Some Films Just Don't Work: Unfaithfully Yours (1948), No Man of Her Own (1950), Adventureland (2008)

Regrettably, some films are only interesting as an exercise in figuring out what went wrong. Some don’t even deserve that much attention. Here are three duds I’ve watched (or tried to watch) recently: Unfaithfully Yours (1948), No Man of Her Own (1950) and Adventureland (2008), a disparate bunch to be sure, except in their dudness. If you like any of these pictures, let me know, tell me why. If you haven’t seen them, well – you’ve been warned.

Unfaithfully Yours (1948)

I expected to like this film. After all it was written and directed by Preston Sturges, the brilliant, comedic force behind The Lady Eve , Sullivan’s Travels, and several other funny, satirical films of the late 1930’s and 1940’s. Boy was I ever wrong.

Unfaithfully Yours is an American film about a British symphony conducter (Rex Harrison) who comes to suspect his much younger wife (Eve Arden) of having an affair. During the course of a New York concert, he vividly envisions various responses, ranging from murdering his wife and framing her lover, to graciously divorcing her along with a gift of money to go off and be happy, to killing himself.

Now this is supposed to be a comedy, but it’s just a mess. For one thing, Sturgess couldn’t decide whether he was going for clever, droll and witty in the Noel Coward style, or slapstick of the Charlie Chaplin/Buster Keaton style. Hard to mix the two, it seems. Compounding the problem is that Rex Harrison simply can’t seem to do slapstick; and he doesn’t even get the droll and witty piece down: he expostulates as if he was trying to be heard in the cheap seats in the back balcony, never realizing that he’s acting in a film rather than in a theater. Although the premise of imagining the murder of a two-timing wife could be played for laughs, it simply is not amusing to watch our protagonist (in his dream) gleefully, repeatedly slicing her throat with a razor! (I kid you not.) It's a shame that the core of this movie is so bad, because some of the supporting performers, especially Edgar Kennedy and Julius Tannen, are fun to watch

No Man of Her Own (1950)

This is another one, I thought I’d like. It stars Barbara Stanwyck, and I really like a lot of her movies, such as Baby Face (1933), The Lady Eve (1941), Ball of Fire (1941), and Double Indemnity (1944). It was directed by Mitchel Liesen, an experienced director at the time (although I don’t know that I’ve seen any of his other films). Yet, despite an interesting story idea, it is one of the flattest performances by an ensemble that I’ve ever seen.

Stanwyck plays Helen, a ‘fallen’ woman, unmarried but pregnant, with seven cents to her name, who starts the story wearily dragging herself and her forlorn little suitcase up the stairs of a New York apartment house to the door of her former lover, Steve Morley (Lyle Bettger), to beg for help – shelter, money, a little affection, whatever. Steve’s a cad, has already taken up with another girl, and refuses even to open the door, but he does slide an envelope under it with a one way ticket to San Francisco and five or ten bucks. So Helen gets on the train, where she is befriended by a young couple of newlyweds, Patrice and Hugh Harkness. Patrice is also pregnant and there’s a natural sympathy between she and Helen. Patrice and Hugh are on their way to Hugh’s hometown to meet his wealthy parents. But then there’s a horrible train wreck, Hugh and Patrice are killed, and Helen wakes up in the hospital, having given birth to a baby boy via emergency C-section. Helen is mistaken for Patrice, and soon is taken in by Hugh’s bereaved parents, who show nothing but kindness to their widowed “daughter-in-law” and their new grandson. But we know trouble is brewing because of the somber tone superimposed on all this (and because of an awkward framing device, which started the film at the end, then shows us what happened as an extended flashback.

Still, the story has promise right? Should Helen tell the Harkness family the truth and risk being turned out , relegating herself and newborn babe to a life of destitution in a cruel world? Can she maintain the act, pretending to be someone else? Can she resist the charms of Hugh’s handsome, kindly brother Bill (John Lund)? I didn't care, because the pace of the movie is irritatingly slow and the acting is remarkably wooden, almost catatonic, most remarkably (and surprisingly) in the case of Stanwyck as Helen. This affect is so pronounced, that I have to believe it was intentional, perhaps to remind us that the entire situation is being played back for us in Helen’s memory. If that is the case, it was a terrible decision. (In the new film version of Jane Eyre (2011), Mia Wasikowska gives a similarly uninflected performance, with similar results; see my notes on that film in my next post.)

There are also annoying, cloying voiceovers by Helen at key moments (“I can’t go through with this.But I must! I can’t!”). Voiceovers to convey an actor’s inner thoughts were apparently a cinematic vogue in the late 40’s (see Olivier’s Hamlet from 1948, as another dreadful example), but rarely if ever does this work – at least for the modern viewer.

I must confess that I could not sit through the entire movie and quit about half-way through. Maybe it gets better? I seriously doubt it.

Adventureland (2008)

I wanted to see Adventureland because I had heard it was pretty good and because it starred Jesse Eisenberg, a couple years before his leap to prominence in The Social Network (2010). Also it was written and directed by Greg Mottola, who had also directed Superbad (2007) and the recent Paul (2011), both of which I liked pretty well. (See my review of Paul)

This is a coming of age picture. Normally such films are about high school seniors just before or after graduation; this one is about college graduates getting ready for grad school or life itself. There are scads of bad or mediocre films in this genre, but there are also a remarkable number of decent or even excellent ones, such as The Last Picture Show (1971), American Graffiti (1973), Breaking Away (1979), Diner (1982), Say Anything (1989), Dazed and Confused (1993), the aforementioned Superbad (2007), etc. A common themes in all these films is that the young person has to find his/her own way; their parents are hopelessly out of touch at best, malevolent tyrants at worst or effectively non-existent.  A related theme is that romantic love may provide the necessary link to self understanding. Some are comedies, some are dramas; Adventureland tries to be both: a dramedy of sorts.

Eisenberg plays James, a somewhat subdued, introverted young man whose plans to travel in Europe with friends over the summer between college graduation and the start of grad school are dashed when his parents reveal that they can’t afford to chip in as promised. We deduce his disappointment from the situation, since Eisenberg plays his character in such a low key manner that he is unable to reveal much of what James is actually thinking. He takes a job at the seedy, local amusement park called Adventureland, running sideshow games, like the ring-toss. It’s dull and demeaning work, but there are other young people there to get to know, including the attractive (in a slightly goth way) Kristen Stewart, as Em. She is also kind of subdued and introverted. They start to get friendly, although Em is dating (or at least having sex with) another guy.

That’s about as far as I got in this film. It was so slow, so predictable, so enervating that I just couldn’t go on. Don’t get me wrong: it is perfectly acceptable to make a movie about a depressed person, or an introvert going through tough times. One classic example is De Sica’s Umberto D (1953), which is about a lonely old man, being turned out of his rooming house for lack of funds, with no prospects, silently contemplating suicide, but needing to find a home for his faithful pooch first. A dreary, depressing situation, but a very watchable, engrossing film. While one shouldn’t expect a film such as Adventureland to aspire to the level of the best De Sica works, one does need to be engaged by the narrative and/or the character. Didn’t happen here.

If you are still interested, all these films are available on DVD. Adventureland is also available on Blu-Ray. Unfaithfully Yours and No Man of Her Own are also available as streaming downloads from Netflix.