A Film Canon

Sturges' darkest comedy is sharply divided into three acts - a set-up, in which English conductor Sir Alfred De Carter (Rex Harrison) returns to America from abroad to find that his brother-in-law (Rudy Valee) has misinterpreted his request to 'keep an eye' on his wife, had her shadowed, and discovered an infidelity; a concert, in which he imagines three different responses (murder, resignation, suicide) over the course of three movements; and, finally, his extended attempt to put the first into effect. This produces a comic juxtaposition of erudition and crime encapsulated in Harrison's screen persona, which is just close enough to that of a stereotypical Englishman to make his departures all the more startling, confirming Sturges' comic signature as a tendency to almost reduce things to a common denominator, such that every difference is both infinitesimal and epic; sublime bathos. Hence the gradual integration of Harrison's verbosity into its ostensible opposite - crude physical comedy - most explicitly in the third act, which is little more than a series of increasingly grating pratfalls, but most poetically in his plea for the vulgarities of classical music, which reduces the orchestra to a collection of slapstick machines (especially the cymbal - his favourite instrument - which becomes synonymous with his gun), his own talent to a mere accumulation of sweat, and his fan-base to buffoonery, even - or perhaps especially - when it exhibits the insight and eloquence that he incorporates into his sustained attack on intellectuality, delivered with a fastidiously intellectual precision: "There's nothing serious about music. It should be enjoyed flat on the back, with a sandwich in one hand, a bucket of beer in the other, and as many pretty girls as possible."