Joseph L. Mankiewicz turns a small-town guessing game into a shrewd, talky comedy about money and marriage. The first of its three stories is thin and it explains itself too often, but Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas make the third one worth the whole evening.
Joseph L. Mankiewicz likes people who talk, and A Letter to Three Wives is built so that they can. Three women in a well-off town set off for a day’s charity outing with a boatload of children, and a letter is handed to them at the landing. It is from Addie Ross, a woman they all know and all keep an eye on, and it says she has left town that morning with one of their husbands. It does not say which. The film then goes back over each marriage in turn while the boat is out, and the result is shrewd, funny and occasionally sour, better in its second half than its first, and worth an evening for anyone who likes to hear a script that has been worked at.
Mankiewicz wrote it himself, from a novel by John Klempner, and the cleverest decision is one of absence. Addie never appears. We hear her, in Celeste Holm’s amused, needling narration, and we see the other women turn their heads when her car goes by, but she is never on screen. She is the woman every husband compares his wife to and every wife compares herself to, and the film is right to keep her as a voice. J. Watson Webb Jr. cuts back to the boat between the three stories, briefly, so that the guessing never quite stops.
The first story is the weakest. Deborah (Jeanne Crain) is a farm girl who met Brad (Jeffrey Lynn) in the navy and now has to face the country club in a dress she already knows is wrong. Crain plays the nerves well enough, but the episode is mostly about her being frightened of a room, and Lynn is given so little that we struggled afterwards to describe him. It is the necessary set-up, and it feels like it.
The second is sharper. Rita (Ann Sothern) writes radio serials and her husband George (Kirk Douglas) teaches school for a fraction of her salary, and the story turns on a dinner for her sponsor, Mrs Manleigh (Florence Bates), and the husband who trails after her (Hobart Cavanaugh). Sothern is quick and dry and manages to make a woman apologising for her own success look like a woman with a spine. Douglas gets the speech Mankiewicz plainly wanted to make himself, about what radio advertising does to the people who listen to it. It is a good speech. It is also a speech, and the film stops so that he can deliver it.
The third story is the one people remember, and they are right. Lora Mae (Linda Darnell) lives with her mother (Connie Gilchrist) and sister Babe (Barbara Lawrence) in a house so close to the railway that the crockery jumps every time a train goes past, and she has decided to marry Porter Hollingsway (Paul Douglas), who owns the department store where she works. The courtship is a negotiation, and both parties know it. We laughed at the first train and were not laughing by the third, because Darnell does her lipstick through it without a flicker and Arthur Charles Miller holds on her face while the house shakes, and what we were watching was a woman who had decided never to live like this again. Paul Douglas, in his first film, plays Porter as a loud man who knows exactly what he is buying and is ashamed to want it. Kay Nelson dresses Lora Mae in clothes that climb a rung with each scene.
Miller shoots the two houses so that the difference is the point: the Finney kitchen is cramped and lit from one lamp, the Hollingsway place is all polished floor and empty air. Alfred Newman’s music is used mostly to carry us in and out of the flashbacks, and it does so without pushing. What pushes is the writing. Mankiewicz cannot leave a scene until someone has said what it meant, and by the last half hour we could feel the lesson being written on the board.
One critic has called the film conformist, and we half agree. It mocks these marriages for a hundred minutes and then, we will not say how, decides they are worth keeping. A year later Mankiewicz made All About Eve, which does the same trick with a colder eye and a better villain. This is the rehearsal, and a good one. At 103 minutes it is brisk, and it is best watched with someone who will make a different guess about the husband than you do.
