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The feint is on McCarey's Love Affair, the construction allows a consideration of moods from giddiness to anxiety to transcendence. The camera rises from murky water reflections to a high-angled tracking shot for the blizzard of masks and streamers at Mardi Gras, "where once a year people play the parts denied them in life." The maiden (Nancy Coleman) is garbed as Marie Antoinette, the dance is to "Bayou Serenade" with the serviceman on leave (Phillip Reed), the coach driver sips surreptitiously from his bottle during their ride. Starry night, dawn, dissolve to café owner (Felix Bressart) sweeping confetti. "Aren't you exceeding the war effort?" Rendezvous not kept and letter not delivered, a kewpie doll points up the unmarried girl's quandary. Her childless sister (Margaret Lindsay) picks up the slack, the arrangement takes its emotional toll, the heroine's reunion with her estranged baby at Central Park almost turns into a kidnapping. Edgar G. Ulmer and the importance of "someone to weep on," a melodrama as full-bodied and personal as any by Stahl or Leisen. Stock footage on a Navy deck compresses the combat abroad, the conflict at home is fought in penthouses, just as brutal. Paterfamilias (Henry Stephenson) expires surrounded by books and Willa Cather quotes, "I shall die of having lived," elsewhere émigré bit players ponder the affair from the wings: Fritz Feld as a wine merchant recommending French vintage in New Orleans, Rudolph Anders as a chatty graybeard who appreciates Germanic punctuality and New York pigeons. A captivating modulation, a happy Ulmer ending. "Oh, you women and your secrets!" Ophüls is just over the rise with Letter from an Unknown Woman. With Regis Toomey, George Meeker, Frances Williams, and Winston Severn. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |