The Arnelo Affair

I mentioned a few months back that I somehow wound up with a whole bunch of movies starring George Murphy on my DVR, not from a programming theme of his movies. Another of the movies was The Arnelo Affair, which I watched and wrote of this post that I could schedule at a suitable time after other posts on Murphy's movies.

Murphy is technically the second male lead here, and we don't see him at first. Instead, we see the female lead, Frances Gifford, who plays Ann Parkson. Ann is in a car with Tony Arnelo (John Hodiak), and in a voiceover talking about how much she regrets this. And how she wishes her husband had never brought this guy home. So, as you might be able to guess, we're about to get Yet Another Flashback, to the time when Ann's husband Ted (that's George Murphy) brought Tony Arnelo home.

Ted is a Chicago lawyer who's trying to advance his career, and one of his clients is nightclub owner Arnelo, whom Ted is representing in a bunch of tax-related stuff. Ann and Tony have a kid, Ricky (a young Dean Stockwell), and a seemingly wonderful life, except that Ted is spending a lot of time on his work, to the point that he can't take Ann out for a night out on the town with friends like upstairs neighbor and couturier Vivian Delwyn (Eve Arden). But Tony shows up, and he immediately starts telling Ann how striking she looks. When he learns that Ann has a hobby of interior decoration, Tony offers her the chance to make a bit of money by decorating some of his places.

Ann being a bored housewife, she decides to take Tony up on the offer. However, she quickly learns that Tony is really interested in her for other reasons, and that she's not the only woman he's interested in. He's also seeing a local actress named Claire Lorrison who shows up one afternoon when Ann thinks she's going to be alone with Tony. Worse, Tony starts smacking Claire around, leading Ann to want to break off the relationship with Tony. Tony, for his part, is rather persistent, constantly calling Ann up.

Things take an even worse turn when Claire winds up dead, clearly quite murdered. Ann is innocent of the murder, although not necessarily of adultery, which is still an issue under the Production Code. But Tony being a nasty piece of work, he's able to blackmail Ann by making certain that the dead Claire is found with a compact that has a big letter A that can likely be traced back to Ann. But of course, since there's that Production Code, we know that the real murderer has to be caught and get his just desserts.

I can see why all the people involved in The Arnelo Affair might want to be involved with it, but the final result is something that's rather a misfire. If I had to guess why, I think that it feels like it's devoid of emotion. George Murphy isn't a very charismatic actor at the best of times, and he's certainly very much a second banana here. Tony Arnelo may be a piece of work, but Hodiak doesn't give off that vibe. And Gifford is a bit of a cipher too. The Dean Stockwell character is somewhat superfluous. And, not that it has anything to do with the movie itself, the print TCM ran looked like one of those older 16mm prints that TV stations would run of old public-domain movies.