1953 Directed by Ida Lupino
San Francisco businessman Harry Graham and his wife and business partner, Eve, are in the process of adopting a child. When private investigator Mr. Jordan uncovers the fact that Graham has another wife, Phyllis, and a small child in Los Angeles, he confesses everything.
Joan Fontaine Ida Lupino Edmund Gwenn Edmond O'Brien Kenneth Tobey Jane Darwell Peggy Maley Lillian Fontaine Matt Dennis John Maxwell Bess Flowers Walter Bacon Ralph Brooks Jack Chefe Kem Dibbs Ken Drake Jerry Hausner Donald Kerr Mike Lally Mac McKim Monty O'Grady James Todd Mack Williams Collier Young James Young
Bigamie, La grande nebbia, El bígamo, Bitter kärlek
Thrillers and murder mysteries Moving relationship stories marriage, drama, family, emotional or emotion film noir, femme fatale, 1940s, thriller or intriguing marriage, emotion, romance, feelings or relationships emotional, emotion, family, moving or feelings cops, murder, thriller, detective or crime Show All…
"When a man, even with the best intentions, breaks the moral laws we live by, we really don't need man-made laws to punish him."
I hate to saddle the only female director in the film noir universe with the "sensitive" descriptor, but it's one of the first words that come to mind when considering this. Lupino has such sincere empathy for all of these characters, and this has to be one of the most dramatically ambitious movies of the studio era for the way it sets up a situation for which no emotionally satisfactory resolution is possible, then follows it to the bitter, unsatisfying end.
In its own way, this is almost as tense and suspenseful as The Hitch-Hiker.
In the Code-era, a film like this should really not have ended this way. The implications of it are far more complex than I would have expected of a film forced to punish bigamy (though I assume it would have probably done so anyway). It dares to hint that love might be more complicated than marriage, and it has a fairly strong condemnation of the hypocritical view of adultery vs. bigamy (though it seems to suggest condemning adultery more than loosening the condemnation of bigamy). I feel like I am spoiling it, so I will stop the roundabout analysis. Suffice to say, the film's view of love is more intelligent, if not the ideal I'd like, than I expected.
52 project: 51/52 *
* One film not in database will be added as soon as it shows up, hopefully.
even as ur thinking 'this guy is freakin idiot,' the performances + feelings conveyed are entirely convincing...ended up being more modern and ambiguous than i was expecting!
"I never expected to see Phyllis again, but I knew I'd remember this day—when two strangers helped each other through a lonely Sunday."
Though by 1949 Ida Lupino had already assumed the remarkable mantle of being the only woman directing theatrical features in Hollywood (with Dorothy Arzner having retired from filmmaking in 1943), she staked a further claim to history in 1953 with The Bigamist—in which Lupino became the first woman to ever star in an American feature film of her own direction. In a brazen demonstration of the proverbial dictum to "write what you know", the screenplay fashioned by producer Collier Young (with Lawrence B. Marcus and Lou Schor) provocatively excavates biographical details regarding his former marriage to Lupino…
"Let's not wait, Eve," says Edmond O'Brien's traveling salesman to his wife midway through The Bigamist. He's enjoining her to take a trip with him, wishing she'd pull him away from California and the other woman he's been seeing. "Our marriage is the only thing that really matters." Joan Fontaine, playing Eve, smiling up at him from her separate bed. She's framed so that she stretches diagonally across the screen, in a shot so tight you can see the sinews in her arms and where her nightgown bunches around the middle. "I love our marriage," she replies, yawning, and rolls away from him and the camera to lie facing the window.
That only describes about ten seconds of this noir…
this is either a dull defense of awful misogynist behavior or a very subtle critique of it, a strong argument could be made for either, which is pretty fascinating. it mostly comes across as an indictment of the oppressively busy world that makes people lonely rather than of the man who can't help himself. Edmond O'Brien thankfully comes off as much less of an entitled asshole than he does in D.O.A., and the movie never paints him as some sort of tortured soul in a "bitches be crazy" situation who's acting heroic by doing a terrible job of covering his ass (for that plot see: LOCKE). the worst thing this guy does isn't falling in love with someone else, it's…
This was an interesting watch. It didn’t play into any of my expectations going in— something along the lines of a thriller or an intense drama. Instead, Ida Lupino offers a more psychological angle to this story, and I appreciated this approach so much more than if the film had met my original expectations. The whole thing worked for me, especially in the way it explored taboo subjects in regards to the contemporary times. Lupino is of course the key to all of this. Judging by the reviews, perhaps her execution of this film wasn't as effective to many viewers, but I dug it quite a lot.
Featuring a fiendishly clever screenplay from Collier Young (the ex-husband of director and star Ida Lupino), The Bigamist brilliant lays bare the anxieties of the postwar United States as it encounters the world through the eyes of a frightened man, struggling to find his place (Harry, played by Edmond O'Brien).
Harry's wife Eve (Joan Fontaine, who is so beautiful in this that I want to die) is everything 1950s America was warned against: a woman whose decision to work has stripped her of her femininity, and transformed her into her husband's competition, not his mate. What makes the character of Eve so effective is that we see her almost exclusively via her husband's characterization, reliant as we are upon the…
Prefigures Mad Men in a lot of interesting ways -- the ennui-filled businessman torn between various women who can't fulfill him. Always consuming, never sated, doomed from the start and trudging along any way he can. Neat to see this perspective arise from the period itself and not retrospectively. Ida Lupino is astounding.
Directed and starring English-American actress, singer, director and producer Ida Lupino, The Bigamist is raised from mere melodrama to a delicate portrayal of one man and his two marriages because of its components in characterisation. Associating here with Lupino is Joan Fontaine, Edmond O’Brien and Edmund Gwenn, and which amusingly includes several in-jokes citing Gwenn's most well-known role, portraying Kris Kringle in Miracle on 34th Street. This is a striking even-handed movie that unexpectedly stands upon an emotional neutral ground scarcely seen in Hollywood movies from this era.
Ida Lupino and Joan Fontaine are so good in this you wish they were fighting for each other!
There are some Hays Code surprises in this movie, particularly how marriage is viewed as a transactional business scheme, but perhaps most interestingly Lupino doesn't direct this movie as a horror critique of bigamy or patriarchy. Instead there's little judgement, just how man-made laws can make love feel criminal. I like that Lupino, who's obviously starred and directed a number of noirs, doesn't turn this into a noir melodrama with murder to get rid of secrets. But most importantly, the bigamist behaves like a a big lug, incapable of explaining thoughts, and just wanting some attention, and the women are defined individuals…
