The Bigamist (1953)

Film: The Bigamist (1953)
Stars: Joan Fontaine, Ida Lupino, Edmund O'Brien, Edmund Gwenn
Director: Ida Lupino
Oscar History: No nominations
Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2019 Saturdays with the Stars series, we highlight a different actress of Hollywood's Golden Age.  This month, our focus is on Ida Lupino-click here to learn more about Ms. Lupino (and why I picked her), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

This week we will conclude our month-long look at Ida Lupino.  Lupino has been a discovery for me throughout November, someone who I had heard of but never really followed, and only seen in a smattering of things like her TV spots on Batman and The Twilight Zone.  This month, I've really enjoyed finding an actress that genuinely didn't get her do in her era but was a particularly fine performer who frequently got saddled with less-than-inspiring scripts and storylines that were beneath her talents.  It's difficult to imagine what might have been if Lupino had been, say, given one or two the iconic roles that went to her peers Bette Davis, Joan Crawford, & Barbara Stanwyck, as she was clearly up for a Mildred Pierce or Double Indemnity if it suited her.  Unlike most actresses we've profiled who started to migrate away from screens when the parts got lousy, Lupino took her fate into her own hand, becoming the only significant female film director of the Classical Hollywood era.  We likely could have devoted a whole additional month to Lupino's work behind-the-camera, but this is a series that is focusing on stars in front of the camera, so we will only profile one of her directorial achievements: The Bigamist, a 1953 picture that made history as the first Hollywood studio film to have the same woman both on the screen and in the director's chair.  As a result, Lupino was a trailblazer for women such as Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster, Angelina Jolie, & Diane Keaton who would also star in their own directorial achievements.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film gives Fontaine & Lupino top billing, but the titular and main character is Edmund O'Brien's Harry Graham, a seemingly mild-mannered salesman who is trying to adopt a child with his confident, businesswoman wife Eve (Fontaine).  While investigating them for whether they'd make good parents, the adoption officer Mr. Jordan (Gwenn) discovers that Harry has been leading a double life, and is in fact married to another woman named Phyllis (Lupino), with whom he has a young son.  Repulsed, Mr. Jordan initially wants to contact the police, but Harry insists that he hear his story, and in it we learn that he is a man who was in a stilted marriage, and who genuinely fell in love with another woman, got her pregnant, and then married her to "do the honorable thing."  Despite Mr. Jordan forgiving him, Harry feels the need to come clean, and the film ends with an unusual amount of ambiguity, as while the judge is sympathetic to Harry, he passionately calls out that it will be the women in his life who will decide his ultimate fate, and both women don't show their leanings before the end card scans (and for the record, neither does the judge as we don't know what he'll sentence).  We're left with a lot of heartache, but no answers from Eve or Phyllis if either will take back the man who lied to them, but lied because he genuinely loved them both.

The movie is short, and was a blip of a picture when it was first released.  RKO was initially going to release the film, but dropped out (perhaps because of the movie's touchy subject matter, a trait of Lupino's as a director as she'd also discuss rape in Outrage and serial killers in The Hitch-Hiker, both of which caused her headaches with censors), and so Lupino's production company had to release the film themselves.  Even with several big name stars, that's a tall task for a minor studio with a pioneering director.

It probably helped Lupino, though, in selling the film that it's really good.  The Bigamist handles its subject matter with a calm, level-headed demeanor, proving that while there are complicated feelings and attitudes here, there are no villains here.  Harry never blames Eve's infertility or her ambition for being the reason he stepped out on her (he tries on occasion, but the movie is quick to deter him from blaming his wife for her own career).  The movie also doesn't make Phyllis out to be a harlot or some sort of gold-digger; if anything, they underline that she didn't want to get married and is willing to have their baby as a single mother, not wanting to "marry him that way."  It feels a bit sexist of me to attribute this care to Lupino's gender, the way that she is able to have both Eve and Phyllis be real, fully-fleshed women who have their own pursuits but still are in love with the same man.  After all, other directors like Nicholas Ray were able to have this sort of sensitivity for their characters.  But it's perhaps more telling the way that Lupino handles the behind-the-screen scenes as a director with a long history as an actor, as she makes sure to use her performer's natural gifts (O'Brien's everyman lunkheaded charm, Fontaine's casual elegance, Lupino's brash initial standoffishness) to aid her story.  The Bigamist is proof that Lupino was a damned fine director, and it's hard not to imagine what she would have accomplished given a bigger budget and more sway from the powers-that-be.

Instead, The Bigamist would be Lupino's penultimate directorial achievement, and the last one of the 1950's.  She'd continue starring in the occasional noir film (including While the City Sleeps which we looked at for Rhonda Fleming's month), but mostly migrated to television as an actress and a director.  She'd only make one more feature film, the 1966 Columbia movie The Trouble with Angels with Rosalind Russell & Hayley Mills.  Next month, we will conclude our first season of "Saturdays with the Stars" with one last starlet, a Hollywood actress who also turned her stint in the movies into more memorable success in other fields.