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Bigamist (1953)
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by Kino Video
Sales Rank: 42668
Price: $24.95
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Edmund O'Brien, the soft, sweaty Everyman of so much early-'50s film noir, is cast as a sympathetic bigamist in Ida Lupino's 1953 film; a traveling salesman married to a frigid Joan Fontaine in San Francisco, he lets his loneliness lead him into a Los Angeles relationship with a hard-boiled waitress (Lupino, directing herself to one of her definitive damaged-goods performances). Hollywood's only significant woman filmmaker of the '50s, Lupino scrutinized and often criticized the sexual stereotypes of her time, and O'Brien is no moustache-twirling predator but a fundamentally decent man trapped by his own sense of responsibility. The on-the-fly, location shooting offers a hyperrealistic, street-level depiction of the seamy side of Los Angeles, epitomized by the hideous Chinese restaurant in which Lupino works, while Fontaine is positioned in an artificial soundstage world of penthouses and boardrooms. Defiantly violating any number of social taboos, <I>The Bigamist</I> is sensitive, meticulous filmmaking from a neglected master. <I>--Dave Kehr</I>
Viewer Reviews
If you have read my other reviews, you know I like complex, layered topics. Ida Lupino is now my role model as a filmaker actress. If this film were made today it would be called and "indie". Back then it was called "low budget". Clearly, though, this type of thoughtful, well acted, sensitive, insightful look at a difficult subject is where the indie movement has come from.
This film handles the subject of Bigamy from the standpoint of the story of this "regular guy" who ends up in a situation we come to understand from all its angles, who allows himself to be undone by applying to adopt a child and submitting to the background check.
I can not begin to describe how well this is handled. For a subject that reeks with potential melodrama, every single element is drawn from the characters, and the choices they are making. Joan Fontaine clearly had courage and an eye for thoughtful and controversial subjects (remember, Hitchcock's suspicion was supposed to - from the book story - end in her complicity in her own murder at the hands of her husband). She handles her role here so deftly... the character that we assume to be the "perfect wife" is unveiled as being very myopic and disregarding her marriage.
Ida Lupino gives herself the role of the working girl who asks no questions, so that she doesn't have to hear any lies. Edmund O'Brien, usually cast as the hulking tough, must have been delighted to have this morally complex, but remarkably unconflicted role. This film is simply a revelation. What is lovely is that the film recognizes all the typical things society would say about this situation, but we see the individuals, and they see each other, with human foibles and compassion.
Clearly, too this is one of the precursors to films like "Days of Wine and Roses" and "A Patch of Blue" in the next decade... films that took basically ordinary characters and put them in situations that were frowned on by society. The material is "of it's time," the elements and attitudes toward it would be very different today. But this is simply a masterful moment of film history that stands up to time.
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Bigamist (1953)
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