The galloping orchestral music that opens Unfaithfully Yours would, in any other Sturges film, accompany 10 people crowding into the mayor’s office to make—operator, operator!—an extremely urgent phone call. Here, in what is tempting to see as a self-conscious movie-length gag, there’s an actual orchestra behind the clamor, churning out Rossini, Tchaikovsky, and Wagner under the direction of the very English conductor Sir Alfred De Carter. But there I’ve begun as most do with this film, highlighting first its differences from the rest of Sturges’ work—it’s a comedy with dark touches, distinct from Sturges’s usual freewheeling blend of optimism and cynicism and marked by a general psychological remove to its execution rather than bubbling immediacy. The plot follows the same fertile template but exists on a theoretical plane. Sturges’s action usually consists of the resolution (more often the elaboration) of a misunderstanding, whether a mistake, a con, or a fantasy, or the all-American combination of all three. In this case, Sir Alfred is led to believe that his wife Daphne is up to hanky-panky with his secretary Tony, but in an exceptional move, the traditional Sturgean action of the movie occurs entirely in Sir Alfred’s head: they are the fantasies he has while conducting an orchestra, all variations on the theme of extravagant jealous satisfaction. A mistake, a fantasy—and also a con: the first, flagship imagination shows Sir Alfred, so very efficient, framing his secretary for the murder of his wife.

Resolution, of a sort, does follow for his fantasies. When he finally tries to execute them in the final third of the film, all is undone according to comic and then melodramatic tradition: first physically (he wrecks a whole apartment trying to recreate the dreamt-of frame-up, which involves a recording gramophone) and then emotionally, when he is finally persuaded of her faithfulness. But that’s too generous to the insufferable Sir Alfred (a silver-tongued British invader that I for one can’t stand seeing in Sturges’s America), because the ending remains closer to the director’s classic work—borne out of chance. For the great composer is really persuaded more by the failure of his own fantasies, according to physical, slapstick circumstance than anything else.

Especially for someone who finds Sturges’s films an uncomplicatedly madcap home away from home, it feels clunky to pick the film apart—and in fact Sturges, as usual, supplies his own best commentator in Sir Alfred’s smart aleck sister-in-law, who dissects the film’s first screen kiss. But in truth Unfaithfully Yours comes close to demanding a little contemplation for full enjoyment—who would have thought that the three pieces Sir Alfred conducts are all precisely matched, thematically and musically, to the fantasies of murder, noblesse oblige, and grandiose tragedy? Criterion staffs us with a triumvirate of scholars on the DVD commentary, in conversation, and it’s amusing to hear the three puzzle over the film, too, just with a slightly higher level of access to Sturges’s letters (from which he poached the film’s classic-Hollywood dream closing line). And, in their patter, it’s hard not to see little bit of Sturges’s characters—James Harvey as Rudy Vallee, perhaps? (“She is eating chocolates in bed, which is always the sign of a floozy, for some reasons I do not understand.”) Farber’s quoted on Sturges (“viciously alive”), but the biggest kick is scholar Diane Jacobs claiming that Sturges was the third-highest paid person in America—totally improbable and absolutely perfect, just like his films.
—NICOLAS RAPOLD