Unfaithfully Yours (Preston Sturges, 1948)

Kurt Kreuger, Linda Darnell, and Rex Harrison in Unfaithfully Yours

Cast: Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence, Kurt Kreuger, Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, Al Bridge, Julius Tannen, Torben Meyer, Robert Greig. Screenplay: Preston Sturges. Cinematography: Victor Milner. Art direction: Lyle R. Wheeler, Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Robert Finch, Stuart Gilmore. Musical director: Alfred Newman. 

Preston Sturges's familiar "stock company" of character actors like William Demarest, Jimmy Conlin, Julius Tannen, Robert Greig, and others served an important role in creating a context in which otherwise straight leading actor types like Joel McCrea, Henry Fonda, Claudette Colbert, and Barbara Stanwyck could let themselves go and behave in ways that they normally wouldn't on screen. No film demonstrates this function better than Unfaithfully Yours, in which the silliness of performers like Lionel Stander, Edgar Kennedy, and others let Rex Harrison and Linda Darnell loosen up and go a little bit crazy -- or in Harrison's case, quite a bit more than crazy. Psychotic, to be blunt about it. This was Sturges's least successful with audiences of his major comic films of the 1940s, and it marked the start of the  decline of his career. It may be that postwar audiences were not ready to laugh at the kind of mayhem that Unfaithfully Yours contains -- after all, a man brutally slashing his wife with a freshly sharpened razor is not an image that normally elicits laughs. There's a failure of tone in the way Sturges writes and stages the scene, which takes place only in the mind of Harrison's character, Sir Alfred De Carter, as he conducts a symphony orchestra in a performance of Rossini's Overture to Semiramide (somewhat padded out with a Rossiniesque pastiche by music director Alfred Newman). It's all a setup, of course, for the slapstick sequence in which Sir Alfred tries to follow through on the imagined murder, only to screw things up monumentally and hilariously. But the premise is sour to start with. It encourages us to believe that Sir Alfred is the kind of man who would not only imagine killing his wife but also follow through on the idea persistently, like Wile E. Coyote attempting to off the Road Runner. The film may end with the restoration of order, and the De Carters cozily snuggling up to each other, but it's hard to resist the thought that something else could happen to make him snap tomorrow. Still, that's the major blemish on what is, if you don't think too closely about it, a very funny movie with one of Harrison's best performances, and a lot of sublime comic bits supplied by the stock company players. Sturges's dialogue, as usual, is mile-a-minute laugh lines, going by so fast that the captioners have trouble keeping up with them. It would be pure giddy fun, if the plot weren't intrinsically so dark. 

The Man With the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955)

The Man With the Golden Arm (Otto Preminger, 1955)

Cast: Frank Sinatra, Eleanor Parker, Kim Novak, Arnold Stang, Darren McGavin, John Conte, Doro Merande, George E. Stone, George Matthews, Leonid Kinskey, Emile Meyer. Screenplay: Walter Newman, Lewis Meltzer, based on a novel by Nelson Algren. Cinematography: Sam Leavitt. Production design: Joseph C. Wright. Film editing: Louis R. Loeffler. Music: Elmer Bernstein.

Under the Production Code, alcohol flowed freely, and drunks were likely to be glamorous like the martini-swigging Nick and Nora Charles in The Thin Man (W.S. Van Dyke, 1934) or lovable like James Stewart's Elwood P. Dowd in Harvey (Henry Koster, 1950). But drug use was strictly taboo, even when it was depicted as a road to degradation, until Otto Preminger thumbed his nose at the Code with The Man With the Golden Arm. Preminger's film is very much about the degradation, but he deftly avoided making it into a "problem picture" with a "just say no" moral tacked on, mainly by focusing on the character of Frankie Machine, played superbly by Frank Sinatra. When we first meet Frankie he's just gotten out of prison rehab and is determined to go straight and get a job as a drummer with a band. But he's saddled with a clinging wife called Zosh, played (and sometimes overplayed) by Eleanor Parker. She wants him to resume his old underground life as a card dealer rather than risk it as a musician, and couldn't care less if that life involves resuming the drugs provided by Louie (Darren McGavin). Zosh is, or so it seems, confined to a wheelchair after an auto accident in which Frankie was the driver, and after which he married her out of pity. In fact, she's just milking the supposed disability for all it's worth, and when no one's around she gets out of the chair and walks. The marriage to Zosh also put an end to Frankie's involvement with Molly, a b-girl in a strip club. She's played by Kim Novak, an actress whose beautiful blankness always allows us to project whatever the script wants us to see in her. This doesn't make Novak a bad actress, I think, but simply a limited one who works best in films like Vertigo (Alfred Hitchcock, 1958), in which her role is all about the male gaze and its effects. She's perfectly fine here, though her preternatural beauty seems out of place in the drab urban setting of the film, like an orchid in a junkyard. Anyway, as you can guess, Frankie gets hooked again and has to go cold turkey with Molly's help. The Man With the Golden Arm sometimes feels dated: Sam Leavitt's camerawork is often too bright and flatly lighted, showing up the artificiality of the soundstage sets, and Parker and Novak are too glamorous for their roles. But the film works anyway, thanks to the solid dramatic effect produced by Sinatra's performance and the fine support from McGavin and character actor Arnold Stang, who gives a touching performance as Sparrow, a hanger-on devoted to Frankie. Elmer Bernstein's score is a classic, too, as is the  opening title sequence designed by Saul Bass.