La infiel

THE UNFAITHFUL (1947), is director Vincent Sherman's 1947 loose remake of the 1940 William Wyler/Bette Davis classic, THE LETTER.

Glamorous Ann Sheridan stars as a woman who kills an intruder in her home, and then tries to hide the fact that the man had once been her lover from her husband and the police. There's one problem; the dead man had been a sculptor, and his widow has possession of a bust he had sculpted which Sheridan had obviously modeled for.

Sheridan is excellent as the loving wife who, out of loneliness during her husbands tour of duty in WWII, gave into temptation and an adulterous affair, then with her attorney (Lew Ayers) makes a desperate effort to retrieve the incriminating object before her husband (Zachary Scott) finds out the truth.

Neither Ayers or Scott have ever set the screen on fire for me, and that holds true here as well. But they're both always competent actors, and they give fine support to Miss Sheridan's gutsy performance in one of her better Warner Brothers star vehicles.

Eve Arden also has several memorable scenes as a gossiping relative.

It's not the classic film that THE LETTER is, but still a well made and highly entertaining Hollywood drama worth seeing.

The 1940 William Wyler/Bette Davis, based on a Somerset Maugham story, is a top-notch romantic thriller (a 1929 version starring legendary Jeanne Eagles is apparently even more sizzling). So a 1947 remake set not in the rain-forest plantations of the British Empire East of Suez but in postwar Los Angeles - building boom and all -- seems a stretch. It is, but it's not a bad movie, once you accept wholesome and throaty Ann Sheridan as the fallen woman (in this version she's not quite the cold-blooded killer of the earlier versions). Instead of a letter, we have a bust of Sheridan sculpted by the dead artist who became her R&R while hubby Zachary Scott was overseas fighting the good fight. The story is well-told and helds interest most of the way through, until it melts down into a routine marital crisis (quite a world apart from the vengeance by an Asiatic Gale Sondergaard in the 1940 telling). The most memorable performance here comes from Eve Arden, as the tart-tongued in-law Paula.

The unfaithfulness referred to in the title reveals itself with a fair amount of intrigue as the film rolls on. However, by the end it has been sanitized to fit into the supposed audience expectations of the day. The story moves along fairly well with the details coming out after wife Ann Sheridan kills an intruder who had forced his way into her upper middle class home she shares with real estate developer and WW2 vet husband played by Zachary Scott. Who the intruder actually was and other aspects get doled out leading to a trial with aggressive DA played by over the top but interesting Jerome Cowan facing off against family friend and high class divorce lawyer Lew Ayres. Ayres has significant screen time and makes for an interesting 1940's LA divorce lawyer. The best scene goes out of the studio and on location in LA as the intruder's wife reads about her husband's death in the paper while she's taking a trolly down a steep street somewhere in 1940's LA. The intruder turns out to have been an interesting guy and it's good that the film can weave his story into the plot so well.

I just saw this on TCM and was so surprised at how gripping it was. Loosely based on Somerset Maugham's "The Letter" that was a major early talkie hit for Jeanne Eagels at Paramount and then remade into a the William Wyler-Bette Davis-Warner Brothers classic of 1940, this version pulls you in and gives Ann Sheridan one of her finest roles. Lew Ayres, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden and Marta Miltrovich are all outstanding as well. Top notch Jerry Wald production includes excellent Max Steiner score, superb Ernest Haller cinematography, and a very good script. Outstanding direction by Vincent Sherman allows Sheridan to shine in her central role as a woman who kills a supposed stranger in self-defense and then watches her life implode around her. The ending is the only letdown. Definitely a must for fans of the "Oomph Girl" at her Warner Brothers peak.

Ann Sheridan and Zachary Scott star in "The Unfaithful" in this 1947 Warner Brothers film directed by Vincent Sherman. The likable Sheridan plays Chris Hunter, a woman whose husband (Zachary Scott) has been away on a business trip. She's excited about his return the next morning; after a party held by her husband's cousin Paula (Eve Arden), we see her being attacked. The attacker gets into her home, and the assault continues there.

The next day, we find out there's been a murder, and Chris tells the police and her husband that a man tried to rob her of her jewelry and she killed him defending herself. Right away you know her story is no good.

This is a fairly interesting update of "The Letter" with some modern marital problems coming into the mix - a hasty marriage followed by a long wartime separation and the resulting loneliness. It doesn't have the bite of the Somerset Maugham story, but it's pretty good.

Zachary Scott for once plays a nice guy, and Ann Sheridan gives a good performance as his wife. Eve Arden has the best role as the gossipy cousin who is more sympathetic to Chris than she immediately lets on.

Good Warners film, good Warners cast.