Unfaithfully Yours (20th Century-Fox, 1948)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

The next feature-length film my husband Charles and I watched on September 4 (my 72nd birthday, by the way) was Unfaithfully Yours, a comic masterpiece written, produced, and directed by Preston Sturges for 20th Century-Fox in 1948. According to Eddie Muller, Sturges had got the idea for this film – an egomaniac conductor named Sir Alfred DeCarter (Rex Harrison) suspects his much younger wife Daphne (Linda Darnell) of infidelity, and he dreams up three ways to murder her while he’s conducting a concert, and each fantasy sequence is accompanied by one of the pieces he’s conducting – in the early 1930’s. But the Production Code Administration and the Legion of Decency (a pressure group founded by the U.S. branch of the Roman Catholic Church) intervened in 1934 and pressured the Hollywood studios to get serious about enforcing the Motion Picture Production Code they’d promulgated, and then largely ignored, in 1930. Sturges didn’t get to make Unfaithfully Yours until the late 1940’s, after he’d made the mistake of leaving Paramount Pictures (where he’d established himself as a star writer-director with a series of masterpieces like The Great McGinty, The Palm Beach Story, Christmas in July, The Lady Eve, The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, and Hail the Conquering Hero) to join Howard Hughes in a newly formed venture called California Pictures. Sturges made a brilliantly funny film called The Sin of Harold Diddlebock which starred Harold Lloyd – his first movie in nine years – and he opened it with the closing reel of Lloyd’s silent classic The Freshman (1925). But Hughes sat on the film for three years and didn’t release it generally until 1950, after he’d bought RKO studios, with 15 minutes cut and retitled Mad Wednesday. Sturges was also one of the many directors Hughes rotated on and off a film called Vendetta, a movie about a blood feud between families in Italy that was supposed to make a major star out of Faith Domergue and eventually took nine years (1941 to 1950) to make before Hughes was at last satisfied with it.

Sturges was “at liberty” until Darryl F. Zanuck of 20th Century-Fox signed him to a two-picture contract and agreed to let him make Unfaithfully Yours as his first film there. I first saw Unfaithfully Yours on commercial TV in the 1970’s and immediately fell in love with it; later I brought a videotape over to my husband Charles’s place in the 1990’s. He was initially reluctant to watch it with me because he’d seen the 1984 remake, directed by Howard Zieff and starring Dudley Moore and Nastassjah Kinski, and he hadn’t liked it. After 10 minutes of Sturges’s original, Charles turned to me and said, “This is great! Why didn’t they just reissue this one instead of making it all over again?” Sturges originally wanted to make Unfaithfully Yours with James Mason and Gene Tierney, and though Rex Harrison is so good in the role one can’t imagine anyone else playing it, he might have been better off with Mason in the lead for a reason that had nothing to do with the film itself. Though Harrison had arrived in Hollywood with his wife, German actress Lilli Palmer, he started an extra-relational affair with American actress Carole Landis, who’d already been married and divorced three times. Harrison decided to break up with Landis and go back to his wife, and Landis responded by committing suicide. This led to an intense backlash against Harrison by the American moviegoing public – his career didn’t recover until the smash success of the 1956 Broadway musical My Fair Lady, based on George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion – and Zanuck tried to salvage it as best he could by holding Unfaithfully Yours from release for two years. The film as it stands is a masterpiece, reflecting Sturges’s rather jaundiced view of classical music and the people who either love it or pretend to because they think they’re supposed to as part of their social position. A New Yorker profile of Sturges claimed that in his childhood his socially-conscious mother had dragged him to the annual Wagner festival at Bayreuth and insisted he greet an endless supply of venerable German dowagers and remember all their names. As a result, in many of Sturges’s scripts the comic villains have German names.

The man DeCarter (whose name is a bizarre in-joke; the British conductor Sir Thomas Beecham had been a member of a family that made its fortune through a patent medicine called “Beecham’s Pills,” and Sturges named his conductor after Carter’s Little Liver Pills, the American equivalent) suspects Daphne of having an affair with is his secretary, Tony Windborn (Kurt Kreuger), and without his knowledge Carter’s manager, Hugo Standoff (Lionel Stander doing his “Russian” schtick), has hired a detective named Sweeney (Edgar Kennedy) to follow Daphne and get the goods on her. Sweeney turns out to be a huge fan of classical music, which so appalls Carter that he vows never again to conduct the music of Sweeney’s favorite composers, Handel and Delius. The pieces that inspire Carter’s fantasies of doing in his wife – the overtures to Rossini’s Semiramide and Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Tchaikovsky’s tone poem Francesca da Rimini – are all about illicit love. After Carter completes his concert, with Daphne’s sister Barbara (Barbara Lawrence) and her husband August Henshler (Rudy Vallée, whose moribund film career got a boost when Sturges saw comic potentialities in him other filmmakers had missed) as bored attendees (Carter complains that he can hear Henshler snore from inside his box), there’s a screamingly funny slapstick sequence in which Carter gets what he thinks is a disc recorder out of his closet. It’s actually a box containing gambling equipment, and when he finally gets the disc recorder down its owners’ manual says it’s “So Simple It Operates Itself!” That became a catch phrase between Charles and I because we first saw this movie together it was at the height of the first Internet boom in the late 1990’s. Like the computers of that time, the instructions for Carter’s disc recorder are hellishly complicated, and the manual says that if you’re confused you should turn to page 6 – which consists of an elaborate and incomprehensible schematic diagram of the machine’s electronics. Unfaithfully Yours holds up beautifully, especially given Sturges’s skill at portraying both Carter’s self-importance and the events of the story which take him down more than the proverbial pegs, including a running gag when he tries to stand on chairs to get at the various boxes in his closet and he keeps falling through the wicker seats. Rex Harrison so perfectly inhabits the role of Sir Alfred DeCarter it’s impossible to imagine anyone else playing him – not James Mason (though my all-time favorite Mason movie, Alfred Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, cast him as a Bisexual villain), and certainly not Dudley Moore!