The Unfaithful (1947)

(On Cable TV, November 2022) While The Unfaithful’s kinship to the film noir genre may not be as obvious as the private-eye-murder-thriller exemplars of the genre, it does have murder, morally dubious actions and there certainly, to a degree seldom acknowledged in other noir movies, a clear sense of time and historical consequences driving the plot forward. It starts with the murder, as a woman alone in a house kills a male intruder. She says he’s unknown to her, but that lie is exposed in the form of a bust of her made by him—exposing a wartime affair between the two. If you’re looking for more death, you’re out of luck: the initial murder is all you get. But if you’re looking for near-fatalistic “suffering with style,” then this is where the film’s meatiest moments start, as the husband of the woman is incensed at her affair and threatens divorce, but a stern talking to (from an exceptionally well-cast Eve Arden) introduces some complexity in what could have been a punitive moralistic conclusion. While noir almost always takes place in the shadow of WW2 and the reintegration of a fighting force into a general population (something seldom explicitly mentioned), The Unfaithful squarely talks about the toll of wartime separation, and suggests that, since the war drove everyone to behave in less-than-ideal ways, maybe we should be compassionate about it. That explicit call-out may be the noirest thing about The Unfaithful, and a good reason to take it in as a companion to other more conventional film noirs. It remains what they called “a woman’s picture,” but there’s a four-quadrant appeal in what the film has to say.