Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

When you think of Preston Sturges, you don't tend to picture scenes in which a man slices up his wife with a straight razor. This is probably why few people tend to place Unfaithfully Yours in the same league as Sullivan's Travels or The Lady Eve. The fact that this slicing is carried out by an actor (Rex Harrison) who at the time was reeling from a scandal in his personal life -- he was having an affair with actress Carole Landis and her suicide didn't exactly endear him to the moviegoing public -- probably contributed to the film's failure at the box office. However, some fifty plus years later, we can now look at the film for what it is, a deliciously dark comedy with emphasis on the dark.

Sir Alfred DeCarter (Harrison) is a celebrated conductor, renowned the world over -- one of the best lines in the movie is the observation that "nobody handles Handel like (he) handles Handel" -- and someone who should be enjoying life at the top of his game. Unfortunately for Sir Alfred, he married a woman who he suspects is having an affair with an assistant of his and, as he conducts three different musical pieces, he imagines the ways in which he will carry out his revenge.

The violence in these scenes is played, especially for a movie in the 1940s (that is meant to be a comedy), with a kind of disturbing intensity that you'd expect to turn up in the work of Alfred Hitchcock or perhaps a low-budget film noir. But agressive (even audacious) leaps in tone are actually a mainstay of Sturges' work -- think of how effortlessly Sullivan's Travels moves from screwball comedy to sentimental pathos -- and the film's wild shifts in mood seem right at home if you take them in line with the rest of his ouevre.

From this simple premise -- arguably the most streamlined "plot" in any of Sturges' films -- he hangs some of his most daring character experiments. To put it mildly, Sir Alfred is a jerk. Self absorbed, well aware of his glowing reputation in the music world, and unwilling to suffer fools (which, in Sir Alfred's eyes, includes 99% of the world's population) one couldn't really blame his wife for running around on him.

While Sir Alfred genuinely loves his wife, his temper tends to get the best of him. The fact that Harrison plays him with such a fearless disregard for audience sympathy is pretty daring. The fact that we actually start to feel for the guy despite these unsavory traits is a testament to Sturges' virtuosity as a writer.

This year we're finally seeing more of Preston Sturges' output on DVD -- there was a bare bones DVD of The Palm Beach Story released earlier and his screwball classic The Miracle of Morgan's Creek is being released by Paramount Home Video later this year -- and all I can say is, thank god Criterion is releasing this title because, as usual, they give it a top-of-the-line transfer and offer up plenty of well-thought out extras.

We get interviews with Preston's widow Sandy Sturges -- who is actually pretty entertaining to listen to -- and Monty Python's Terry Jones (they call this an "introduction" but it's probably better that you watch it after the movie) who gleefully expounds on the film's style and its influence on him. After all, if anyone ought to know how to mix belly laughs with gory violence, it's the boys in Monty Python.

A duelling scholars commentary track by James Harvey, Diane Jacobs, and Brian Henderson -- all of whom have written material on the writer/director -- details Sturges' career, the film's history and its reception. This is a tad dry but does cover an awful lot of information. Overall, this is a respectable package for a film that deserves a lot more respect than it received in its time. -- Christopher Hyatt