Review: Beloved Infidel

The 1930s Hollywood romance between columnist Sheilah Graham (Deborah Kerr) and F. Scott Fitzgerald (Gregory Peck), the intelligent, and once well-respected, but now sloshed writer whose career (and life) she attempts to rescue. However, his alcoholic struggle and unhappy time as a screenwriter in Hollywood, make this one very tumultuous relationship.

Two genuinely talented stars cast to their disadvantage help derail this frankly disappointing and unconvincing Henry King (“The Song of Bernadette”, “Twelve O’Clock High”) film from 1959. They actually have good romantic chemistry with one another (and these are the film’s best scenes), but Peck (who is one of the all-time greats as far as I’m concerned) is out of his depth playing a drunk in largely caricatured fashion, perhaps to suggest a loss of dignity, but it’s poorly conveyed and actually rather sanitised, even for the time. The equally well-regarded Kerr is simply too prim and proper to convince as a rather blunt gossip queen, she’s a lady through and through (For once, I might have actually suggested the casting of Ava Gardner or at least Gloria Grahame!).

It also never convinces in its Hollywood scenes, oddly enough, nor in any period detail (I wasn’t even sure what era this was until I researched the film afterwards!). So I bought the romance but not the rest of the story nor the actors, and that’s simply not good enough by a long shot.

Furthermore, by focusing solely on this (rather brief) excerpt from Fitzgerald’s life (i.e. The End), it makes for a really dreary, uninteresting experience that makes the unenlightened like me (I’ve heard of “The Great Gatsby”, of course, but my only exposure to the man was the appalling film version of his last work “The Last Tycoon”), question why this old drunken fool is so worthy of my time. This rather phony film certainly wasn’t worth my time, A-grade leads or not. How the hell did such a failure get made by such well-respected people?

The disastrously artificial screenplay is by Sy Bartlett (“Twelve O’Clock High”, “The Big Country”, “Cape Fear”, and “Pork Chop Hill”, all much better Peck films), from the book by Sheilah Graham herself, and Gerold Frank (“The Boston Strangler”).

Rating: C