Youth belongs to youth. Beauty to beauty

Things have gotten pretty dark. Some of these postwar films are vicious. I’m mostly thinking Monsieur Verdoux and A Foreign Affair. They weigh on you. They’re heavy with death. What better to follow them up with than a movie that attempts to return to the silly, exasperated, manic tantrum explosive type of farce where it all began?

     Unfaithfully Yours (1948, Preston Sturges) is a fundamental screwball nightmare warning condemning age-gap romantic entanglements, by showing the requisite jealousy, insecurity, and paranoia they bring; though it also both brings the era of the Golden Age to a close and cathartically resets it.
     As an allegory for jealousy, it’s fitting that the report SIR ALFRED CARTER (Rex Harrison) receives that his wife DAPHNE (Linda Darnell) is unfaithful gradually begins with its unsolicited, unwelcome, unavoidable boring into his conscience. He rips it up, throws it away, kicks the dustbin out of the room; burns it; destroys all copies of it. But it’s spectral-elusive. You can’t destroy something that’s not of this world. It’s sad, the wisdom SWEENEY the detective leaves the great conductor with, that men should just be happy if they get an hour or a week with a beautiful woman, because it can’t last. It isn’t viable. Nature commands that they leave you for someone younger, better looking.
     The cucked conductor imagines three different scenarios to deal with his wife’s cheating—a passage that makes up the middle of the movie. They each comprise parts something like: revenge, moral high ground, and game of fate. The first sequence is the most elaborate. When the conductor takes a straight razor and murders his wife, frames her lover, and gets away with it, after being cleared in court there’s this shot of him laughing belligerently, and I’m laughing right there with him. 
     But in the third fantasy, when the conductor confronts his wife, with deranged delight he tells her about knifing her and that “my dear, your head nearly came off,” murder stops being funny. It’s like Unfaithfully Yours has some psychic connection to Nicole Brown. This movie reminds us that once dark impulses reach a certain point, they’re not even funny in movies. Even worse, the scene after this the conductor keeps trying on leather gloves that are too small for him to fit his hands into.
     So how does Unfaithfully Yours reset the comedy mechanism? The second act at the concert performance was all in his head. Now as the third act begins, he attempts to carry out his plans in real life. But he can’t. To turn real life into the illusion is impossible. What ensues is an inescapable slapstick routine that forces upon him the futility of attempting to leave the illusion. He’s in a comedy. Its tone is incontrovertible. 
     And as we sensed all along, his wife never was cheating. I was kidding earlier. The movie has nothing against age-gap relationships. Nor does it dissuade anyone from finding the woman of your dreams and living happily ever after with her. The joke was on him. And the joke was on us. For the rule of screwball is be careful when jumping to conclusions based on misleading appearances.