Unfaithfully Yours. 1948. USA. Directed and written by Preston Sturges. With Rex Harrison, Linda Darnell, Rudy Vallee, Barbara Lawrence. DCP. 105 min.
Rex Harrison, perfectly cast as a pompous British orchestra conductor, is haunted by the thought that his much younger wife (Linda Darnell) has betrayed him; as he rehearses three classical pieces, he imagines three different solutions to his dilemma, only to come up comically short when life fails to achieve the formal perfection of art. The film is pretty damn perfect in its own right, and ends with Sturges’s unforgettable encomium to Darnell, “A thousand poets dreamed for a thousand years, then you were born, my love.”