Twentieth Century-Fox Film
Directed by Preston Sturges
My rating: 2.5 stars out of 4
IMDb Wikipedia
(DVD, Criterion Collection)
Rex Harrison is a famous symphony conductor with a beautiful wife, Linda Darnell, who dotes on him. He returns from a long trip during which he asked his brother-in-law, Rudy Vallee, to "watch" his wife. Instead, Vallee hired a detective to follow her, leading to a conspicuous visit to Harrison's handsome, and much younger, assistant's hotel room in the middle of the night. At first Harrison ignores it, but he can't put it out of his mind and suspicion gets the best of him. Soon, he is arguing with Darnell and everything is falling apart. It culminates in a series of "fantasies" during a performance of three classical pieces. In the first, he plans the perfect murder, in the second he pays her off with a large check, and the third plays a game of Russian roulette! After the performance, he contemplates each one in real life, but they fall apart in various hilarious ways. In the end, Darnell confesses that she was in the assistant's hotel room, but it was all innocent and they reconcile. Lesser Sturges requires one to check logic at the door, but has the usual crisp dialogue for which he is well known. Unfortunately, Harrison's change of character from loving husband to raging creature of anger and hate and back again is just not that believable. The violence in the "perfect murder" fantasy is jarring even now, much less for the late 40s.
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