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Thursday, July 11, 2013

The Unfaithful - 1947



The Unfaithful (1947) is a superior movie to The Letter (1940). 
I just wanted to get your attention.  I’ve been away from this blog for a long time.  I’m still here.
But seriously, I really do prefer The Unfaithful to the much more well-known and deservedly lauded The Letter.  Pour yourself a cuppa and I’ll tell you why.  You don’t mind spoilers, do you?  I didn’t think so.
Both films are based on the story and subsequent stage play by W. Somerset Maugham, (went through a handful of other film versions as well) but The Unfaithful is a re-working of the story to fit into a different locale: post-war Los Angeles.  The original story, you’ll remember, is set in a Malaya rubber plantation.  The Letter stars Bette Davis and Herbert Marshall in the tale of an unfaithful wife, who murders her married lover, and then must hide the truth from her husband and the police.  The device that seals her fate and proves her guilt is a letter written to her lover.  Gale Sondergaard, who strikes fear into the hearts of everybody, not just in this movie—she probably struck fear into the hearts of people just walking down Wilshire Boulevard—is the dead man’s wife who holds the whip hand over Bette Davis.

Directed by William Wyler, The Letter is lush and mysterious, steamy and provocative, beginning with Miss Davis unblinkingly gunning down her lover.  We are plunked down at the edge of the jungle, under a tropical moon, where civilization, i.e. white European society, is represented in a dance at the Raffles Hotel in Singapore.  It is about guilt and revenge and racial stereotypes.  The famous line uttered by Bette Davis: “With all my heart, I still love the man I killed!” is still a shocker, an electric moment. 
But for me, the film is a marshmallow: all air, sticky, and without nourishment.  Even the impressive Miss Sondergaard reminds me of The Dragon Lady in the old Terry and the Pirates comic strip, and so the “mysterious orient” clichés that abound in this movie strike me as somewhat cartoonish.  I prefer The Unfaithful for several reasons.  Here we go:
Ann Sheridan is in the Bette Davis role, but unlike Davis—who we know is guilty from the very first moment in the film—Ann Sheridan’s guilt, her sin of being unfaithful, is not apparent until far into the movie.  We start with a happy Miss Sheridan speaking on the phone with her husband who is away on a business trip.  We see she is in love, and eagerly awaiting his return the next day.  We do not suspect her of an adulterous affair.  What we do learn about her comes through twists and turns, and by the end of the film, we see we do not know her at all.  In comparison, Bette Davis comes off as transparent, and I find her brittle rigidity, though compelling psychologically, still two-dimensional, even if we are shocked by her declaration at the end of the film.
Miss Sheridan attends a party thrown by her husband’s cousin, Eve Arden.  Any movie with Eve Arden is always better than a movie without Eve Arden.  Our Eve has a good role here.  We first meet her as a new divorcee who throws herself a Happy Divorce Party.  All her friends are there, and one who is not her friend: her ex-husband shows up, drunk and angry, and vents his bitterness before he is dragged away.  Douglas Kennedy has this small role.  We saw him previously in South of St. Louis (1949).
Miss Arden is raucous, crude, loud, and tasteless in the early part of the film, but she keeps popping up from time to time, and each time we see her, a little more of her hard shell gets peeled away and we discover by the end of the film she’s really a sad and lonely person, and a mensch.  She turns out to be a real pal to Sheridan and her husband, played by Zachary Scott, when they really need her.

Zachary Scott has a more interesting role than the character played by Herbert Marshall in The Letter.  Though I love Herbert Marshall, and though we feel great sympathy for him as the cuckolded husband of Bette Davis, we also can’t help but regard him as a sap.  She’s playing him like a fiddle.  The story, and the director, allows us to see right through Davis, but he has no such advantage and we may wonder how he could be so dense.
Mr. Scott is nobody’s fool, an enterprising builder taking advantage of the post-war boom.  He’s devoted to Sheridan, but when the clues of her guilt wipe the scales from his eyes, he’s determined to dump her and see her rot.  How quickly, and stunningly, love turns to hate.  It’s all passion in one form or another.
Lew Ayres plays their friend and lawyer in a role similar to James Stephenson in The Letter; likewise he is devoted to his friends, plays knight errant to the accused until he discovers her guilt and then fights his own disgust to be able to save her.
Most especially, I love that The Unfaithful is frankly and most purposefully without that fantasyland setting of the tropics.  It is set in a mundane and more familiar time and place.  (Although, I confess, as a New Englander, I find palm trees, even lined up in front of a shopping mall, extremely exotic.) This is a setting we recognize; these are people with whom we are familiar.  It brings this tumultuous story down to earth, with consequences that are real.  We must take their troubles more seriously because they may be our own.
This being a blog about how classic films teach us much about the eras in which they were made, I find The Unfaithful a very useful tool in examining the post-war era.  It’s got all the details.  The narrator tells us as the camera pans from the home of Sheridan and Scott to the palm-tree lined roadway, “The problem with which it deals belongs not to any one town, city or country, but is of our times.”  In this respect, the movie is less like The Letter and more like The Best Years of Our Lives.
The “problem,” it seems, is that so many marriages begun in haste during the romantic and rushed war years are ending in divorce.  Lew Ayres’ clients are mostly women seeking divorces, and he has mixed feelings about that: a desire to be successful, and yet a sense of disgust for his clients.  Eve Arden is his latest client and his latest victory in the courtroom. 
Ann Sheridan is the opposite of Eve Arden: she is a loving wife who waited patiently for her husband to return from war, who still waits patiently for him to return from every business trip.  She waits around a lot.  She and Eve Arden are not close friends; they are too different.  One is a lady and one is…not.
Things turn very bad for Ann and progressively get worse.  She arrives home from Eve Arden’s divorce party, and parks her car in the back of the house.  As she pulls into the drive, we see a man is watching her.  Instantly, the tone of the movie changes.  She walks to the front of the house and we see her silhouetted in the mist.  We watch her walk towards us, knowing the man is hiding, also watching her.  At her door, the man attacks her, pulls her into the darkened house.  We watch through the windows, from the street, a scene of terror and the sounds of struggle, and screams.  We don’t know what’s happened, but we’ve imagined the worst.
It’s the next morning and Zachary Scott lands at the airport, wondering why his wife isn’t there to pick him up.  I like the way the director, Vincent Sherman, takes his time and lets this scene play out.  He’s very good at developing these very tense scenes from ordinary situations.  Your stomach tightens when you see Ann Sheridan walking at night in her own driveway.  Your stomach tightens when you see Zachary Scott get bad news.  We’ve been there.  This is a large part of why I prefer this movie to The Letter—it brings high drama to smallest, quietest elements of what we know as “real” life.
Mr. Scott looks and looks around, finally goes to a phone booth to call home.  Because he’s closed the door of the booth, and because there are constant announcements on the public address system about flights, we barely hear his voice.  We strain to hear him—a nice dramatic touch over not hearing him at all.  It makes us an active participant.  We don’t know what he’s saying—just like we couldn’t see the attack except from yards away and through curtains.  By his expression, we realize somebody on the other end told him shocking news, and he rushes to find his checked luggage and get a cab.
The phone, we learn, was answered the by the police, and we see when he arrives that his home is chaotic with reporters, and police all around.  For the first time, we learn that Ann Sheridan is well and survived the attack, but that her attacker lies dead on the living room floor with an ornamental knife in him that Mr. Scott had brought back from Japan during the war.  That’s about all of the mysterious orient you’ll find in this movie.
When Miss Sheridan is interviewed in her bedroom by the police, with her husband and Lew Ayres at her side, we see that she is traumatized and miserable.  We knew Bette Davis’ distress was just an act, but Sheridan’s horror is real.  The million-dollar question is asked of her “Had you ever seen him before?”  She answers no, and we have no reason to doubt her.  Neither does her husband or her lawyer pal.  The police detective, played by John Hoyt, remains cynical, but that is his job.

The widow of the dead man, played by Marta Mitrovich, accuses Ann of murder. “You killed him!” She is not as scary as Gale Sondergaard, but she’s pretty worked up about it.

By the way, does anyone know who plays the stenographer in this scene?  She has no lines, but she looks familiar.  I love stenographers.  
The detective tells us that the dead man has no criminal record, that he was a sculptor.  His mind, and ours, turns to the question, why did he go to her house?  If robbery wasn’t his motive, we are left with a question of attempted rape, though nobody uses the word.  Ann Sheridan’s expression is our first clue that she’s not being completely honest, she’s withholding some information, but we have to find out the hard way.
Steven Geray plays a smarmy art dealer who contacts Lew Ayres about a bust of a woman, asking him if he wants to buy it.  It was sculpted by the dead sculptor guy.  The face is Ann Sheridan’s.
Ann lied.   The dead scupltor obviously knew her and she knew him, because we are told that this kind of piece would have to be modeled from real life.  He didn’t sculpt it from a photo of her.  I find Ann's scatterbrained, guilt-driven, panic-induced deceit much more understandable and appealing than Bette Davis' psychotic, chilly posturing, but that is not to say that one actress is better than the other in the role; it's just a preference for characterization. 
The art dealer is attempting to blackmail Mr. Ayres’ client, but our noble Lew isn’t having any of it.  He brushes off the smarmy art dealer and goes straight to Ann, who, reluctantly, relents and confesses she did know the dead guy.  It was during the war, and she hired him to do the sculpture, but after a few sittings, he got too personal and creepy and made her feel uncomfortable, so she avoided him and never went back.  He stalked her a few times, but when her husband came home from oversees, it scared the guy off.
Ann tells Lew she didn’t tell him or the police that she knew the guy because, “I was afraid of what people would say.”
Now Lew has to hammer home to her that what people say is not the problem.  The problem is if she knew the guy, a jury might think she let him into the house and murdered him, that it was not self-defense.  She’s frustratingly slow on the uptake about this.
Unless there's more to it that she isn't saying.  

And there is.  

Then Ann goes to the smarmy art dealer herself to pay the blackmail, but the widow doesn’t want her money.  She wants her to go to jail. 
Ann goes back to Lew Ayres in a panic, getting herself in deeper and deeper, and finally Lew understands, as do we, that she had more than a professional relationship with the sculptor.  She had a fling with him.
Lew, lawyer and bachelor, is disgusted.  “You’re no different from all the other cheating, conniving women who parade through my office.”  Now he strips the final layer away:  Did she kill him on purpose to shut him up?
We pause here to watch the how her web of lies has taken on a life of its own.  Smarmy art dealer still wants a cut of the blackmail money he thinks he’ll get, so he contacts Zachary Scott and meets him, like a spy movie, in MacArthur Park (no cake out in the rain here, so just never mind that), one of the many neato Los Angeles scenes we have in this movie.  He takes him to the widow’s run-down apartment and meets Ann’s sculpted likeness as the art dealer hammers him with the old Othello scenario about the treachery of women.  Zachary is crushed.
He goes home to have a showdown with Ann.  She tries to explain her loneliness during the war.  He blasts her, “Millions of women waited, they waited decently, loyally.  They didn’t cheat.”
Mr. Scott wants a divorce, but just as he’s about to storm out, the cops show up at the door to arrest Ann on suspicion of murder.  See, the cops discovered Zachary going to the widow’s apartment with the smarmy art dealer.   They know about the sculpture now.  The jig is up.
Our Lew, despite his profound disappointment in Ann, agrees to represent her at the murder trial, where the prosecuting attorney is our old pal, Jerome Cowan.
The trial sequence builds to a crescendo of self- knowledge—of Zachary about Ann, and of about himself and his failings as a husband.  We learn they knew each other two short weeks before they were married, and he was so eager to pursue his career on his return home, she became an afterthought.  We also learn, somewhat surprisingly, that she was a fashion editor for a magazine before the war, yet we are given the impression she does not have a career now.  She gave up a job like that to stay home and volunteer for the Red Cross?  That is an interesting subplot that is not pursued, however. 
Neither is it fleshed out the possibility that Lew Ayres may feel more than friendship and respect for Ann and could present as a romantic rival, which would have been intriguing, but no triangle happens. 
What we do have is the crime of the century—not the murder, and not just cheating on her husband, but cheating on a vet in a post-war climate that revered them.
Jerome Cowan asks us, “Is this a woman you can believe?”
But Lew Ayres, and the producers remind us, “She is not on trial for infidelity.”  Mr. Ayres, from his own professional perspective as a divorce lawyer counters: “How many personal tragedies occurred far from the battlefield,” and “If there had been no war, she would not be in this court today.”  So it’s the war’s fault.  We see Zachary Scott mulling this over.
The best summation of the story is handled by Eve Arden.  When the jury is out a long time, Zachary Scott goes over his cousin Eve’s house to wait.  The merry divorcee is spending a quiet evening alone, with a book, the radio, and a box of chocolates, still wisecracking, but softer and sympathetic.  Zachary tears up, and cries, and she softly replies, “I’m glad to see you acting like a human being for a change.” 
Though she was never best pals with Ann Sheridan, whom she regarded as too good to be true, she defends her, and Zachary is upset.  “Is it my fault I was sent overseas?”
“You knew you were going when you met her.  Let’s face it, that’s why you married her…what you wanted was a whirl and a memory.  You wanted a beautiful woman waiting for you, and you didn’t want anyone making time with her when you were away, so you hung up a no trespassing sign, like you’d stake a gold claim.  You didn’t marry her; you just took an option on her.”
“She could have said no.”
Eve continues her sane, and somewhat shocking for the times, rebuttal: “When the band was playing?  Listen, I was there.  I saw you making with that uniform and that ‘today we live’ routine.  And then you were off.”
Production on this movie was begun in late 1946.  Just a year after the war, and we’re already negating all that movie patriotism and sacrifice that got us through the worst of it.
Then a phone call lets them know that Ann has been acquitted by the jury.  Mr. Scott quietly says, “Oh.”  So that we are still not sure how the ending will be played.
With Lew Ayres seemingly guiding the shell-shocked couple to a negotiation, it ends with a cigarette on the couch, and the leaden film noir score suddenly lighter, giving us hope, a suggestion of gentleness, and we even hear bells pealing.
We are left with an indictment not of Ann Sheridan, but of the era, and that gave the audience then, and gives the viewer now, something to think about. 
“With all my heart, I still love the man I killed” is just a cheap thrill in comparison. 
And the ending of The Letter where Bette Davis is murdered was not in the original story.  This was tacked on by the stalwart keepers of the Production Code to see that a murderess and adulteress was punished.
Ann Sheridan, in The Unfaithful remarkably gets away with both a killing and adultery, and still holds our sympathy.  She’s rebuked, but still noble.  Way to go, Ann.  It would have been a great scene for the movie if Ann had discussed her affair,  what attracted her to the man and why she needed to be with him.  Perhaps the intimacy of her face and body being so closely studied in creating the sculpture was what seduced her.  But I guess you can push the Hays Office just so far.
You may now rebut.

32 comments:

Caftan Woman said...

Well!

I can't say my love for "The Letter" has diminished as I'm still waiting for Sen Yung's Oscar nomination that I'm sure was held up in the mails. But... the food for thought you provided is quite nourishing and I look forward to meeting with the folks in "The Unfaithful".

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

I know what you mean about Sen Yung's missing Oscar nomination. Rum go, what? (As they say at the Raffles.)

Mark said...

No rebuttal - I agree!

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

That's one acquittal for "The Unfaithful" by a man who knows his noirs.

Kevin Deany said...

No rebuttal from me, as I've never seen it. I did skip a bit to avoid surprises, but read enough to really whet my appetite. How did this one ever slip by me? It sounds great. I will definitely be on the look out for this one.

I find post-war Lew Ayres quite interesting. He's pretty great in "Johnny Belinda" and there's a maturity there that wasn't there pre-war. He's like Tyrone Power, Gable, Robert Taylor, Jimmy Stewart...the war seemed to have aged them drastically. I know Ayres was a pacificst and refused to fight but was a medical corpsman, I believe. I'm sure he saw some awful things. It's reflected in his later performances.

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

I also love Lew Ayres in his post-war films, and agree with you about that appealing maturity in his post-war films. But that hint of world-weariness is also there in his comic turn in "Holiday" and "All Quiet on the Western Front", both pre-war.

He was a pacifist, but his being listed officially as a conscientious objector and sent to a CO camp I think was more due to the Army's refusing his initial request to serve as a medic. Once that got straightened out, he served as a medic and a chaplain's assistant in the Pacific for something like four years, at one point helping to set up an evac hospital under while fire at Leyte. He reportedly donated all his earnings from the service to the Red Cross. I haven't read the new bio on him yet, but I hope to one of these days. Interesting guy.

Unknown said...

I loved the classic film noir "The Letter" and I'm sure I will also love what sounds like a very watchable melodrama "The Unfaithful". Which sounds a little familiar to me.. maybe I have seen it..

Ryan said...

I'm about to utter what many will find hard to take, but Bette Davis has never been an actress that I find appealing on screen. There is almost always too much of an edge to her, which is odd because there are other actresses that I like because of it. I'm not sure I can ever explain my lack of interest in her.

I've seen "The Letter" and dspite y feeling on Bette Davis, I did enjoy it. I've never seen this movie, but I have a feeling I would like it more than "The Letter" and probably find myself willing to rewatch it, which is not something I will do with any Bette Davis movie.

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

Dawn, I hope you get to see the movie soon. "The Letter" is a great film, and it's fun to compare this with it.

Ryan, I don't think it's at all odd that you can't warm up to Bette Davis on screen. She is a stunning force to be reckoned with, but her acting style in most of her films is not natural. Though I admire many of the risks and chances she's taken, I think I liked her best in "All About Eve" where her style really seemed to fit.

I will say, that though I like Bette Davis, and Joan Crawford, when I watch their movies I rarely forget I'm watching Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. They are larger than life, and so I am entertained by them, but rarely taken in by their characterizations. I don't identify with them. To some extent, but not always, I would say Katharine Hepburn fits into this grouping, too. There are only a few movies where Hepburn transcends her own image. That's got to be a tough thing to do for actresses who are "stars" and spent their entire careers building up their images.

David said...

Very nicely put. I caught this movie the other day and was surprised to get caught up in it. It's a nice showcase for Sheridan, and you're right -- any movie with Eve Arden is automatically better than a movie without Eve Arden.

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

Thank you, David. I agree Sheridan gets a good role here. So glad to see another Eve Arden fan, and that this movie is getting some attention.

Vienna said...

Great review. I've watched The Unfaithful many times and rate it highly. I never think to compare it to The Letter. Although the same basic theme, the two films are so very different .
The four leads are so good.
And I love the theme music .
I wonder what happened to that sculptured head of Anne!

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

Thanks, Vienna. I also wondered what happened to that sculpture. Like you, I also loved the musical theme -- Max Steiner, I guess, but that foreboding noir anthem, terrific.

FlickChick said...

I LOVE Ann Sheridan, so she can do no wrong here. I totally agree about the settings - the tropics just seemed an excuse for an English woman to go wild (Red Dust, too). Now, have yo seen the Jeanne Eagels version of "The Letter"? It is quite ancient and creaky, but that woman could act!

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

I'd love to see the JE version, which I understand Herbert Marshall appears in as well.

Vienna said...

It's on YouTube, but very poor quality

DorianTB said...

Jacqueline,I've been meaning to catch up with your review of THE UNFAITHFUL, and I'm so glad I finally had an opportunity to read it! While I like Bette Davis in THE LETTER, your review of THE UNFAITHFUL really got me thinking more deeply about the characters and the post-war milieu where it's set. It may have its flaws, but with that backdrop and that great cast, you've really got me eager to give it my undivided attention the next time it turns up on TCM! Your blog posts are always a great read, and I'm looking forward to catching up with THE UNFAITHFUL!

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

Thank you, Dorian. I hope you get a chance to see "The Unfaithful" sometime. I don't think it necessarily competes with "The Letter", but it's fun to compare the two.

Yvette said...

I would agree with you, Jacqueline, about Better Davis always being BETTE DAVIS in her films and I agree that in ALL ABOUT EVE, it works for her. But I'd also add her 'soft' role in THE MAN WHO CAME TO DINNER. She is wonderful and not at all BETTE DAVIS-like. One of my favorite films, by the way.

At any rate and though I love THE LETTER (especially the murder scene at the beginning) precisely because of its melodramatic larger than life tone(when Gale Sondergaard is in a movie, you KNOW it has no basis in reality - not that that is a bad thing), I would not be averse to watching THE UNFAITHFUL at some point. (Big of me, I know.) It's Zachary Scott who would make me think twice about the whole business. Never liked him. Always thought him Too Odd - more like a snake come to life. Okay, okay, I exaggerate, but really - can this this guy be for real? No, no, a thousand times no!

P.S. You stumped me a second time, Jacqueline. I KNOW I've never seen this film either. :)

Ana Roland said...

Excellent Argument! Very persuasive. As much as I love Bette Davis and THE Letter I think I agree with you. I don't know if it is also because of the fabulous shots of Los Angeles!

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

Thank you very much, Ana, and welcome to the blog. I agree those fabulous Los Angeles scenes are such fun to see.

Anonymous said...

I agree with you 100%. I saw "The Unfaithful!" many years ago but was very impressed by it. Ann Sheridan plays a woman who is really sympathetic. She slipped in a moment of weakness but she deserves our fellow-feeling. The ending is very positive. I thought everything did well in this film.

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

Welcome, Denise, and thanks for sharing your thoughts on this great movie. So glad it's becoming more well known.

Anonymous said...

"The Unfaithful!" reminds me a bit of a Suspense radio show that aired in 1948 entitled "Beware the Quiet Man." It stars Ann Sothern as a wife "stepping out" on a nice-guy husband. She learns her lesson by the end of the episode and plans to be a better wife.

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

I'm not familiar with that episode, but I love Old Time Radio, and I'll have to look it up. Suspense was a great show.

Anonymous said...

I think it is wrong to say Chris Hunter "gets away with both a killing and adultery." The killing was self-defense. I think we are meant to believe that it was self-defense so her acquittal is simply justice. She doesn't "get away" with adultery. She is terribly embarrassed about it and it hurts her that she has hurt the husband she loves. That they stay together doesn't mean that she hasn't suffered for her sins. Rather, it shows that they belong together and it is possible to forgive someone for basically being human and giving into temptation.

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

Thanks for commenting, Denise. I appreciate your input. What I mean is in terms of the Production Code, she "got way with" both a killing and adultery because she remained the heroine of the movie, drawing our sympathy. This was unusual for the day, when the Code was quite strict about mandating that such faults lead to the ruin of the character committing them. I'm not suggesting the character didn't suffer and regret her actions, only that the Production Code was usually not so magnanimous in allowing forgiveness and redemption.

Anonymous said...

Here's "Beware the Quiet Man" http://www.oldtimeradiodownloads.com/thriller/suspense/beware-the-quiet-man-1948-08-12

Jacqueline T. Lynch said...

Swell! Thanks, Denise.

Anonymous said...

I think someone hit it on the head when the person commented that "The Unfaithful!" is NOT a "remake" of "The Letter" but, rather, that both films draw on the same source material. They are completely different films. Bette Davis plays a murderer. Ann Sheridan plays a woman who genuinely killed in self-defense. Both play adulteresses but the character Davis plays is in love with "the man she killed" while the character Sheridan plays is in love with her husband. The audience can cheer at the end of "The Unfaithful!" because the two of them really are in love and really belong together.
I am SO GLAD you devoted a blog to "The Unfaithful!"

Anonymous said...

It would be really neat if someone could put the entire version of "The Unfaithful!" on YouTube. I would so like to watch this fine film again!

Unknown said...

Just watched The Unfaithful on TCM. I couldn't agree more. Every line and emotion rings true. All characters have incredible interest and depth. Like many films of that era, the dialog is first rate. Loved the uncertainty at the end.

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