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. 

Sic erat in fatis

Opposites attract. The Lady Eve (1941, Preston Sturges) is equal parts hopeful and cynical about romance. It’s a screwball comedy about the love that strikes between a virgin scientist nepo bookworm and a sexpot grifter career criminal. Yet it does stick with one creative choice that links the two through a similarity. At its midpoint when the couple awake to the reality that their dream of sharing a life together happily ever after has ended, they both suffer equally from the cruelty of it all.

     JEAN’S (Barbara Stanwyck) seduction of HOPSY (Henry Fonda) lays it on pretty thick. The dialogue in which they finish each other’s sentences gets risky dangerous at the part about her wanting to be taken by surprise like a burglar. I won’t spell out what that innuendo means for me but in the context of the scene it works well. 
   Act III is a gaslight melodrama that really throws you off any attempt at guessing what Jean’s motives are. Because we the audience are being conned. There’s this red herring involving why Jean’s alter ego EVE SIDWICH has wedged her way back into Hopsy’s life. Is she imposing herself as a British aristocrat imposter into his social circle in order to humiliate him? Rob him again? Harass him out of spite? What kind of revenge does she have in mind we wonder. Because of that line right before the end of the second act: “Unfinished business. I need him like the axe needs the turkey.” 
     After Hopsy and the Lady Eve are married, she confesses to him. She tells him about several sordid sexual partners she’d had in an elliptical anecdote montage. And we think that makes them even. She wanted to hurt him like he hurt her. But after a tacked on shockingly thrillingly random bumping back into each other encounter we learn what the third act was really all about.
     Jean created Eve as a proxy to get Hopsy to reevaluate her. After having his heart broken by the royal teen slut, the crooked felon hustler in comparison now looks to him ideal. So The Lady Eve is telling us a man can forgive being swindled out of vast sums, lied to, used, and tricked, but not a woman who’s slept around alot. It’s funny in a screwball context. So its moral is: whatever it is keep it to yourself if you want to build a relationship on trust. 
     Lastly, I don’t know why but I’ve always hated Charles Coburn as the COL character inordinately. Like just how this grifter family is out to scam the poor Henry Fonda character just aggravates me because I have to see it coming and he can’t maybe. Also I’ve always liked Coburn in anything else I’ve seen him in. Which brings me to ask myself how I feel at the midpoint when Jean gets busted and subsequently broken up with. Something that always works in movies is having a character vow to reveal some immoral spot from their past to a loved one, and the other party finding out just a little too soon. I know she’s good, which is why this plot point probably works so well. So can we really buy the ending? Or do we buy it because we’ve been conned and don’t realize it? In which case would that also possibly be intentional? To on some level equate falling in love or being moved emotionally by a love story as falling for a grift?