A Letter to Three Wives

A Letter to Three Wives, from 1949, is probably best know today, if at all, because it's an Oscar curiosity--write and director Joseph Mankiewicz won for Best Screenplay and Best Director, but the film did not win Best Picture, losing to All the King's Men (Brokeback Mountain was the last film to do this). It's a sudsy examination of the then still new suburban culture of America, interesting for its anthropological foray into the lives of loves of the upper-middle class.

A narrator, called Addie Ross (voiced by Celeste Holm) describes the town, which is not named, but it's 28 miles from the big city, has a main street, and then a street for the country club set. There's also a street for those on the way or the way down. We meet three of her friends: Debby (Jeanne Crain), Rita (Ann Sothern), and Lora Mae (Linda Darnell), housewives who are spending the day on an outing with underprivileged children. Before they embark on a boat, they are handed a letter from Addie--she has left town, and has run off with one of their husbands.

While the women attempt to keep a good face on the outing, we get a flashback for each one of them. Crain met her rich husband (Jeffrey Lynn) in the navy during the war. She is a farm girl, and in her flashback she is extremely nervous about attending the first dance at the club. Sothern is married to a schoolteacher, Kirk Douglas. She has gotten a job writing for the radio, and has invited the boss over for dinner, where she makes a pretentious fool of herself. Darnell is a young woman from the wrong side of the tracks who is scheming to marry Paul Douglas, her employer and the owner of a chain of drugstores. All the men speak fondly of Addie, who is something of an idealized woman. Smartly, Mankiewicz never lets us see her.

While this is all top-shelf melodrama, Mankiewicz does show great skill with the camera. I marveled at some of the use of deep focus and framing. And some of the dialogue is quite good, especially the segment with Sothern and Douglas. He's an educated man who believes that radio is a sign of the downfall of civilization. God knows what he thought of television.

I was intrigued by Darnell, who was a stunningly beautiful woman. Though she has an exotic, Spanish look, she was a girl from Texas whose mother pushed her into show business. She was one of those actresses whose personal life was for more interesting than anything she played on screen, and she ended up in a downward spiral of alcohol and drugs before dying in a fire in 1965 at the age of 41.