Not quite Tallulah Bankhead in Faithless

Zachary Scott, Ann Sheridan, and Lew Ayres (from left to right) in The Unfaithful

A couple of months back, Ann Sheridan was TCM's Star of the Month, which gave me the chance to record a bunch of movie available on DVD from the Warner Archive but that I hadn't blogged about before. Among them is The Unfaithful. So I recently rectified that situation and watched it to do a post on here.

Sheridan plays Chris Hunter, who married her husband Bob (Zachary Scott) just before he went off to World War II. The war is over and he's been back, working as a builder and flying to various places on the west coast supervising the construction of suburban housing developments. While he's away this time, Chris is invited to a party held by Chris' cousin Paula (Eve Arden) to celebrate her divorce.

Chris returns home from the party to find a man waiting outside her house. He forces her into the house, and in silhouette we see what appears to be a struggle between them before Chris kills the man. Bob returns from Oregon the next morning to find the police at his house, with bad news for him.

With the help of the family lawyer, Larry Hannaford (Lew Ayres), Chris gives a statement about the killing that clearly makes it out to be self-defense. But if that were the case, we wouldn't have much of a movie, would we? So we know that something more is going to happen. Eventually, we hear from Martin Barrow (Steven Geray). He's an art dealer who has... a really bad bust of Chris' head. (Unfortunately, I don't have the movie on DVD, and I couldn't find an image of the bust online.) That in and of itself would be no big deal, but it turns out that the bust was sculpted by... the guy she killed!

There, as you can see, is the problem. The idea that the guy she killed in "self-defense" now has some holes in it, and any bright and ambitious prosecutor should be able to find this out in the investigation into the man's death. To make matters even worse, Barrow and the dead guy's wife want to blackmail Chris for a substantial sum of money not to have the information be made public.

But it's not just the public Chris would like to keep the information a secret from. The thing is, Chris really did have an affair with the dead guy while Bob was away fighting the war. In her defense, it was a whirlwind romance that Chris and Bob had before he left, something that was not uncommon in 1941/2, and just as a fair number of servicemen picked up war romances or even war brides, the women back home still had physical needs.

Now, if a lot of this sounds like The Letter, that's not by coincidence. Warner Bros. wanted to revisit the material, although in this case the screenwriters changed enough of it to avoid having it be a full remake of The Letter. Still, anybody who watches is can't help but make the comparisons, and judge the movie in that light.

That's a bit unfair to The Unfaithful, because while it's not quite as good as either version of The Letter, it's not exactly a bad movie in its own right. If it has flaws, it's that it runs too long (it should probably have been written to clock in at about 90 minutes instead of close to 110), and, surprisingly, Eve Arden. I think she's supposed to be playing the same sort of sounding board she did in Mildred Pierce, but where it worked well in Mildred Pierce to break up the tension, The Unfaithful is more of a straight drama instead of a melodrama, and Arden just doesn't work quite as well here.

Still, The Unfaithful is absolutely worth watching for the performances from the other three leads, and for its all around solid production, especially for people not particularly familiar with Ann Sheridan.