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Originally, the focus of my new book Unfaithful was to be Hollywood adultery films produced between 1930 and 1960. But the scope of the book gradually expanded. For certain, you cannot leave the French or the Italian out of a serious discussion of adultery films. And many important adultery films were made outside of 1930 to 1960.
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The criteria that I set for selecting films was not restrictive, but I still found myself rejecting films from consideration. Star 80 (1983), a biopic about Playboy model Dorothy Stratten, has an adultery element to its plot. Stratten left her husband, Paul Snider, for film director Peter Bogdanovich, which incited the emotionally unstable Snider to murder her. But the audience is shown nothing of the affair. Stratten simply tells Snider that she is leaving him. Snider goes berserk and shoots her. The film ends. The director, Bob Fosse, may have avoided dramatizing the affair because Bogdanovich threatened to sue Fosse if he portrayed him negatively. Did it really matter? Fosse could hardly have objected to Bogdanovich seducing a naive young bride when he, himself, had multiple affairs with young women during his 27-year marriage to Gwen Verdon. Besides, Fosse was mostly interested in Snider.
I didn't include Notorious (1946) in the book. Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) is a post-war spy who marries a Nazi emigre, Alexander Sebastian (Claude Rains), to uncover a plot by Nazi survivors to build an atomic bomb. In truth, she loves her suave handler, T.R. Devlin (Cary Grant). This creates a love triangle with a husband, a wife, and another man. But it is not an adultery film. A spy and her surveillance target is not, technically, a bride and groom. Anyone who watches the film understands Alicia's mission and has no expectation of faithfulness on her part. Hitchcock called the film "the story of a woman sold for political purposes into sexual enslavement."
I am confident that readers of Unfaithful will agree with my choices.
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