1. Today after I showered, I dried off and lay down. I thought I'd just take a short rest but I fell into a deep sleep, oblivious to time, and I'm not sure if I slept for 60 minutes, 90 minutes, or maybe even two hours. It was restorative, though, and helped me feel better today.
2. A couple weeks ago, Bill and Diane had just watched the Preston Sturges movie, Unfaithfully Yours (1948), and wondered if I'd seen it. I hadn't. I've heard so much about Sturges over the years, and I'm not sure I've ever seen any any of his movies, although I might have watched Hail the Conquering Hero 35-40 years ago.
This evening, I changed that.
Unfaithfully Yours features Rex Harrison as an orchestra conductor who comes to believe his wife (played by Linda Darnell) has cheated on him.
It is a movie exploring jealousy.
Stories about jealousy, as I see it, straddle any line that might divide farce and tragedy.
Jealousy transforms men and women into farcical, even if dangerous, and hapless beings. They become obsessed, unable to control their imaginations, crude, and sometimes menacing -- in short, parodies of themselves.
I don't know if Preston Sturges would describe the nature of jealousy the way I just did, but I do know that as this movie's screenwriter and director, he created a black screwball comedy. The story moves us inside Rex Harrison's character's consciousness where revenge fantasies, inspired by his jealousy and the musical pieces he conducts, occupy his mind, moving this story to the brink of tragedy.
Near the end of the movie, the clutter and confusion in and the fragile nature of Harrison's character's jealous mind takes physical form in a blissfully drawn out scene in his apartment as he accidentally breaks furniture, gets tangled up in wires, knocks objects to the floor that shatter, accidentally shatters a sliding glass door, and goes to battle with a record playing and sound recording machine.
I love that it seems this scene will never end. I love that it parallels an earlier scene featuring a wastebasket fire in the same apartment, another way Sturges uses a physically chaotic scene to give us an outward experience of the inward chaos (and fire) within the character Rex Harrison plays.
It might seem like I've given a lot of the movie away here, but, believe me, I haven't. To discover how the jealousy comes about, what the revenge fantasies are, to experience the superb supporting roles (like the Handel loving detective), and to find out how this screwball black comedy is finally resolved, you'll have to watch the movie yourself.
3. Until I went to sleep, I spent the rest of the evening watching interviews on the Criterion Channel about Preston Sturges and started a PBS documentary about him entitled, Preston Sturges: The Rise and Fall of an American Dreamer.
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