The Bigamist (1953)
There's something genuinely rare about The Bigamist. A film from 1953, made under the watchful eye of the Production Code, about a man who marries two women and somehow manages to make you feel sorry for him rather than furious at him. That's either a neat trick or a troubling one, depending on how you look at it, and honestly, I'm still not entirely sure which.
Ida Lupino directs, which is itself worth pausing on. Women helming studio pictures in Hollywood's golden age were vanishingly rare, and Lupino was one of the precious few. She also takes a role in front of the camera here, playing one of the two wives, which gives the whole project an unusual intimacy. You get the sense she cared about this story, that she saw something in it worth telling carefully. And she does tell it carefully. This isn't a lurid scandal picture. It's a quiet character study about loneliness, compromise, and the quietly desperate ways people reach for connection when they feel unseen.
Edmond O'Brien plays the travelling salesman at the centre of it all, and he's very good. He brings a worn-down, hangdog quality to the role that keeps the character from reading as a simple villain. His situation is presented almost sympathetically, which is either the film's boldest move or its most evasive one. Joan Fontaine and Lupino, as the two wives, offer contrasting portraits of women navigating love and disappointment, and both feel grounded in a way that the era's more theatrical performances often didn't.
Lupino's direction is economical throughout. The film runs just over 80 minutes and doesn't waste a frame on melodrama when it can spend that time on faces and silences instead. As a piece of mid-century craftsmanship, it's polished and assured. I reviewed The Hitch-Hiker a while back, another Lupino film from the same year, and the same controlled, unfussy sensibility is all over that one too. She clearly had a distinct voice, and it's a shame her directing career didn't stretch further.
But here's where I have to be honest about what The Bigamist isn't, because competence and genuine depth aren't the same thing. The film raises real questions about fidelity, responsibility, societal expectation, and the gap between the life you're living and the one you're performing. It raises them, and then it sort of nods at them and moves on. The moral complexity is gestured at rather than inhabited. I kept waiting for the film to push harder, to really get inside why this man made the choices he made, to interrogate the structures around marriage and gender that shaped those choices. It never quite does.
The ending is where this frustration lands most squarely. After an hour or so of quietly intriguing ambiguity, the film opts for a tidy, Code-compliant resolution that deflates rather than satisfies. Loose ends are left dangling. Emotional arcs feel clipped. The final note lands with a shrug when it should land with something far more complicated. It's the difference between a film that raises difficult questions and one that actually sits with them.
Fans of Joan Fontaine will find this an interesting companion piece to her earlier work. I've always thought she had a particular gift for playing women who absorb others' failures and keep quietly standing, and she does that here too, though I'd point anyone curious towards Rebecca to see that quality at its most fully realised.
Three stars. The Bigamist is worth your time if you're drawn to classic Hollywood drama, to Lupino's work, or to films that take a sideways angle on the era's domestic mythology. It's well-made and well-acted and genuinely unusual for when and where it was produced. I just wish it had been brave enough to follow its own premise all the way through to somewhere uncomfortable. It gets to the edge, looks down, and steps back. A more interesting film would have jumped.
Rating: ★★★ | Year: 1953 | Watched: 2026-05-29
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