Welcome to an exciting year-long project here at The Nerdy. 1984 was an exciting year for films giving us a lot of films that would go on to be beloved favorites and cult classics. It was also the start to a major shift in cultural and societal norms, and some of those still reverberate to this day.
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We’re going to pick and choose which movies we hit, but right now the list stands at nearly four dozen.
Yes, we’re insane, but 1984 was that great of a year for film.
The articles will come out – in most cases – on the same day the films hit theaters in 1984 so that it is their true 40th anniversary. All films are also watched again for the purposes of these reviews and are not being done from memory. In some cases, it truly will be the first time we’ve seen them.
This time around, it’s February 3, 1984, and we’re off to see Unfaithfully Yours!
Unfaithfully Yours
It seems as though I am in the midst of the height of Dudley Moore’s popularity in this project. I’ve already done Wholly Moses!, Arthur, Lovesick, and Romantic Comedy, and it looks as though I have two more coming up later this year. There was just a lot of Dudley Moore going on.
And that may be the problem I’m running into. Moore seems to have found one character and he was going to play that one character again and again.
In Unfaithfully Yours he plays Claude Eastman, a composer and conductor who has married an actress (Natassja Kinski) who is significantly younger than him. Thanks to some miscommunications, Claude thinks Daniella is cheating on him, and even worse it’s with his friend Maxmillian (Armand Assante). What follows is your typical sex farce antics, but at an absolute snail’s pace.
This film was originally intended for Peter Sellers, but he had passed away in 1980. I’m not sure he could have saved this film, but it would certainly have been something other than watching Moore play yet another iteration of the same character.
What doesn’t help the film is there is just no chemistry between Moore and Kinski. You never for a moment buy she would have been interested in Claude. There is no spark there, and I lay that at Moore’s feet.
A completely forgettable film that makes me none too happy about having two more of his films to watch this year.
1984 Movie Reviews will return on Feb. 17, 2024 with Blame it on Rio and Footloose!
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