The Unfaithful (1947)
W. Somerset Maugham’s play The Letter, a dramatization of one of his short stories, has been good to some big-name actresses: Gladys Cooper, who originated its leading role, Leslie Crosbie, in London in 1927; Katharine Cornell, who starred in the play’s Broadway debut, later that year; Jeanne Eagels, who got a posthumous Oscar nomination after starring in the 1929 talkie version; and, most enduringly, Bette Davis (also Oscar-nominated) in the classic 1940 version directed by William Wyler. (Cooper and Davis later were, unforgettably, mother and daughter in Now, Voyager [1942].) The 1929 film does little service to the legend of Ms. Eagels, a theatrical immortal for her Broadway performance as Sadie Thompson in Rain (1922), another play based on a Maugham short story. Her Leslie lacks the control central to the character (and the celebrated Davis performance), resulting in a twitchy, artificial, and sometimes laughable performance. (Eagels was dead by the end of 1929, at age 39, because of her alcohol and drug use.) Her most spontaneous moment comes when she has clearly forgotten her lines but keeps on going. In a neat coincidence, Herbert Marshall, who plays Davis’ husband in the 1940 film, plays Eagels’ lover. Davis’ lover is no more than a prop, just a body to bang six bullets into in the film’s mesmerizing opening. Having had her stunning breakthrough with the 1934 film version of Maugham’s Of Human Bondage, Davis was simply continuing her good streak with his characters.
Following the success and acclaim of their Davis/Wyler version, Warner Brothers wasn’t quite through with the material. The Unfaithful, directed by Vincent Sherman, is an unofficial and uncredited remake, but it is also unmistakably The Letter, simply transferring its location and reimagining its characters. No longer dealing with British high society on and around a Singapore rubber plantation, it is now set among the American upper class of Southern California. This shift allows the film to take The Letter‘s surefire infidelity plot and use it to examine post-war American marriage.
Beautiful Ann Sheridan, an ideally tough yet tender leading lady for James Cagney in movies like Angels with Dirty Faces (1938), and an ace wisecracker in hardboiled melodramas like They Drive By Night (1940), gave her best performance in the period soap Kings Row (1942). (I included this deeply touching and emotionally vibrant performance in my 2002 book 100 Great Film Performances You Should Remember But Probably Don’t.) Sheridan never again got a part that good, or one that suited her so perfectly (though be on the lookout for Come Next Spring [1956], a real sleeper). I’d say that The Unfaithful is second only to Kings Row as the best vehicle that Warners gave her in her roughly dozen-year association with the studio. The always-likable, always-underrated Sheridan died at 51 in 1967.
With The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) focusing on how returning servicemen were handling the delicate transition to civilian life, why couldn’t there be a movie about a woman of the home front and her adjustment to her returning husband? And wouldn’t this be especially dramatic if the wife was trying to keep secret an affair she had while her husband was away fighting? This is how The Letter was revamped for 1947, making it an unexpectedly relevant melodrama actually about something, a post-war confrontation with the repercussions of a confusing and lonely wartime at home. Things appear to be wonderful for Sheridan, with soldier husband Zachary Scott home safely from the war and ambitiously getting his house-building company off the ground. When a man accosts her in front of her home, just as she’s unlocking her door, she and this assumed stranger soon disappear behind the door. This is the beginning of the film’s equivalent of Bette Davis and her six gun shots. The scene is cleverly filmed from outside the house, a violent sequence distressingly viewed only in shadow, further heightened by its unsettling noise. We learn that Sheridan has stabbed him dead—after all, no one can compare with Bette Davis in the gun-shooting department—and she isn’t about to admit that this guy was her lover. In this version, she had already ended the affair and felt guilty and regretful about it ever having happened. Like Davis’ lover, Sheridan’s is essentially faceless and identity-free.
The backstory is that Sheridan and Scott married recklessly during wartime, knowing each other just two weeks. Sheridan’s affair was with a sculptor. But there is no letter to incriminate Sheridan. In its place is an unmistakably identifiable bust of her, for which she posed. While Cooper, Cornell, Eagels, and Davis all knew they had to retrieve that letter, Sheridan wants to get her bust back. (Should they have called this movie The Bust?) It’s most effective to have something as sensual as a piece of sculpture as a lasting representation of Sheridan’s sexual abandon, complete with flowing hair. It’s much sexier, and more visually striking, than a mere piece of paper. And, yes, her lover had a wife: that’s Marta Mitrovich in the Gale Sondergaard role.
Sheridan, who could sometimes seem stiff and sound monotone, comes through with one of her more fluid performances, an honest and smart piece of screen acting. Zachary Scott, better when playing louses, is dull at first but he becomes more interesting and alert once he learns the truth. And Lew Ayres is solid in the lawyer role, memorably played by James Stephenson in the Davis version. But it’s the great Eve Arden, as Scott’s high-living divorced cousin, who really surpasses herself. She shows what a fine actress she was, not just a gal with an awe-inspiring proficiency with snappy quips. Here she reveals the humanity beneath the zingers, crafting a character with more depth than at first suspected. She’s particularly marvelous in a major climactic scene with Scott at her posh apartment (with a large balcony), in which she essentially defends Sheridan (and all wartime wives). In a more typical role, Arden had appeared with Scott when they both supported Joan Crawford in Mildred Pierce (1945).
The Unfaithful is superbly shot and designed in black and white, making it a first-rate piece of Hollywood craftsmanship, complete with a throbbing Max Steiner score. It’s talky in the best sense of the word: it’s filled with conversations worth listening to. More adult than the usual so-called “woman’s picture,” as well as an intelligent and worthy remake, the film does become an admittedly preachy anti-divorce plea, fervently hoping (in the words of the Ayres character) that the Sheridan-Scott union can withstand this test and not declare defeat. (It’s a tricky dilemma for the era’s Production Code, not wanting to “okay” either infidelity or divorce, probably wanting Sheridan to be punished but not wanting Scott to leave her. We should be grateful that they didn’t just kill her.) If there’s real hope for Sheridan and Scott, then there’s hope for other post-war couples who also may not have really known each other when they married. I wonder how many wives saw this movie and were terrified that their wartime dalliances might come back to haunt them. Not to mention their busts.
