Review of Unfaithfully Yours (1948) by Kevin N — 01 Sep 2011

This film wasn't well-received in 1948; that's because audiences weren't ready to laugh while a rich Englishman slashed his wife's throat to pieces with a razor blade. Now it stands as Preston Sturges' most darkly funny film, an insightful glimpse into the human psyche and what makes us human- for better or worse.

Rex Harrison is perfect in this role as Alfred de Carter, an orchestra conductor who believes his wife has been unfaithful to him and who experiences a bout of radical revenge fantasies as he performs his most emotional concert.

Later he will discover that things never quite work out the way we see them in perfect dramatic motion out of the film projectors in our heads, but Sturges revels in the macabre details of these thoughts.

This director was notoriously good at getting his risque ideas past the censor boards, but these sequences push some serious boundaries even by today's standards. What's so funny and intriguing about this premise, though, is that it isn't so extreme; Alfred may seem like a madman among other movie characters, but his violent and carefully orchestrated fantasies are commonplace for human beings in the real world, and their careful placement in the story makes him a sympathetic character rather than a wicked one.

Preston Sturges, in my opinion, was the best director of comedy films in the 40s, and this is one of his very best films- an underrated and unrestrained comic masterpiece.