This is what we might call late-blooming Sturges coming as it did four years after his last Paramount movie and having written and directed eight movies for that studio between 1940 and 1944, the majority of which were successful he was arguably entitled to both a break and a different studio. It was Fox who were to benefit from the breach with Paramount and Sturges got to feature Fox contract player Linda Darnell plus Rex Harrison, who was still hanging around the Lot after shooting Anna And The King Of Siam there a couple of years earlier. In fact Linda Darnell played very much the same role she plays here - an ordinary girl who lucks into a rich older man - as she did for Mank the next year in A Letter To Three Wives where she substituted Harrison for Paul Douglas. This is at its heart a very bitter black comedy but perhaps because he thought it too dark himself or perhaps because he was 'persuaded' by the Front Office, Sturges leavened it from about the seventh or eighth reel with some hopelessly unfunny slapstick involving Harrison who is, above all else, at home with verbal comedy. There are certainly fine moments and the beginning is studded with Sturges one-liners but the ultimate effect is of an unsuccessful meld of bleak humor and slapstick.
Review of Unfaithfully Yours
