The Bigamist – directed by Ida Lupino. Melodrama. 80 minutes Black and White 1953.
★★
The problem with the picture is that its story is told as narration rather than as drama, by which I mean not just the voiceover but that the scenes which the actors engage in do not reach beneath the crop-dusting of the telling. Everything operates as it were from above.
The story is a Hollywoodization of the unsavory subject of bigamy, which means the subject has no recognizable human content, only an approval rating. We are supposed to see that these are all just very nice people in a pickle.
Why was Lupino involved as a director? Well, it was an issue-film, such as she often made — but a poor script, and the next to the last studio picture she made, The Trouble With Angels remaining.
As an actress unlike, say, Barbara Stanwyck, Lupino was common without having the common touch. She is by turns hard-bitten and sentimental, and never less than neurotic. So, as an audience, we are supposed to believe what is said about her rather than how she really appears to be, and we don’t. We feel cheated. “Damaged goods” is Lupino’s ambiance. That’s how she really appeared to be in every part she ever played. And true enough, no one, save Ida, could murmur, “Ya kill me,” and actually land the line as a romantic come-on without making one laugh. As an actress, she’s an odd presence in films. There is always something sightly insane about her. Or rather, she is always on the brink of sanity. It’s a quality that narrows her range, and makes her a hard actress to cast properly, but, unlike here, when she has a well-written and suitable role, she is unbeatable. Her brilliant performance in Roadhouse is the most telling rendition of the damaged-goods role ever put on film.
Joan Fontaine, who once won an Oscar in a leading role, is a sympathetic performer — or, perhaps one should say a pathetic performer. One usually pities rather than admires her, but here she is asked to play the part of a competent, smart, business woman, very much in charge of herself, and she does a pretty fair job. Two more Oscar Winners star here: Edmond O’Brien, who walks through the part of the bigamist, rather than crawls, and Edmund Gwenn who overacts the inspector sadly — but then, he is given dismal lines. We are supposed to approve of his disapproval of the bigamist, and we don’t. I do not accept Santa Claus as my moral compass — do you?
The censorship necessary, at the time, for the subject of bigamy comes from the casting of an actor as the bigamist who has no sex appeal whatsoever. With Edmund O’Brien we never suppose that his bigamy is the outcome of his sex drive, but only his need for companionship while on the road. This emasculates the material, reduces its entertainment value, and demolishes its human subtext. Essentially he becomes a man without a foible who falls by accident into this situation — so where is the drama? Propriety has rubber stamped an issue-film into a B-picture — without the energy of vulgarity that often gives B-pictures vitality.