This review not only MAY, but actually DOES contain spoilers!!!
A husband suspects his wife is thinking about being unfaithful in the future (mostly because she is playing a sad tune by Chopin on their piano, which seems to demand a better explanation than any exposition offered in this 1931 black and white yawner, THE GUARDSMAN). Apparently by the time this movie was made, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne had been married so long that there was little "chemistry" left between them, at least when it came to playing people who were or ever had been in love with each other.
Anyway, the husband hits upon the bright idea that his wife must be yearning for a guy in uniform. Furthermore, he fancies himself such a great actor that he can just throw on anything that resembles a marching band uniform, then strut along the sidewalk under his own window, and his wife will immediately start a fling with him--bamboozled into thinking he is a TOTAL STRANGER. Even at the end of a more or less un-involving 80 minutes--and AFTER sleeping with his own wife with only a fake goatee as a disguise--the husband assumes that his "cheating" wife has NOT caught on to his ruse. He's only enlightened that she sniffed it out from the get-go after she whispers something (too nasty for the studio censors to convey to us) into his ear. Thank goodness this was the only fictional talkie the Lunt family made together, since America got dumbed down enough as it was.
A husband suspects his wife is thinking about being unfaithful in the future (mostly because she is playing a sad tune by Chopin on their piano, which seems to demand a better explanation than any exposition offered in this 1931 black and white yawner, THE GUARDSMAN). Apparently by the time this movie was made, Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne had been married so long that there was little "chemistry" left between them, at least when it came to playing people who were or ever had been in love with each other.
Anyway, the husband hits upon the bright idea that his wife must be yearning for a guy in uniform. Furthermore, he fancies himself such a great actor that he can just throw on anything that resembles a marching band uniform, then strut along the sidewalk under his own window, and his wife will immediately start a fling with him--bamboozled into thinking he is a TOTAL STRANGER. Even at the end of a more or less un-involving 80 minutes--and AFTER sleeping with his own wife with only a fake goatee as a disguise--the husband assumes that his "cheating" wife has NOT caught on to his ruse. He's only enlightened that she sniffed it out from the get-go after she whispers something (too nasty for the studio censors to convey to us) into his ear. Thank goodness this was the only fictional talkie the Lunt family made together, since America got dumbed down enough as it was.