UNFAITHFULLY YOURS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 20, Issue 515, 6 May 1949, Page 12

UNFAITHFULLY YOURS

(20th Century-Fox) HAT goes on in the mind of a famous conductor as he coaxes, wheedles, , or bullies his hundred-man orchestra through a symphony concert? Does he in imagination scale Olympian heights to converse with the gods, or see enacted before him the fabulous deeds of a Nordic past? Not a bit of it, say the cynics, he might just as easily be thinking of to-morrow’s lunch, or of the argument he had with his wife the night before. Carry this fidea to its logical extreme and you have in nucleus the theme of Preston Sturges’s latest comedy, Unfaithfully Yours. In this film Rex Harrison, as a temperamental British baronet in charge of one of America’s most celebrated orchestras, plots successively to murder his wife for a suspected infidelity, then to forgive her, and finally to kill himself, as he conducts three major works of a programme in which he gives the most inspired performance of his gareer. ;

It is all in fun, of course, and as a fairly fast-moving farce this picture is quite good entertainment. Rex Harrison enjoys himself immensely in a role that enables him to over-act all the time, and Linda Darnell as his beautiful wife plays up to him admirably. Rudy Vallee, as the conductor’s witless brother-in-law (and another millionaire), makes a good foil to Harrison’s vivacious playing, and Edgar Kennedy, in what must have been one of his last performances before his recent death, is the music-loving -pfivate detective whose over-zealous snooping brings about all the trouble in the first place. Nevertheless this film has a number of unsatisfying moments-in fact, it is another example of good acting spoilt by a weaknes in plot. The scenes where Sir Alfred (as Harrison is called) mentally works out a perfect crime while he is conducting the orchestra are hilarious enough, but when he tries after the concert is over to carry out what he has just imagined, and makes just about every possible mistake in doing so, the humour begins to wear a little thin. The joke is unduly stretched out, the

action begins to lag a little, and the result is that the whole thing would have been considerably improved if it was a couple of thousand feet shorter. Untaithfully Yours was written, produced, and directed by Preston Sturges, who also made The Miracle of Morgan's Creek, and as in that picture the humour is very broadly played. There is, however, rather more dialogue than is usual in a comedy of this type, almost as if it had been originally conceived as a radio play-a fact which doesn’t worry Rex Harrison who, having by far the most to say, carries off his lines with his usual aplomb.*On the other hand some of the purely visual humour seems a little pointless as far as the story is concerned, such as the apartment fire or the scene where the cymbals player produces an oversized pair which he smites vociferously to the rest of the orchestra’s delight. But as most of this is good cinema it doesn’t matter much anyway. : On the whole the film is something of a mixture. The basic idea js clever, the acting is good, the slapstick is often very funny, and some of the dialogue

is quite neat, But there are too Many slack passages and too many sequences which are merely banal-such as the one where Sir Alfred almost wrecks his apartment in looking for his home recording machine-for really first-rate comedy. The director seems to be trying to please everybody at once, instead of making a picture thoroughly satisfying at one level of taste only.