The Unfaithful (1947)

The Unfaithful is a 1947 Warner Brothers production directed by Vincent Sherman. It’s sometimes described as a film noir but it’s more of a woman’s melodrama somewhat in the mould of Leave Her To Heaven and The Letter.

While her husband is away a man who has been lying in wait forces his way into the home of Chris Hunter (Ann Sheridan). There is a struggle. The man ends up dead, stabbed to death.

We see these events in silhouette through a curtained window. We can’t be entirely sure what happened.

Given that the maid heard a woman scream a moment before the man’s demise the police see this as as a very obvious case of a killing in self-defence. This was clearly an attempted rape.

The only problem for the police is that the story that Chris tells them is not the one they expected to hear. She tells them that the man, whom she had never seen before, tried to rob her. He tried to steal her jewels. That doesn’t quite make sense to the cops. A simple burglar would not have entered a house he knew to be occupied. A stick-up man would have had a gun. This man carried no weapon of any kind. Her story just doesn’t quite hang together. If she had said that he tried to rape her it would all make perfect sense. That’s why he waited until she was home and her husband was away, and that’s why he carried no gun. They would have believed a story like that without hesitation. But she’s telling them a different story and Detective Lieutenant Reynolds isn’t entirely happy with it.

It’s not that this is a case of a movie plot being made incomprehensible by the Production Code. While the movie has to use euphemisms the cops do ask her if it was an attempted rape. So the movie’s plot is fine. We are expected to jump to the same conclusion that Lieutenant Reynolds jumps to, and like him we are supposed to be feel the beginnings of a slight suspicion about Chris’s story.

The dead man is struggling sculptor Michael Tanner.

Chris’s attorney, Larry Hannaford (Lew Ayres), is an old friend of Chris and her husband Bob (Zachary Scott). He has no suspicions because he doesn’t want to be suspicious. Until he gets a phone call and an art dealer tries to make a sale to him.

So firstly, the movie’s good points. Ann Sheridan isn’t too bad. It is, for 1947, surprisingly open about sex.

Now the movie’s problems. At 109 minutes it’s half an hour too long. The plot is largely completed by the halfway stage and is completely resolved half an hour before the end. The characters then start talking. And they talk and they talk and they talk. They talk until the viewer is ready to beg them stop. But they keep talking. They’re talking about stuff we already know.

Lew Ayres doesn’t have any dialogue. He has speeches. Lots and lots of speeches.

The last 40 minutes is like a therapy session. You know how, if you’re even been unlucky enough to go to therapy, you start looking for an escape. You wonder if they’ve forgotten to bolt the door. Maybe you could make a run for it. Or the French windows. If they’re unlocked you might be able to flee across the garden. That’s what this movie is like.

The Unfaithful was apparently a major reworking of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1927 play The Letter and the 1929 and 1940 film. Screenwriters David Goodis and James Gunn have managed to eliminate everything that made the 1940 movie so good.

The idea that this is a film noir is laughable. It has none of the noir sense of inevitable doom. It has no femme fatale. It lacks even a trace of noir visual style. It does not contain a single film noir ingredient. This is a women’s melodrama. Now I happen to like women’s melodramas, but this is a particularly turgid example of the species. And it’s so grindingly slow.

If you’re a very very keen Ann Sheridan fan you might want to check out The Unfaithful. Otherwise it’s one to avoid.

The Warner Archive DVD looks very good.

Oddly enough in 1947 Ann Sheridan starred in another Vincent Sherman-directed women’s melodrama, Nora Prentiss, which s actually a very good movie and well worth seeing. So I suspect that most of the blame for The Unfaithful should be laid at the feet of the screenwriters.