The Arnelo Affair

The best thing I can say about The Arnelo Affair is that it is relatively short. What we have here is yet another picture about a woman getting involved with a shady character because she is feeling neglected by her husband, who is too busy with work to take her out. It is frustrating that filmmakers have to keep falling back on this tired trope in order to mine drama. It fails to garner any real sympathy for the woman involved. She got herself into this mess because of her own bad decisions, and we are expected to feel sorry for her. Francis Gifford does a good job selling her distress but the character she is given to play is a real let-down.

The woman in question is Anne Parkson (Frances Gifford), married to Ted (George Murphy), a Chicago lawyer whose promising career keeps him busy far too often for his wife’s liking. When Ted brings home one of his clients, nightclub owner Tony Arnelo (John Hodiak), a mysterious man who offers her a compliment and a possible job based on her hobby of interior decorating, she eventually takes him up on the offer. This leads her into a series of events that include the murder of his former girlfriend and evidence placed at the scene to frame Anne if she doesn’t agree to leave Ted for him. Anne doesn’t know how to get herself out of this situation but doesn’t dare go to her husband for help lest he discover what she had been entertaining in her mind with the shady Arnelo.

A big fault of this film is that there is just no mystery to help carry the narrative along. We know almost immediately who killed the girlfriend and why, and we are just along for the ride. With no mystery and no sympathetic characters, including the somewhat aloof Ted Parkson, there is nothing to hold our interest. Instead, we have a rather tame film that doesn’t take any real chances to build excitement or an emotional investment. This leaves us a film that is disappointing on nearly all fronts. At least it is fleeting and doesn’t take too long to get to the point. 1947 - 86 minutes