Movie Review - "Unfaithfully Yours" (1948)

Whenever I'm asked to recommend a movie to a library patron (and it happens fairly often) I always tell them, "Oh, you should get 'Unfaithfully Yours.'" It's the perfect movie to recommend to a stranger for three reasons:

1. It's really good

2. It's tasteful (but not boringly so)

3. Most people have never heard of it, let alone seen it

The film tells the tale of one Sir Alfred De Carter, a famous orchestra conductor who, despite his prestige and high-standing, is a man at heart and as such is given over to petty jealousy and fantasies of revenge when he suspects his wife of having a wandering eye.

As he conducts his symphony through several disparate pieces of classical music, his mind wanders as he envisions impossibly complex ways to both prove his wife's unfaithfulness and to exact his own ultra-suave brand of revenge. But things go hilariously awry when De Carter actually gets a chance to set his plots into motion.

Starring a young(er) Rex Harrison, sixteen years before his famous turn as Professor Henry Higgins in "My Fair Lady," "Unfaithfully Yours" benefits tremendously from the highly skilled actor's wonderful performance. Capturing a pompousness and coldness about De Winter while still remaining sympathetic is no small feat, and Harrison handles it admirably. Once things start to go seriously downhill for the man, it's hard not to feel sorry for him even as you laugh at him and chastise him for ever fantasizing revenge in the first place.

Perhaps not the most obvious draw for the movie, but the most important and the most lasting, is that it was directed and scripted by that manic genius of 1940's cinema, Preston Sturges. A rather late-period entry into the director's filmography (his earlier, more well-known efforts such as "Lady Eve" and "Sullivan's Travels having come at the very beginning of the '40's), the film still bristles with Sturges' trademark energy and the unusually-structured script is distinctly his own.

A small masterpiece from one of the giants of "golden age" comedy, as well as a powerful treatise on male hubris and machismo, "Unfaithfully Yours" is a hilarious movie that comes highly recommended - from me to you!