Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

Unfaithfully Yours is a 1948 screwball comedy film written and directed by Preston Sturges and starring Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee and Barbara Lawrence. The film is a black comedy about a man's failed attempt to murder his wife, whom he believes has been unfaithful to him. Although the film, which was the first of two Sturges made for Twentieth Century-Fox, received mostly positive reviews, it was not successful at the box office.

Sir Alfred De Carter (Rex Harrison) is a world famous symphony conductor who returns from a visit to his native England and discovers that his rich and boring brother-in-law, August Henshler (Rudy Vallee), has misunderstood Alfred's casual instruction to watch over his much younger wife Daphne (Linda Darnell) while he was away, and instead hired a detective named Sweeney (Edgar Kennedy) to follow her. Alfred is livid, and ineptly attempts to destroy any evidence of the detective's report.

Eventually, despite his efforts, he learns the content of the report directly from Sweeney: while he was gone, his wife was spied late at night going to the hotel room of Alfred's secretary, Anthony Windborn (Kurt Kreuger), a man closer in age to her own, where she stayed for at least forty minutes.

Distressed by the news, Alfred quarrels with Daphne before proceeding to his concert, where he conducts three distinct pieces of romantic-era music, envisioning revenge scenarios appropriate to each one: a complicated "perfect crime" scenario in which he murders his wife and frames Windborn (to the Overture to Rossini's Semiramide), nobly accepting the situation and giving Daphne a generous check and his blessing (to the Prelude to Wagner's Tannhäuser), and a game of Russian roulette with a blubbering Windborn, that ends in Carter's Suicide (to Tchaikovsky's Romeo and Juliet.)

After the concert, Alfred tries to stage his fantasy of murdering his wife, but is thwarted by his own ineptness, making a mess of their apartment in the process. When Daphne returns home, he realizes that she really loves him, and learns that she is innocent of Sweeney's charges: she had gone to Windborn's room in search of her sister Barbara, (Barbara Lawrence), August's wife, who WAS having an affair with Windborn, and became trapped there when she saw Sweeney spying on the room. Alfred begs Daphne's forgiveness for his irrational behavior, which she gladly gives, ascribing it to the creative temperament of a great artist.

Preston Sturges wrote the original screen story for Unfaithfully Yours in 1932 – the idea came to him when a melancholy song on the radio influenced him while working on writing a comic scene. Sturges shopped the script to Fox, Universal and Paramount who all rejected it during the 1930s.

In 1938, Sturges envisioned Ronald Colman playing Carter, and later initially wanted Frances Ramsden – who was introduced in Sturges' 1947 film The Sin of Harold Diddlebock – to play Daphne; but by the time casting for the film began, he wanted James Mason for the conductor and Gene Tierney for his wife.

Studio attorneys were worried about the similarity between Sturges' "Sir Alfred de Carter", a famous English conductor, and the real-life famous English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham, and warned Sturges to tone down the parallels, but the connection was noted in some reviews anyway. (Beecham's grandfather was Thomas Beecham, a chemist who invented "Beecham's Pills", a laxative. It is speculated that Sturges named his character "Carter" after "Carter's Little Liver Pills".)

Unfaithfully Yours, which had the working titles of "Unfinished Symphony" and "The Symphony Story", went into production on 18 February 1948, and wrapped in mid April of that year. By 28 June the film had already been sneak-previewed, with a runtime of 127 minutes, but the film's release was delayed to avoid any backlash from the suicide of actress Carole Landis in July. It was rumored that Landis and Rex Harrison had been having an affair, and that she committed suicide when Harrison refused to get a divorce and marry her. Harrison discovered Landis' body in her home.

The film premiered in New York City on 5 November 1948, and went into general release on 10 December. The Los Angeles premiere was on 14 December.

It was marketed with the tagline: Will somebody "get her" tonite?

In February 1949, after the film was released, William D. Shapiro, who claimed to be an independent film producer, sued Fox and Sturges with a claim that the story of the film was plagiarized from an unproduced screen story by Arthur Hoerl, which Shapiro had been intending to produce. The connection was supposedly composer Werner Heymann, who frequently worked with Sturges and whom Shapiro had interviewed to be the music director on his film.

The studio-quality tape recorder that cut vinyl records seen in the film is similar to ones used to secretly tape Horowitz and Benny Goodman during their concerts at Carnegie Hall and on the NBC Radio studios at Rockefeller Center. These rough cuts were later mastered into LPs which came to be considered classics. Arthur Rubinstein owned three of these devices, but as shown in the movie, they were difficult to use and required experienced technicians.

While rich with the sharp dialogue that became Sturges' trademark, the film was not a box office success. Critics usually attribute this to the darkness of the subject matter, especially for a comedy. The idea of a bungling murderer did not sit well with 1948 audiences, and the fact that none of the characters are especially sympathetic certainly did not help.

Sturges, whose previous film, The Sin of Harold Diddlebock had been pulled from distribution shortly after being released, never fully recovered from the lukewarm reception given to Unfaithfully Yours, and many point to it as the movie which effectively ended his career. Despite this, it is considered today by many critics to be an outstanding film.