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.
