Le retour à l'amour

When a television personality provides announces the breakup of a famous married couple, Bill Blakely (Victor Mature ) and wife.... their friends talk and think about the couple and their relationship. Jean Simmons is the young starlet on the rise, who is apparently coming between the married couple. This one has a lot in common with "A Star is Born".. which was first made in 1937. And of course, the Judy remake in 1954, right after THIS film. It's a little confusing. Seems to end a bit abruptly. Not a lot of rhyme or reason. Directed by Roy Rowland. Didn't win any Oscars, but made some pretty well known films. Was also married to Louis Mayer's neice. One fun note: Alvy Moore apparently filmed scenes for the film, but they were left on the floor... he was Hank Kimball in Green Acres ! It might have been fun to leave those scenes in.... guess we'll never see them now. So many roles in the cast list here were uncredited or deleted. The kid "Timmy" was child actor Billy Chapin... appears to have quit hollywood before he hit age 20.

Jean Simmons is always reliably good, while Victor Mature sometimes can be awful. Here they are teamed together in a marriage that maybe never should have been. Actually, Jean Simmons is advised against it, and Victor Mature is really not much to have, as a playwright of flops and with a bad habit of gambling and losing. Still she accepts him and mothers him, which he needs, and eventually he makes a success and even gets rich, so he doesn't have to gamble any more. She gets pregnant but loses her child and can't have any more, so the marriage is put to some test. Then a scandal beauty and imprudent actress gets the ambition to hook him and spreads some premature news to a dirty columnist, far too sure of herself as an actress, imagining she has him all wrapped up. The film starts with the columnist incident and then tells the long story of the marriage by flashbacks, eventually returning to the present, both Jean Simmons and Victor Mature getting highly surprised by finding the news of their divorce in the paper. They never even had thought of it. That's the argument of the film.

It's not an uninteresting film, above all it's fascinating as a study in the mechanics of a marriage, what makes it hold and what may threaten it. A certain child also plays an important part, he was later the brother in Charles Laughton's famous "The Night of the Hunter", and on the whole, the story is well written and gets some interesting turns. It is great entertainment on a high level, and the twist in the end to all the predicaments can't leave anyone dissatisfied.

This melodramatic and superamerican "comedy" is now terribly dated, not interesting but made with feeling and thus another routine job done by Roy Rowland. It's nice to see epicman Mature in a setting other than the arena or biblical backgrounds.

In Affair with a Stranger, Victor Mature's marriage to Jean Simmons is falling apart, only they're the only ones who don't know it. Each vignette of flashback is led into by an "extra", like a taxicab driver, the maid, etc. who remember different parts of their marriage and tell the audience about it. With that format, the movie had potential to be cute, but it didn't turn out that way.

They meet, they fall in love, they fall on hard times, but as the rumor mill flies with their impending divorce, they're completely unaware of it. After all, they're not watching the movie. The reason I didn't really like this romance is because of the title. It's pretty obvious someone has an affair, and I didn't like the way the film handled it. If you like the two leads, though, you can give it a whirl.

AFFAIR WITH A STRANGER tells a familiar tale of a rags-to-riches playwright William Blakeley (Victor Mature), who falls in love with and marries Carolyn Parker (Jean Simmons). After a few years of blissfully happy marriage, their impending divorce is announce in the gossip- columns. Through a series of flashbacks we see how their affair started and blossomed, then find out more about the cause of the divorce rumors, as Blakeley has a stillborn love affair with manipulative starlet Janet Boothe (Monica Lewis). Roy Rowland's film unfolds at a brisk pace, with plenty of opportunity for comic moments from Mature himself (in a surprisingly witty role), supported by Mary Jo Tarola and Dabbs Greer as the Murrays, close friends of the Blakeleys. Simmons doesn't have to do much, but she does have one frenetically comic scene where she prepares for William's first visit, falls over a living-room rug, tears her dress and ends up nearly upsetting a freshly-prepared plate of chicken. It is only due to Ma Stanton's (Jane Darwell's) timely intervention that Carolyn eventually composes herself sufficiently to receive her would-be suitor. For anyone interested in film history, AFFAIR WITH A STRANGER offers a fascinating insight into early Fifties attitudes towards marriage, in which the woman is expected to remain faithful at all times, while men are inevitably accepted as being frail-natures; they are always liable to have extra-marital affairs. The wife must accept this, and upbraid her husband for his transgression, but never dangle the prospect of divorce in front of him. It seems as if males have the freedom to let their eyes wander, but women must remain loyal at all times, even when they are as attractive as Simmons in this film.