Unfaithfully Yours - Criterion Collection - Region 1 DVD

The conductor looks suspiciously like a self-portrait by Sturges, and the delicious dialogue comes pouring out of Rex Harrison like pearls from a goblet. The film's main disappointment is that it doesn't feature the teeming stock company of character actors that crowd Sturges's earlier pictures (although Rudy Vallee, Lionel Stander, and Edgar Kennedy come through nicely). The film, while morbid, is often laugh-out-loud funny, but it also has something sneakily brilliant to say about the gulf between art and life: how the exquisite timing and perfect mechanics of Sir Alfred's imagination come a-cropper when he actually tries to enact his fantasies. Unfaithfully Yours was remade in a not-bad version with Dudley Moore in 1984, but this one's the keeper. Too bad it couldn't save Sturges--this is the last worthy film in a too-brief career. --Robert Horton