Intcatinfo A Masterpiece!

Nayan Gough A great movie, one of the best of this year. There was a bit of confusion at one point in the plot, but nothing serious.

Lidia Draper Great example of an old-fashioned, pure-at-heart escapist event movie that doesn't pretend to be anything that it's not and has boat loads of fun being its own ludicrous self.

Nicole I enjoyed watching this film and would recommend other to give it a try , (as I am) but this movie, although enjoyable to watch due to the better than average acting fails to add anything new to its storyline that is all too familiar to these types of movies.

JohnHowardReid Hollywood certainly lived up to its Hollyweird reputation when Mr. Arch Oboler started the 3-D revolution in 1952 with "Bwana Devil". In fact, the very last person in the world you would expect to become involved in a process that was one hundred per cent visual, was Arch Oboler. Mr. Oboler was primarily a radio writer. He had virtually no visual sense whatever. And a good example of Oboler at his worst is Metro- Goldwyn-Mayer's "The Arnelo Affair" (1947). You don't need to actually view the movie. You can close your eyes and Oboler will tell you everything that's going on, courtesy of off-screen narration and instant information dialogue. Aside from Eve Arden (admittedly she has the best of the wordy screenplay), the acting, led by frozen-faced Frances Gifford and stiff-as-a-dummy George Murphy, is almost as bad as the over-lit sets and the incredibly store-windows wardrobe.

RanchoTuVu The story of a woman (Frances Gifford) whose marriage to a successful attorney (George Murphy) leaves her feeling under-appreciated. When she catches the eye of a client who owns an upscale night club (John Hodiak) and, as a means of getting to know her on more intimate terms, offers her a job to redo the interior decorating on his apartment, she eventually accepts, seemingly knowing what this would lead to. Married with a cute son (Dean Stockwell), she realizes she has everything to lose in the Arnelo Affair, especially when Tony Arnelo turns out to be a womanizer who is not above knocking off an interfering ex-lover, the evidence of which points to Gifford, thus adding considerably to her already heightened sense of anxiety, which seems to put her in a state of semi-shock. The affair goes on within her social circle which is captured in a great scene in Arnelo's night club after the murder, with Eve Arden, who is Gifford's friend, noticing something going on between Arnelo and Gifford. Murphy is pretty good as Gifford's husband who realizes she went astray due to his lack of attention. Gifford is worth seeing for her part as she gives in to her desire for Arnelo all the while racked with doubt and guilt and then fear of losing everything dear to her over doing so. And Hodiak turns in a great role as Arnelo, with exceeding smoothness and subtlety.

bkoganbing The Arnelo Affair has John Hodiak in the title role of a nightclub owner with tax troubles getting an affair going with his lawyer's wife Frances Gifford.Frances is a woman with an itch and Hodiak is quite willing to scratch it. But as it turns out he's doing a bit of two timing himself on actress Joan Woodbury. Later on when Woodbury is murdered Hodiak is on the short list of Detective Warner Anderson suspects, but so is Gifford.This film is a great example of the Code strangling the creativity of film making. Today it would be quite explicitly filmed with proper sex scenes in their place. George Murphy played Gifford's husband and his is a strangely underwritten role. If I were doing the film and being that Hodiak is having tax troubles, when Murphy does find out there are hundreds of creative ways he could have done Hodiak good and proper.Eve Arden is in the film in an Eve Arden part. Though in this one she's sporting a hint of jealousy that Hodiak isn't giving her a tumble. That too should have been brought out more.The Arnelo Affair if someone decides to remake it has lots of room for improvement.

Benoît A. Racine (benoit-3) This is not the worst film ever made. Just one the most confused crime stories ever to reach a movie screen before the advent of Quentin Tarantino. A lovely "ordinary" housewife (Frances Gifford) - who also dresses like Greta Garbo's understudy - finds herself fatally attracted to a fiery-eyed Italian greaseball (John Hodiak) who owns a nightclub. Melodrama ensues... Her husband is a nice, reliable, hunk of manhood, that any woman (of that time) would have given her eyeteeth to bed (George Murphy). Her adorably precocious, pretty and curly-haired nine year old son who has recurring nightmares about chocolate (!) and whose psychological problems provide comic relief (!!) is played by Dean Stockwell. She has a devoted Black maid and her best spinster friend is an amusing wisecracking clotheshorse in eye-popping outfits (played by Eve Arden) who can sniff out "man trouble" a mile away.So what's wrong with this picture? Everything. The styles are confused. It's basically a Harlequin-type women's novel (also known as women's porn) that would like to pretend it's also a murder mystery film noir and witty enough to be an Oscar Wilde adaptation by Joseph L. Mankiewicz - with just a touch of "Madame Bovary" thrown in at the last minute for good measure. But the literary pretensions are not what sinks this turkey. Many other elements contribute to the downfall. The fact that the morality of the times transpires at every turn, for instance... The heroine is not guilty of adultery, just of having flirted with the idea of having a life, a career and aspirations to happiness of her own, outside the domination of her boring, all-knowing husband and the prevalent "feminine mystique" which defines her persona, while also lusting for the exoticism of a fling with pencil-mustachioed impudent male Latino flesh. The powder compact she leaves behind at the scene of the crime actually shows more signs of life and expression than she ever does. The Tony Arnelo character is really guilty of being a dirty no-good wop from the wrong side of the tracks in spite of his stated (uppity) obsession for beauty and his highly suspicious fixation on his mother. You have to ask: Is this why he is attracted to this woman? And what about the Dean Stockwell character's equally ambiguous attraction to his own mother? Ms. Gifford treats her Black housemaid worse than any Southern belle would a plantation slave. The couple's friends (as revealed in the nightclub conversation) are all shallow, blasé, effete, snobbish and decadent, which was considered the mark of true intellect (a.k.a. homosexuality and/or communism) in Hollywood circles in those days. Their idea of small talk is simply hair-raising. The gangster's girlfriend is an actress (i.e. another transgressive working female, a.k.a. a whore, which is the only alternative to being a "mother" and a "dried-up old maid" in this universe) who deserves to die and whose only excuse for living is making trouble for everybody else. All non-procreative females are, after all, expandable. The Central Casting police detective chews gum continuously and is thrown leftover lines from every Bogart picture ever made. This is also the film that put a definitive end to Eve Arden's career as a serious character actress playing funny women and turned her into a prop and the role model for drag queens everywhere, i.e. a frustrated old maid milliner whose financial independence allows her to indulge in extravagant dress, barely controlled nymphomania, tough-girl mannerisms bordering on lesbianism and unfunny deadpan cracks that simply overstay their welcome for lack of substance and meaning, double, single or otherwise.The men walk like they are afraid to dent or crease the architecturally daunting square-shouldered suits they are expected to macho-posture in and the women are made breathless and dizzy from the repression three-way girdles exercise on their vital organs and cute hats on their brains. The film is without tension and unfurls at a morbid and soporific pace. By the time the Frances Gifford character turns off that horrifically elaborate chrome and lucite monstrosity of a lamp at her bedside, you really wish to God the sleeping pills will take effect and this nightmare will end, even though she has sleep-walked in a near-comatose state all through the film.