L'infidèle

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.

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.

This combination of a murder mystery and post-war reclamation of Family life is Film-Noir at its definition but not in its execution. It is handled quite regularly and straightforward, aside from some very effective L.A. street scenes that evoke Noir overtones.

It's most effective in its "new" Hollywood discovering of extramarital affairs brought on by quick vows and hasty deployment by our Military. Predictably some of these quick, for convenience Marriages could not hold true, especially for the left alone "War Widows" who had little time to fall deeply in love with their Husbands.

The mystery and courtroom part pales in comparison to the social drama and infidelity conundrums, and it is the deconstructing psychology of this unfortunate situation that compels this to above average Cinema. Eve Arden's accurate understanding insight and delineation speech is quite a mid 1940's welcome revelation to Movie audiences. It was this very seldom open discussion about private affairs that elevates this one and moves it to the periphery of Film-Noir.

I began watching this film out of curiosity. Having seen "The Letter" I just wanted to see how this one stacked up. But other than in general terms there is little else to compare them. Frankly the first half was somewhat predictable, a soap opera that telegraphed the outcome. But when it hit its stride, boy what a surprise! Without giving away any details this film is worth watching simply for the honest and straightforward way it deals with the complications of married life, especially when a couple is separated over a long period. There is plenty of good advice here especially considering the times we live in, what with all the servicemen returning home to find that their wives and sweethearts were real people with real problems.

But there was more to it that just that. Perhaps a lawyer might object, but to me even the brief courtroom scene was believable. And the issues were very real. The film did not take the easy way out and reduce itself to an indictment of infidelity. Instead it examined and revealed the motives of the principal characters and none of them came out all good or all evil but a mixture, hence human.

If one subscribes to the belief that cinema reflects life then this film is an important revelation of post WWII society and the surprise is that it wasn't all that different from today.

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.