This lopsided, stunning comedy is Sturges' last masterpiece, a bitter denunciation of culture, and the most savage dissection of marriage in the cinema. It is more shocking than 'Othello', sadder than 'Ulysses', both of which it alludes to. Like Othello, Sir Alfred de Carter is a celebrated, civilised hero whom jealousy drives insane; both men are linked to culture - Othello tells bewitching stories, Carter conducts - and both are failed by culture, which cannot elevate base, murderous, misogynistic instincts.
Even better, for a Hollywood movie by a (till then) popular director, is that it attempts some of the formal daring of Ulysses. One of the reasons the film's structure seems so strange is that it doesn't follow a traditional narrative movement (eg of a play, novel or film), but tries to match the abstract patterning of music (like the episode 'Sirens'), the film's subject matter. The development of themes, motifs, antiphony, repitition, give the film the same fluidity, richness and depth of a symphony, and this plays havoc with our conventional narrative expectations.
Further, like 'Oxen In The Sun', which relates narrative in styles pastiching the 'best' (clean, proper, elegant) of English prose, before collapsing in a babble of slang and dialect, UNFAITHFULLY YOURS develops its story through the history of popular classical Romantic music, from Rossini, to Wagner to Tchaikovsky, from populist musical entertainment made for the people, to solemn music drama more appropriate to cathedrals, to sophisticated souffle dilution, before Carter's narrative collapses into slapstick and farce, wholesale destruction, mirrored in the grotesque, carnivalesque, distorted music, and the painful lashes of feedback.
Sturges' view of marriage is alarmingly bleak, not just including the reprehensible coupling of pompous, sterile miser August Henshler (a priceless Rudy Vallee) and his bored sarcastic golddigging wife, Barbara (like her sister - Carter's misogyny is not without some justification; and the film is a rare Hollywood analysis of class). The film opens with symbolic ominousness, as a wife waits at an airport for a husband who is lost somewhere in the sky, possibly in danger. Their reunion is sheer theatre, complete with audience and critics; and their first night together is rudely interrupted (witnessed) by the man whose intrusions will be central to the following plot, Tony. The film is full of this idea of theatre, that the lives we lead are mere crippling performances for a society full of begrudgery, indifference and contempt.
The important thing about the early scenes is how much Carter is to blame, how useless he is at marriage beyond the pleasureable physical duties. He is almost always away from his wife, or putting her off when he is there, delegating his responsibilities to his secretary so that he might as well be her lover - Carter's jealousy is really only a hypocritical smokescreen for guilt and neglect. He thinks throwing money and dresses at Daphne is enough - he is closer to August than he would care to admit.
His abrasive ego and violent clipped wit is hugely amusing and full of a brisk energy, but it consumes and negates all around him. He is an all-powerful man, a magician, the centre of public attention - he can make a legion of men do his bidding, and make hundreds more applaud him for doing so. This necessitates a regulated life, all the elements therein subservient to his will. So when his wife is possibly having an affair, he loses control. His sense of wholeness is split, but this is figured in the fragmentation of his wife (when he first suspects, she is reflected in a mirror; in the next sequence, she is divided into three by a double mirror), so bound up is she in his self image.
After a slow start, this is monstrously funny, and Carter's decline is dramatised in his change of comic registers, from verbal ('intellectual') comedy, to broad, 'vulgar' slapstick, from construction (of neat sentences etc.) to destruction, from activity to passivity. Decades before Cultural Studies came into being, Sturges links Dead White Male culture to masculinity and the arbitrary, brutal power of patriarchy is shown in all its unlovely violence.
The fantasy sequences are delirious, wicked, frightening and plausible (with disorientating zooms into Carter's eye reminiscent of VERTIGO)., and a thrill to see in a 40s Hollywood film, but Sturges is well aware that the pleasure we get from Carter murdering Daphne (explicitely eroticised) is very real, a release of what we (men anyway) feel but would never admit. In this way, YOURS is a forerunner of PEEPING TOM.
Although this is definitely the work of a misanthropist, there are glimmers of humanity, especially Sweeney the detective, whose loneliness is genuinely moving; he is the only character for whom music actually enriches. It is odd that a late 40s American film featuring detectives should have that figure as a receptacle of hope and humanity, and the man of culture, breeding and nobility the noir hero.
There are some unexpectedly delightful bits of irrelevant business, such as Daphne and August dropping things from the balcony on an old dowager. Sturges' use of space and architecture to dramatise emotion is once again masterly and Antonionian - the whole final third is a superb depiction of domestic alienation, Carter's ignorance of his own home revealing about his marriage; when he goes to confront Tony, the corridor's geometry is a chilling vanishing point; his mute walk through Tony's room is like the perambulaitons of a ghost.
Even better, for a Hollywood movie by a (till then) popular director, is that it attempts some of the formal daring of Ulysses. One of the reasons the film's structure seems so strange is that it doesn't follow a traditional narrative movement (eg of a play, novel or film), but tries to match the abstract patterning of music (like the episode 'Sirens'), the film's subject matter. The development of themes, motifs, antiphony, repitition, give the film the same fluidity, richness and depth of a symphony, and this plays havoc with our conventional narrative expectations.
Further, like 'Oxen In The Sun', which relates narrative in styles pastiching the 'best' (clean, proper, elegant) of English prose, before collapsing in a babble of slang and dialect, UNFAITHFULLY YOURS develops its story through the history of popular classical Romantic music, from Rossini, to Wagner to Tchaikovsky, from populist musical entertainment made for the people, to solemn music drama more appropriate to cathedrals, to sophisticated souffle dilution, before Carter's narrative collapses into slapstick and farce, wholesale destruction, mirrored in the grotesque, carnivalesque, distorted music, and the painful lashes of feedback.
Sturges' view of marriage is alarmingly bleak, not just including the reprehensible coupling of pompous, sterile miser August Henshler (a priceless Rudy Vallee) and his bored sarcastic golddigging wife, Barbara (like her sister - Carter's misogyny is not without some justification; and the film is a rare Hollywood analysis of class). The film opens with symbolic ominousness, as a wife waits at an airport for a husband who is lost somewhere in the sky, possibly in danger. Their reunion is sheer theatre, complete with audience and critics; and their first night together is rudely interrupted (witnessed) by the man whose intrusions will be central to the following plot, Tony. The film is full of this idea of theatre, that the lives we lead are mere crippling performances for a society full of begrudgery, indifference and contempt.
The important thing about the early scenes is how much Carter is to blame, how useless he is at marriage beyond the pleasureable physical duties. He is almost always away from his wife, or putting her off when he is there, delegating his responsibilities to his secretary so that he might as well be her lover - Carter's jealousy is really only a hypocritical smokescreen for guilt and neglect. He thinks throwing money and dresses at Daphne is enough - he is closer to August than he would care to admit.
His abrasive ego and violent clipped wit is hugely amusing and full of a brisk energy, but it consumes and negates all around him. He is an all-powerful man, a magician, the centre of public attention - he can make a legion of men do his bidding, and make hundreds more applaud him for doing so. This necessitates a regulated life, all the elements therein subservient to his will. So when his wife is possibly having an affair, he loses control. His sense of wholeness is split, but this is figured in the fragmentation of his wife (when he first suspects, she is reflected in a mirror; in the next sequence, she is divided into three by a double mirror), so bound up is she in his self image.
After a slow start, this is monstrously funny, and Carter's decline is dramatised in his change of comic registers, from verbal ('intellectual') comedy, to broad, 'vulgar' slapstick, from construction (of neat sentences etc.) to destruction, from activity to passivity. Decades before Cultural Studies came into being, Sturges links Dead White Male culture to masculinity and the arbitrary, brutal power of patriarchy is shown in all its unlovely violence.
The fantasy sequences are delirious, wicked, frightening and plausible (with disorientating zooms into Carter's eye reminiscent of VERTIGO)., and a thrill to see in a 40s Hollywood film, but Sturges is well aware that the pleasure we get from Carter murdering Daphne (explicitely eroticised) is very real, a release of what we (men anyway) feel but would never admit. In this way, YOURS is a forerunner of PEEPING TOM.
Although this is definitely the work of a misanthropist, there are glimmers of humanity, especially Sweeney the detective, whose loneliness is genuinely moving; he is the only character for whom music actually enriches. It is odd that a late 40s American film featuring detectives should have that figure as a receptacle of hope and humanity, and the man of culture, breeding and nobility the noir hero.
There are some unexpectedly delightful bits of irrelevant business, such as Daphne and August dropping things from the balcony on an old dowager. Sturges' use of space and architecture to dramatise emotion is once again masterly and Antonionian - the whole final third is a superb depiction of domestic alienation, Carter's ignorance of his own home revealing about his marriage; when he goes to confront Tony, the corridor's geometry is a chilling vanishing point; his mute walk through Tony's room is like the perambulaitons of a ghost.