Unfaithfully Yours (1948), directed by Preston Sturges. Criterion DVD at Tom’s, Tuesday, June 6.

I love Preston Sturges movies, or should I say I love his good movies, because when he fails he comes very close to being an exhausting joke machine along the lines of Jerry Lewis. Case in point: Unfaithfully Yours.

Rex Harrison (mistake number one) plays conductor Sir Alfred de Carter, who is married to the beautiful Daphne de Carter (Linda Darnell). She is mistake number two. Not Darnell, but Daphne. See, the conductor adores his wife, until his brother-in-law, August Henshler (Rudy Vallée) hires a detective to follow Daphne. He did this because Alfred asked him to “watch over his wife”, meaning to take care of her while he was away, not have her followed. Well, the detective finds some hanky-panky going on, which everyone but Alfred knows is not really hanky-panky, but a simple mix-up.

Alfred goes berserk, and then decides to murder Daphne. We see him conducting a classical music piece, and the camera, in an impressive shot, zooms in close to Alfred and into his eye, where we see him imagine three scenarios of revenge, followed by the crushing and overtly slapstick reality, all to the music he’s conducting. That’s moderately impressive.

Problems abound. First, Alfred is played by Rex Harrison, who was an asshole in life, and which always seemed to follow him into his movies. To me, the man’s repellant, he seems like a total creep. Then there’s Daphne. Now, Sturges was very capable of writing female characters, as evidenced by The Lady Eve and The Palm Beach Story. But Unfaithfully Yours’ Daphne is akin to Veronica Lake’s “Girl” in Sullivan’s Travels, that is to say, very little character at all. Linda Darnell is fine, but her character does nothing. Actually, no one is very interesting but Alfred and a private detective who, in the only truly funny moment in the film, is revealed to be an insane fan of Alfred’s. “How you handle Handel!” is actually hilarious when delivered by Edgar Kennedy, a Sturges regular.

Sturges always had a problem, in my mind, reverting to over-the-top slapstick that is never as brilliantly conceived as Keaton or Chaplin, and goes on and on and on. He seems to do this when his scripts lag, and that doesn’t help things. Such is the case here, and it’s made worse by the fact that Harrison is no one’s idea of a great physical actor. If you’ve never seen a Sturges film, please do not start here, but go to Lady Eve, Hail the Conquering Hero, Miracle of Morgan’s Creek or Sullivan’s Travels instead.