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DVD A Letter to Three Wives
Before he made the classic All About Eve, writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz made this clever story about three wives who spend an afternoon at a children's picnic mulling over a letter all three had just received, from a woman who says she's just run off with one of their husbands. As the wives--a former farm girl (Jeanne Crain), a radio soap opera writer (Ann Sothern), and a social climber from the wrong side of the tracks (Linda Darnell)--mull over the troubles of their marriages, each begins to think that she's the one left behind. A Letter to Three Wives doesn't have the crackling show-biz milieu of Eve, but it has the same mix of snappy dialogue and topnotch performances. The tone ranges from florid sentiment to unblinking cynicism, yet Mankiewicz holds it all together with smooth, witty direction. Also featuring Kirk Douglas and the great character actress Thelma Ritter. --Bret Fetzer
An Amusing Satire of the Relations Between Men and Women
Three suburban wives board an excursion boat to chaperone an all-day outing with a group of school children. Just before the boat leaves the dock a messenger arrives with a note for the three of them. It's from Addie Ross, an old friend who may not be much of a friend. "Dearest Debby, Lora Mae and Rita," she writes. "As you know, by now, you'll have to carry on without me from here. It isn't easy to leave a town like our town, to tear myself away from you three dear, dear friends who have meant so much to me. And so I consider myself lucky to be able to take with me a sort of memento, something to remind me of the town that was my home, and of my three very dearest friends, who I never want to forget, and I won't. You see, girls, I've run off with one of your husbands. Addie" For the next few hours, unable to get to a telephone, each of the three women can only reflect back on her marriage and wonder if she is the one who has just lost her husband. Only that afternoon when they return will they learn which husband Addie made off with.
There's Deborah Bishop (Jeanne Crain) married to Brad (Jeffrey Lynn). She was a small town girl swept away by a glamorous officer, who now lives a life of country club complacency. She has never lost her insecurity. There's Rita Phipps (Ann Southern) married to George (Kirk Douglas). She and her husband started out as school teachers. He still is but she is carving a successful and well-paid career as a radio soap opera writer. There's Lora Mae Hollingsway (Linda Darnell) married to Porter (Paul Douglas). She wanted away from the other side of the tracks, and managed to make a marriage happen with the town's biggest businessman.
As they flash back, we learn a lot about each one of them and the state of their marriages. Hovering over everything is the presence of Addie. "That's Addie, for you," gushes Brad at one moment. "Always the right thing at the right time. Thoughtful and generous." "Generous to a fault," agrees George. "To a fault. That's Addie," say Rita, making a face. We never meet Addie, never even see her, but she keeps up a voice-over commentary with us that is amusing, a little malicious and wise about the ways of husbands.
By the end of the movie the three couples have learned a good deal about themselves and what's important. Addie indeed had run off with one of the husbands. And nonetheless the movie has a happy and satisfying ending.
Many critics think this is Joseph Mankiewicz' best movie after All About Eve. He won Oscars for best screenplay and best direction (and then repeated the next year for Eve). There are any number of good things about the film. The situation could have degenerated into melodrama but Mankiewicz' writing is so amusing and sophisticated it raises the game. It crackles with commentary on any number of issues, and most are still pertinent today. "I'm a school teacher," George Phipps says. "That's even worse than being an intellectual. School teachers are not only comic they're often cold and hungry in this richest land of ours." Try substituting "television writing" for "radio writing" and hear the zingers snap home as George offends a radio advertising executive. "The purpose of radio writing," he says, "as far as I can see is to prove to the 'masses' that a deodorant can bring happiness, a mouthwash guarantee success and a laxative attract romance." Mankiewicz' brief satire of a radio soap opera, "Another Day in the Notebook of Linda Grey, Registered Nurse," is almost as good as some of Bob and Ray's stuff.
All the actors do fine jobs, but particularly appealing, I think, are Ann Southern as Rita, Linda Darnell as Lora Mae and Paul Douglas as Porter. Unbilled and stealing scenes is Thelma Ritter as the Phipps' maid. Also unbilled but a key element in the movie is Celeste Holm. She does Addie's voice...warm, low pitched, amused, and not to be trusted if you're a wife.
The black and white DVD looks great. There are several extras, including a TV biography of Linda Darnell and a commentary track which includes two of Joseph Mankiewicz' biographers and his son.
They may be grandmothers to the "Desperate Housewives,"
but have things really changed that much since the late Forties?
This gem of a movie is a neglected classic of Americana. "A Letter to Three Wives" uses many of the same talents who made "All About Eve" such a hit a year later, most notably Joseph L. Mankiewicz as the writer/director and Celeste Holm, who is present here in voice only as Addie Ross, the town flirt.
Just as three of the town's more prominent clubwomen are about to depart on a day-long trip with underprivileged children, they receive a note from Addie--she has run off with one of their husbands. They have the whole day to think about which one it was. The Jeanne Crain character is insecure because she left her Iowa roots and married up to one of the town gentry. The Linda Darnell character was "shanty Irish" and married a department store millionaire with whom they share a rather grudging relationship. Ann Sothern plays a radio screenwriter who is trying to maneuver her way out of the second-best neighborhood in town into the very best.
Along with sharp observations about class and social climbing in small towns/suburbia, this film has sharp writing and acting and some genuinely funny moments, including a star turn from Kirk Douglas as a droll English teacher (bet you thought you'd never see HIM in a comedy!). Look for the wonderful Thelma Ritter as the maid from the wrong side of the tracks. All in all, "A Letter to Three Wives" is a great entertainment and a welcome addition to any video collection. I have seen my copy several times and introduced it to several people.
A little soap, a lot of spice
My wife rented this movie and I was ready for something mawkish, sentimental and, well, mostly for women. I was very surprised. This is an incredibly well-written, clever, sophisticated and insightful film that compares the marriages of three archetypal women who have made it to the upper middle class. One got there by being pretty, but fears she doesn't belong because she's a farm girl. One got there by taking a job that pays more than her husband's teaching gig. And one got there by making her (older) boss so frustrated by her unavailability he finally marries her.
All three husbands seem to have been in love with a woman who remains a fantasy figure to us--Addie Ross. We see her hand holding a cigarette on a balcony, a silver frame with her picture lovingly placed atop a piano, and a precious gift of a rare LP. All three wives assume their husbands would leave them for Addie given a chance, as they assess themselves critically and worry about whether they are worthy of their husband's love. It might sound politically suspect in our decade, but the portraits of the women are so three-dimensional, showing them to be far more substantial than they give themselves credit for being--that's really the joke of the movie. They don't like themselves as much as their husbands like them.
This story is told with great intelligence. The structure of the screenplay is unique and effective. The dialogue is amazing; sharp, funny, penetrating. The film was written by Joseph L. Manckiewicz, who later wrote "All About Eve," an acknowledged classic. This one deserves equal billing, and I think I might like it a little better. It is not as well cast as "Eve"--that's probably the only reason it isn't as well known. But there are a few great performances here, most notably Kirk Douglas as the schoolteacher, Ann Sothern as his ambitious wife, and Thelma Ritter as their maid, who also happens to be friends with another character's family.
This silky smooth film noir pits gruff police detective Dana Andrews, stiff and blunt in his street-bred manners, against a cultured columnist and acidic wit (Clifton Webb at his prissiest) in a battle of wits during a murder investigation. The cop is a romantic hiding under a hard-boiled exterior who falls in love with the beautiful victim through the portrait that hangs in her apartment. Gene Tierney, whose heart-shaped face mixes the exotic with the girl next door, brings the poise and calm of a model to her role as the object of every man's gaze and the target of a killer. Laura, handsomely shot in dreamy black and white, is the first and best of Otto Preminger's cool, controlled murder mysteries. In the gritty world of film noir it remains the most refined and elegant example... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Dana Andrews Director(s): Rouben Mamoulian - Otto Preminger DVD Release Date: Released the 15 March 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Leave Her to Heaven is one of the most unblinkingly perverse movies ever offered up as a prestige picture by a major studio in the golden age of Hollywood. Gene Tierney, whose lambent eyes, porcelain features, and sweep of healthy-American-girl hair customarily made her a 20th Century Fox icon of purity, scored an Oscar nomination playing a demonically obsessive daughter of privilege with her own monstrous notion of love. By the time she crosses eyebeams with popular novelist Cornel Wilde on a New Mexico-bound train, her jealous manipulations have driven her parents apart and her father to his grave. Well, no, not grave: Wilde soon gets to watch her gallop a glorious palomino across a red-rock horizon as she metronomically sows Dad's ashes to the winds. Mere screen moments later,... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Gene Tierney - Cornel Wilde Director(s): John M. Stahl DVD Release Date: Released the 22 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Among the earliest writers to set his sights on the director's chair, Preston Sturges brought a frank, unsentimental view of the war between the sexes to his mid-'40s features that exemplify his style, as demonstrated in this prescient 1942 gem. Architect Tom Jeffers (Joel McCrea) and his wife, Gerry (Claudette Colbert), further refine the archetypal Sturges couple--the male embodying strength, idealism, and a certain naivete, the female ultimately stronger, smarter, and (as revealed early on in an astonishing speech by Colbert) clearer-eyed and more pragmatic about the subtext of sex. This giddy shaggy-dog story follows the couple's split, and Gerry's subsequent flight to Palm Beach. This head-snapping frolic is paced by double-entendres and lampooning looks at the very rich, with... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Claudette Colbert - Joel McCrea Director(s): Preston Sturges DVD Release Date: Released the 01 February 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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In the opening sequence of The Letter, director William Wyler delivers a primer on film directing: at a rubber plantation, in the tropical funk of a Malaysian night, the heavy stillness is suddenly broken by shots... and a woman with a gun, descending a staircase. She is the wife of the plantation owner, and the dead man is, ahem, not her husband. Holding the gun so securely is Bette Davis, in one of her greatest performances (her acting of a big revelation, late in the film, is still an astounding piece of emotional fluency). The story is taken from one of those sturdy Somerset Maugham tales that has proved itself in many versions, but this is the keeper; it was nominated for seven Oscars®, including best picture, director, and actress, winning none. Wyler's... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Bette Davis - Herbert Marshall - James Stephenson Director(s): William Wyler DVD Release Date: Released the 11 January 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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Beautifully directed by Edmund Goulding, this sumptuous, and prestigious adaptation of Somerset Maugham's novel was made in 1946 to great acclaim. It's a tale of manipulation, greed, unrequited love, and the eternal search for spiritual enlightenment. Larry Darrell the central character - and played in the movie by the startlingly attractive Tyrone Power - searches for life's meaning in a journey that takes him from the high society of Chicago to the coal mines of France and then on to the mountains of the Himalayas.
Larry Darrell (Power) is a frustrated man. Having just returned to Chicago after World War 1, and having seen his best friend killed, he dodges a future as a stockbroker and instead goes to Paris to seek enlightenment, much to the chagrin of his wealthy and... More Info about this DVD Actor(s): Tyrone Power - Gene Tierney Director(s): Edmund Goulding DVD Release Date: Released the 24 May 2005 Usually ships in 24 hours
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