Beloved Infidel ** (1959, Gregory Peck, Deborah Kerr, Eddie Albert) – Classic Movie Review 7562

Famed, all-time-great American author F Scott Fitzgerald’s last, struggling drink-sodden years as a 1930s pre-World War Two Hollywood scriptwriter, and his torrid affair with witty young English columnist Sheilah Graham while his wife Zelda is in an expensive mental institution, are mawkishly filmed as soap opera by director Henry King in the 1959 real-life romantic drama Beloved Infidel.

A stodgy, sticky film is further hampered with chilly, self-conscious, rather hollow performances by Gregory Peck and Deborah Kerr as Fitzgerald and Graham. But on the plus side is the sumptuous, costly looking Jerry Wald Productions/ Company of Artists/ 20th Century Fox production, with gorgeous cinematography by Leon Shamroy and a sharp view of Tinseltown as the film’s main virtues.

It is based on Graham’s book (with Gerold Frank), so it is obviously a biased account. How one longs for Scott Fitzgerald’s own screenplay instead of the one we have here by Sy Bartlett.

Also in the cast are Eddie Albert, Philip Ober, Herbert Rudley, Karin Booth, Ken Scott, John Sutton, Buck Class, A Cameron Grant, Jonathan Hole and Cindy Ames.

It might have been even poorer if original stars Audrey Hepburn and Mel Ferrer had filmed it.

© Derek Winnert 2018 Classic Movie Review 7562

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