The Affairs of Martha (1942)
(On Cable TV, February 2021) While I’m reasonably happy with The Affairs of Martha, I can’t help but think that this is a film that leaves a lot of material on the table, and I can’t help but wonder how much better it could have been had it been made twenty years later. The premise itself is fun but unfulfilled: What if the elite set of Long Island starting fretting about the announcement of a tell-all book written by an unnamed servant girl of theirs? Much of the film’s comic potential is explored early on, as both the upper-class gets concerned, and the comfortable servant class also finds the development alarming. (“I’ve spent years getting my employer where I want her!” complains one of the veterans of the trade.) There’s some bite to the opening moments, but it doesn’t really go anywhere — soon enough, the romantic comedy gets underway and nearly forgets about the opening premise. To be fair, the romantic complications that pile up do make for a serviceable film: as an heir to an upper-class family comes back from an expedition with a fiancée in tow, his previous marriage to a servant (the unknown author of the tell-all book!) comes back to make a mess of everyone’s plans. It pretty much ends up like you’d like to, but the class-division aspect takes a much smaller role than announced by the opening minutes. (Especially when the servant doesn’t have anything bad to say about her experience!) Still, Marsha Hunt is lovely as Martha, Richard Carlson makes for a likable romantic lead, and there’s a lot to like about Virginia Weidler’s performance as a bratty too-smart teenager. (This was a kind of role that Weidler played a lot during her short Hollywood career, and you can look at her turn in The Philadelphia Story as another exemplary instance of that persona.) The film doesn’t overstay its welcome despite shifting gears early on. The one strangely amusing note here is noticing that the film is an early effort from Jules Dassin, who would become far better known for hard-edged noir thriller in the late 1940s and then (due to the Hollywood Blacklist) be exiled in France, where he’d become famous for legendary crime thrillers. You can find distant echoes of The Affairs of Martha in more modern class-concerned fare such as The Devil Wears Prada or The Nanny Diaries, but I still think that it missed an opportunity to be far more striking.
