Unfaithfully Yours (1948 Film) - Production

Production

Preston Sturges wrote the original screen story for Unfaithfully Yours in 1932 – the idea came to him when a melancholy song on the radio influenced him while working on writing a comic scene. Sturges shopped the script to Fox, Universal and Paramount who all rejected it during the 1930s.

In 1938, Sturges envisioned Ronald Colman playing de Carter, and later initially wanted Frances Ramsden – who was introduced in Sturges' 1947 film The Sin of Harold Diddlebock – to play Daphne; but by the time casting for the film began, he wanted James Mason for the conductor and Gene Tierney for his wife.

Studio attorneys were worried about the similarity between Sturges' character Sir Alfred de Carter, a famous English conductor, and the real-life famous English conductor Sir Thomas Beecham; they warned Sturges to tone down the parallels, but the similarity was noted in some reviews anyway. (Beecham's grandfather was Thomas Beecham, a chemist who invented Beecham's Pills, a laxative. It is speculated that Sturges named his character de Carter after Carter's Little Liver Pills.)

Unfaithfully Yours, which had the working titles of "Unfinished Symphony" and "The Symphony Story", went into production on February 18, 1948, and wrapped in mid April of that year. By 28 June the film had already been sneak-previewed, with a runtime of 127 minutes, but the film's release was delayed to avoid any backlash from the suicide of actress Carole Landis in July. It was rumored that Landis and Rex Harrison had been having an affair, and that she committed suicide when Harrison refused to get a divorce and marry her. Harrison discovered Landis' body in her home.

The film premiered in New York City on November 5, 1948, and went into general release on December 10. The Los Angeles premiere was on December 14. It was marketed with the tagline: Will somebody "get her" tonite?

In February 1949, after the film was released, William D. Shapiro, who claimed to be an independent film producer, sued Fox and Sturges with a claim that the story of the film was plagiarized from an unproduced screen story by Arthur Hoerl, which Shapiro had been intending to produce. The connection was supposedly composer Werner Heymann, who frequently worked with Sturges and whom Shapiro had interviewed to be the music director on his film.

The studio-quality recorder that cut phonograph records seen in the film is similar to ones used to secretly tape Horowitz and Benny Goodman during their concerts at Carnegie Hall and on the NBC Radio studios at Rockefeller Center. These rough cuts were later mastered into LPs which came to be considered classics. Arthur Rubinstein owned three of these devices. They were difficult to use and required experienced technicians.