unfaithfully

When Rex Harrison flails about on the podium in the delicious Preston Sturges classic “Unfaithfully Yours,” from 1948, you hear wonderful results from a prerecorded studio orchestra expertly led.

Taken together, these cynical comedies add up to an essential user’s manual for life in these United States, and the Criterion Channel is currently streaming all seven of them, plus 1948’s Unfaithfully Yours, so now is the perfect time to watch them.

Having staged Malleson’s “Yours Unfaithfully,” a polyamorous comedy, and “Conflict,” a political romance, Jonathan Bank, the theater’s artistic director, has now paired two Malleson adaptations of short fiction: Chekhov’s “An Artist’s Story” and Tolstoy’s “What Men Live By.”

Although two of the three American movies he went on to make as a freelancer, “The Sin of Harold Diddlebock” and “Unfaithfully Yours,” have their moments, they fared poorly at the box office.

All were box office failures, though 1948’s “Unfaithfully Yours” has gained in reputation and popularity over the decades.