Unfaithfully Yours is the outlier among Sturges's masterpieces. The first seven were unveiled in an improbable stretch, from 1940 to 1943, when he seemed incapable of doing wrong, and they were to varying degrees hits, while Unfaithfully Yours bled the studio that bankrolled it. What's more, in Unfaithfully Yours, the auteur's usual curiosity about webs of social relationships is muted in favor of a psychological subject with nightmare overtones: sexual jealousy, paranoiac daydreams, schemes for domestic murder. For these reasons, and others, some of Sturges's commentators have hesitated to grant its place in his canon. For the connoisseur of Unfaithfully Yours, though, it may be possible to savor the film's distance from its contexts—Sturges's other films, "the comedy of remarriage," film noir, and the rest of Hollywood film in 1948—and to instead describe Unfaithfully Yours as an anomaly among studio fare, an experiment in the guise of a romp. Granting its status as an eccenttric artifact, we can better forgive 1948's unease with it.
Unfaithfully Yours builds a relatively conventional frame around three absurdist reveries. In the frame, we come to know the impulsive and distractible master conductor Sir Alfred De Carter, who, though he is surrounded by assistants, managers, relatives, and fans, is consumed solely, in alternation, by his marriage and his art. His obsessiveness is rewarded in his work and punished in his love life, at least for the duration of the film, when passion turns to jealousy, and therefore to daydreams of sacrifice, derangement, depression, and revenge. Those daydreams make up the content of the three unreal sequences and, paradoxically, the real subject of the film. In “Kafka and His Precursors,” Jorge Luis Borges describes how Franz Kafka’s nightmare geometry echoes the ancient Greek mathematical fable called Zeno’s paradox: “A moving body at point A (Aristotle states) will not be able to reach point B, because it must first cover half of the distance between the two, and before that, half of the half, and before that, half of the half of the half, and so on to infinity; the form of this famous problem is precisely that of The Castle, and the moving body and arrow and Achilles are the first Kafkaesque characters in literature.” In Sturges’s film, it is the relationship of Sir Alfred’s idealized fantasies (whether of committing murder or suicide or merely of pulling off a flamboyant guilt trip) to the material reality he encounters in his attempts to enact those fantasies (telephone, chairs, a folding checkerboard, and that great Simplicitas home recording machine, which earns a place between the feeding machine in Modern Times and R2D2 in the pantheon of cinema’s great robots) that is so utterly Zenoesque. In his fantasies, the arrow strikes the mark: Sir Alfred crosses the room in a long stride or two and retrieves the recorder from the overhead cabinet effortlessly. When he tries to re-create this sequence in the real world, the distance is everything, and the goal—his perfect murder—recedes from sight as persistently as Kafka’s castle.
