Movie Review: Beloved Infidel (1959)

There are two terms that will make me drop everything and pay attention: “Deborah Kerr” and “Cinemascope.” I don’t care what I have planned, what else is on, or how bad Rotten Tomatoes says the film is—I’m there.

Which is how my wife and I found ourselves perched in front of the set on a Saturday night a week ago to take in the richly filmed 1950s melodrama Beloved Infidel, based on the memoir of Hollywood gossip columnist Shelia Graham about her affair with the tortured movie screenwriter version of America’s greatest novelist—F. Scott Fitzgerald.

The film paints a vivid picture of Hollywood in the 1950s, full of baggy slacks, wrinkled tuxedos, bungalow apartments, and endless meetings. I loved those elements. Honestly, I could watch a two-hour film that just props a camera, Rear Window style, on a table in a bungalow apartment in LA in 1953. The mid-century modern decor, the flowing dresses, the pastel colors, the food—often augmented with gravy or jello, all tell the story of a postwar America that has been made safe for white people and their progeny in a world that is full of promise and love of the American dollar. Yes, it was a fantasy, but isn’t that what movies are supposed to be?

Unfortunately, the little detail of plot often creeps into a perfect picture, and Beloved Infidel provides a dreary version of that. Though the story is based on truth, director XX has chosen to dump a vat of schmaltz on the proceedings which leads to myriad scenes of walks on the beach, drunk hat tipping, embarrassing episodes of Kerr throwing herself at Fitzgerald with a lugubrious sigh: “Oh….Scott!!!”, and the presence of The Bottle, all set to swelling Montovani music that doesn’t trust its story enough to just get on with it.

Take the production out of the 50s and you’ll probably call it a wasted experience. But ensconse the picture in that decade (even though it recounts a story from the 30s), and you’ll find plenty to love. Kerr’s dresses, the streamlined offices, trains and cars, the quaint hokiness of air travel, and, especially, the kitschy visit to Mexico, complete with a ride on a donkey and a tourist photo. This is America, we own everything, and nothing could ever go wrong.

Nothing, that is, except the plot points brought on by The Bottle and The Gun. If you know the F. Scott Fitzgerald story, you know how it ends and you know he left much unfinished in his life. But you may not know exactly what happened, or how tortured his daily life was by his institutionalized wife, Zelda, and his loving but lonely daughter, Scottie.

The story of a man who provided such a sharp dissection of the American experience of the 1920s should have been hoisted to the pinnacle of celebrity in that decade, only to have his wings melted by the white-hot sun of the relentlessly moving American celebrity machine, seems more at home in Greek myth that 1950s Cinemascope. It’s no coincidence that later in the decade the glorious moviemaking process was ported over to Broadway musicals and, especially, westerns.

Cinemascope was not meant to tell stories of inner torment and failure. That’s what black and white and noir are for. But in this case, I’m glad it did. For all the maudlin treacle Beloved Infidel presents to the viewer, at its worst, it still stars Deborah Kerr and Gregory Peck and tells the story of the sad demise of America’s greatest writer. There will be details that you didn’t know and they will help flesh out your understanding of a complex man, and, along the way, a conflicted country. That the story is presented in variegated widescreen glory of Cinemascope takes it from a “maybe I’ll watch” to a “must-be-seen.”