Product Details

• Format: Black & White, NTSC
• Rated: NR (Not Rated)
• Number of tapes: 1
• Studio: First Look Home Ente
• VHS Release Date: January 27, 1998
• Run Time: 80 minutes
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (16 customer reviews)
• ASIN: 6304753357
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #484,734 in Movies & TV (See Top 100 in Movies & TV)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com essential video

Edmund O'Brien, the soft, sweaty Everyman of so much early-'50s film noir, is cast as a sympathetic bigamist in Ida Lupino's 1953 film; a traveling salesman married to a frigid Joan Fontaine in San Francisco, he lets his loneliness lead him into a Los Angeles relationship with a hard-boiled waitress (Lupino, directing herself to one of her definitive damaged-goods performances). Hollywood's only significant woman filmmaker of the '50s, Lupino scrutinized and often criticized the sexual stereotypes of her time, and O'Brien is no moustache-twirling predator but a fundamentally decent man trapped by his own sense of responsibility. The on-the-fly, location shooting offers a hyperrealistic, street-level depiction of the seamy side of Los Angeles, epitomized by the hideous Chinese restaurant in which Lupino works, while Fontaine is positioned in an artificial soundstage world of penthouses and boardrooms. Defiantly violating any number of social taboos, The Bigamist is sensitive, meticulous filmmaking from a neglected master. --Dave Kehr

Review

The title character is Edmond O'Brien, a lonely travelling salesman who ends up married to two women, Eve (Joan Fontaine)--and Phyllis (Ida Lupino). Eventually, of course, the truth comes out. Directed by costar Ida Lupino, The Bigamist manages to evoke a certain amount of sympathy for Edmond O'Brien, without in any way advocating or excusing his lifestyle. It's worth noting that an Italian film made around the same time, also titled The Bigamist, is a comedy. --Hal Erickson, All Movie Guide

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars My Hat is Off to Ida Lupino! Thoughtful, Real portrayal of a difficult topic., March 28, 2006

By 

J. Kara Russell "Actress/Artist/Musician/Writer" (Hollywood - the cinderblock Industrial cubicle) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bigamist [VHS] (VHS Tape)

If you have read my other reviews, you know I like complex, layered topics. Ida Lupino is now my role model as a filmaker actress. If this film were made today it would be called and "indie". Back then it was called "low budget". Clearly, though, this type of thoughtful, well acted, sensitive, insightful look at a difficult subject is where the indie movement has come from.

This film handles the subject of Bigamy from the standpoint of the story of this "regular guy" who ends up in a situation we come to understand from all its angles, who allows himself to be undone by applying to adopt a child and submitting to the background check.

I can not begin to describe how well this is handled. For a subject that reeks with potential melodrama, every single element is drawn from the characters, and the choices they are making. Joan Fontaine clearly had courage and an eye for thoughtful and controversial subjects (remember, Hitchcock's suspicion was supposed to - from the book story - end in her complicity in her own murder at the hands of her husband). She handles her role here so deftly... the character that we assume to be the "perfect wife" is unveiled as being very myopic and disregarding her marriage.

Ida Lupino gives herself the role of the working girl who asks no questions, so that she doesn't have to hear any lies. Edmund O'Brien, usually cast as the hulking tough, must have been delighted to have this morally complex, but remarkably unconflicted role. This film is simply a revelation. What is lovely is that the film recognizes all the typical things society would say about this situation, but we see the individuals, and they see each other, with human foibles and compassion.

Clearly, too this is one of the precursors to films like "Days of Wine and Roses" and "A Patch of Blue" in the next decade... films that took basically ordinary characters and put them in situations that were frowned on by society. The material is "of it's time," the elements and attitudes toward it would be very different today. But this is simply a masterful moment of film history that stands up to time.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Lupino's best, a downbeat melodrama of loneliness worthy of Sirk, September 20, 2009

By 

Muzzlehatch (the walls of Gormenghast) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bigamist [VHS] (VHS Tape)

Ida Lupino's second 1953 directorial effort (her first was the nightmarish road-movie/film-noir "The Hitch-hiker") is at first glance an entirely different affair -- pun intended -- charting the investigation of San Francisco adoption agent Mr. Jordan (Edmund Gwenn) into the background of a childless couple who wish to become parents, Harry and Eve Graham (Joan Fontaine and Edmond O'Brien). For the first couple of reels, the investigation is the story, as Jordan discovers several rather suspicious items about the husband, a traveling salesman who makes quite regular trips to Los Angeles. Suspecting that all is not as it seems, Jordan eventually follows Graham to L.A. and discovers that he goes under a different name, and doesn't seem to register at any of the typical hotels. We know from the title what is going to happen, and sure enough when Jordan tracks Graham to a small house out in the suburbs, a baby cries, and Graham's big lie unravels....

Yes, Graham has another wife, Phyllis Martin (Ida Lupino), a waitress and the mother of his baby boy. He admits it all to Jordan, admits that he fell in love with Martin because she offered something that his career-woman wife and partner Eve could not -- real love, need, romance. Most of the rest of the film is a flashback, detailing the last year or so of Graham's life; probably the best part of the film lies in the next couple of reels, O'Brien showing real pathos as the lonely husband, the romantic and would-be lover whose marriage has become a business arrangement, wandering a large and unfriendly, alien city -- Lupino does a beautiful job of conveying the desolation and unfriendliness of Los Angeles -- and finally striking up a tentative friendship and would-be romance with a tart-mouthed waitress from Pennsylvania who's still dreaming of a better life. Eventually that friendship becomes a one-night stand on Graham's birthday that results in the unexpected, but not unwanted child, and when back in San Francisco Eve decides to finally look into adopting after 8 years of childlessness, Graham realizes that difficult choices are closing in, though he avoids them until caught.

What's most striking about The Bigamist to me is how it avoids taking an easy way out, avoids making any of the characters into villains or clichés, though Fontaine's Eve is a little scantily fleshed out and is probably the least likable character of the trio; the film really comes off as an indictment of the career and capitalist-based world, of the conflicts between money and real joy that we face in this society, and it nearly achieves mastery in its exploration of these themes through the great location work and fine acting (especially by O'Brien) -- until a weak and fairly slapdash moralizing courtroom ending which boils it down all too simply. Still, for the most part this is a beautifully worked out look at the challenges people face alone and together, and a bravely realistic portrait of a crime that was barely talked about in an era where even divorce was often taboo. Though I haven't yet seen all of her films, I suspect this is Lupino's best; and though stylistically it couldn't be more different, in theme and feeling it is rivaled in its era in American film only by Douglas Sirk. Kino VHS rental.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Avoids Soap Opera, November 13, 2005

By 

Douglas Doepke (Claremont, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Bigamist [VHS] (VHS Tape)

One of a handful of low budget films from pioneering woman film-maker Ida Lupino. Known mainly for her soulful screen portrayals in the 1940's of downtrodden women, she managed this career turn in the early 50's, a remarkable feat given a production industry so thoroughly dominated by men.

Her best known feature is the chilling and critically acclaimed account of serial killer Emmet Myers, called "The Hitchiker". But all her films are marked by an earnest concern for the lives of ordinary people, whether menaced in extreme circumstance or in more ordinary circumstance by the unwed pregnancy of "The Outrage". Moreover, at a time when studios were fending off small screen television with big budget technicolor, she gamely persisted with the small, the intimate and the unglamorous.

"The Bigamist" remains an oddity, very much an artifact of its time, but worth viewing for its sensitive handling of male loneliness, a topic for which macho Hollywood has never had much time. The acting is first-rate from a trio of de-glamorized Hollywood professionals, including the poignant Lupino; there's also Edmond O'Brien in a low-key, nuanced portrayal of a man trapped by emotions, showing once again what a fine, intelligent performer he was. Notice how elliptically the pregnancy is presented and how subtly Fontaine's career woman is projected into the breakup. Both are very much signs of that time. Although the subject matter may have tempted, the results never descend into bathos or soap-opera, even if final courtroom scene appears stagy and anti-climatic. All in all, it's a very well wrought balancing act.

Lupino's reputation should not rest on gender. This film as well as so many of her others demonstrate what a versatile and unusual talent she was, whether in front of the camera or behind. Too bad, she never got the recognition from an industry to which she contributed so much.