Ann Dvorak and Walter Pidgeon

I mention these two actors because I recently watched them together in Leslie Fenton's Stronger Than Desire (1939), in which Pidgeon plays a lawyer who defends Dvorak on a murder charge, not knowing that his wife (Virginia Bruce) actually did the shooting, although it turns out in the end Bruce actually missed.  But what the film is about is infidelity, something the film takes seriously in the way current movies often don't, e.g., Little Children, Todd Field and Tom Perrotta's film I watched recently, an amusing satire of suburbia but with cartoonish infidelity.  In Fenton's film Dvorak is at her wit's end with her husband's infidelity, while Bruce has taken up with Dvorak's lounge lizard husband (Lee Bowman) to retaliate against Pidgeon's infidelity.  Dvorak, who was never happy with the film roles she was given, plays her part with sad intensity, while Pidgeon is moving as the husband betrayed, punishment for his own betrayal.  Neither of these actors ever received the parts they deserved, but soared on the rare occasions they did:  Dvorak as the out-manipulated wife in Albert Lewin's Private Affairs of Bel Ami and Pidgeon, at the end of his career, as the solid majority leader in Preminger's Advise and Consent (1962); another rare good part for Dvorak was in Howard Hawks's Scarface (1932) and Pidgeon was quietly effective as the minister in John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, the same year as the Fenton film.