Very well executed

Simple and well acted, it has tension enough to knot the stomach.

How wonderful it is to see this fine actress carry a film and carry it so beautifully.

Unshakable, witty and deeply felt, the film will be paying emotional dividends for a long, long time.

Okay crime drama is helped by the competence of the film makers but hindered by the flat performance of one of the leads.The actual story of a bored housewife seemingly framed for murder by a cad certainly isn't fresh but Frances Gifford is properly anguished in the lead. MGM was giving her the big push at this time but almost immediately after this was completed she was involved in a major car accident in which she sustained severe injuries which effectively ending her career and causing her mental problems for the remainder of her days. Hodiak is also quite good as the rotten Arnelo of the title who manages to shade his rather contemptible character with a bit of conflict. The divine Eve Arden is also in the cast proving once again she's the best friend a leading lady ever had. In addition to being a bright spot she looks sensational in one glamorous outfit after another.Where the film suffers is in the role of the husband portrayed by George Murphy. He could not possibly have played the role more flatly if he actually tried. It's as if everyone else learned their lines and he's reading them off a cue card, badly. He's a major flaw in the film.Shot when noir was in its heyday the film is full of shadows and deep focus. Not a classic of the genre but a decent entry of its type.

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.

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.

FRANCES GIFFORD had one of the best roles of her career as the troubled wife of lawyer GEORGE MURPHY in THE ARNELO AFFAIR, but the director fails to get more than worried looks and a coma-like expression that she wears most of the time--while looking very beautiful. Facially, she bears a strong resemblance here to Donna Reed.She's a woman who feels neglected by her busy husband and falls prey to the flattery of a womanizing man (JOHN HODIAK) who later kills a woman and sets up Gifford as the murderess. Only through the keen detective work of a doggedly determined officer (WARNER ANDERSON) and the gradual realization of her husband that she's been seeing Hodiak, do the deceptive Hodiak's schemes fall apart as clues are unraveled. EVE ARDEN, as a dress designer friend of the heroine, has her usual quips but none of them are particularly inventive.It's strictly a B-film that has all the MGM gloss but falters because of a weak script and a poorly directed actress in the leading role. Miss Gifford gives a bland performance in a role that calls for more than close-ups of a fixed expression.Hodiak is fine as the cunning predator and nine year old DEAN STOCKWELL is lively as Gifford's loving son. GEORGE MURPHY is unable to do much with the role of the neglectful husband, a thankless role that he plays in stolid style.