The Unfaithful (Warner Bros., 1947)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2022 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Two nights ago Charles and I watched a movie on Eddie Muller’s “Noir Alley” program on Turner Classic Movies: The Unfaithful, a 1947 Warner Bros. film directed by Vincent Sherman and written by David Goodis and James Gunn. It was actually a clever reworking of W. Somerset Maugham’s short story “The Letter” (1926), which was adapted into a play in 1927 and had already been filmed twice with Maugham attributed as the original writer: by Paramount in 1929 with Jeanne Eagels and by Warner Bros. in 1940 with Bette Davis (who had previously played a character loosely based on Eagels in the 1935 film Dangerous). In 1947 Warner Bros. producer Jerry Wald decided to remodel “The Letter” from its original setting in the South Seas to contemporary Los Angeles. The original story is about a woman who’s been having extra-relational activities and kills him to get rid of his no longer wanted attentions. Then she lies about it, telling her husband that she’d never met the man before and she killed him in self-defense when he tried to rape her. But a local blackmailer has a letter she wrote to him the night she killed him luring him to her home, and she gets her husband to give her the money to buy the letter even though this means he can’t buy the new plantation he had arranged to purchase and move with her to run it. In 1947 Ann Sheridan played the woman, Chris Hunter, and Zachary Scott played her husband Bob (a real bit of anti-type casting since we were used to seeing the rather seedy-looking Scott as the cuckolder, not the cuckoldee).

The victim is a sculptor, Michael Tanner (Paul Bradley), who met Chris while her husband was overseas fighting in World War II. Instead of a letter, Goodis and Gunn made the blackmail object a statue, a bust of Chris which she posed for while she and Michael were having their affair. Bob has a best friend, divorce lawyer Larry Hannaford (Lew Ayres), who takes Chris’s case when she’s arrested for Tanner’s murder. Also in the dramatis personae is Paula (Eve Arden, who’s absolutely superb and comes close to stealing the film from its nominal leads), a conniving bitch with an air of superiority similar to the character played by Agnes Moorehead in the film Dark Passage, starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall and based on a Goodis novel (though Arden here, unlike Moorehead in Dark Passage, isn’t playing a killer). The other odd thing about this movie is the sheer length of time the writers take to let us know that Chris Hunter has actually been unfaithful to her husband – even though the very title gives it away. The Unfaithful has some pretty radical ideas about marriage and its obligations – though the omnipresent pressure from the Motion Picture Production Code Authority kept it from getting too radical in that department – and it ends pretty much the way you’d expect it to, with Bob Hunter determined to divorce his wife until Larry Hannaford talks him out of it and convinces him to forgive her,.

It’s a nicely acted piece of melodrama that wears its literally pedigree lightly – the equivalent of the plantation the man in “The Letter” wanted to buy but couldn’t because his wife had paid the blackmailer for the letter is a housing development in Oregon Bob Hunter was building for returning servicemembers (a lot of the development of suburbs in postwar America was fueled by the federal government’s GI Bill of Rights, which gave low-interest loans to returning servicemembers – returning white servicemembers, anyway, which is one reason for the still yawning gap in equity between white and Black Americans) and hoping to move to himself – and the film also benefits from two unusually good supporting performances. One is by Steven Geray as Martin Barrow, a conniving art dealer who owns the statue and is working with Tanner’s widow to blackmail Chris; and the other is Marta Mitrovich as Eve Tanner, Michael Tanner’s widow, who turns ini a remarkable etched-in-acid reading as the woman who’s not going to let the Hunters get away with getting rid oif her husband even though he not only had extra-relational activities on her but lived off her financially as well. There’s also a welcome appearance by Jerome Cowan, Miles Archer in the 1941 Maltese Falcon, as the prosecutor, even though the usually cool and collected Cowan plays this character in an overextended rage throughout and one gets the impression that the judge in Chris’s trial (John Elliott) is about to send both Cowan and Lew Ayres to their corners for a time-out!