Letter to Three Wives

Initially, Joseph Mankiewicz's script exploring mid-century marriage was entitled a "A Letter to Five Wives" -- this would have been an epic film, the Hamlet of matrimonial misery, but, of course, the studio bosses vetoed the idea.  Mankiewicz streamlined the scenario to a letter to four wives, but, again, the producers thought this excessive and, so, the least interesting couple was surgically excised from the script, resulting in A Letter to Three Wives, the movie that Mankiewicz directed from his screenplay and that was released in 1949.  The picture is a good example of a post-War prestige film, made with well-known actors speaking intelligently scripted dialogue and propelled by a killer premise:  in a small suburban town, the local femme fatale has run off with someone's husband, rather sadistically posting the titular letter to three married women of her acquaintance so that each can spend the day on tenterhooks wondering if the erring husband is her own.  By this contrivance, which is unmotivated and makes no narrative sense, Mankiewicz sets up a series of flashbacks in which three marriages can be anatomized, rather in the nature of a "compare and contrast" essay in some infernal test on marital mores in 1948.  Lest the enterprise become too academic and abstract, the cruel home-wrecker's reticence about the identity of the man that she has misappropriated provides the film with a mildly interesting element of suspense -- the audience doesn't learn the identity of the erring husband until the last five minutes or so.  A Letter to Three Wives won several Oscars and it's certainly entertaining and witty.  It also embodies a number of ideas about marriage and the relationships between the sexes that may be worth considering, at least, by members of our rapidly greying cohort of baby-boomers whose parents, I think, lived (more or less) in accord with the norms portrayed in the film.  The dream of a rational, gracious suburban life with women happily serving as home-makers and men employed as breadwinners is the film's backdrop and the social assumption on which it is based -- although the picture also is honest enough to admit that the dream was never really viable even when shared by much of the population.  In effect, time has made the film its own harshest critic with respect to the once-conventional notions of marriage and male-female relations that it expresses.  Future generations, one supposes, may have trouble even watching a picture of this sort since the conventions that underlay the melodrama are so obsolete.  Or, perhaps, not.

The film is narrated by the ghostly Addie Ross, the woman who has absconded with one of three heroines' husbands.  We never see her although there are glimpses of men interacting with her at the edge of the social gatherings shown in the film.  Every available man in town seems to be smitten with her -- she offers to each a glimpse of the bliss that is missing in his own marriage.  (Although, the film's morale seems to be that this bliss is wholly illusory, as evanescent as the unseen narrator, who whispers aphorisms about the town and its people in the breathy voice that Marilyn Monroe was later to use in singing "Happy Birthday" to JFK.)  After an ingenious and satirical prologue, Addie vanishes (until she utters an envoi to the film in the ghostly last shot), and we are introduced to the three marriages under consideration.  Brad and Debra Bishop are both veterans of World War II.  Brad comes from a wealthy family and is so wholly bland and unctuous that he doesn't register at all in the film -- if he were to vanish, no one would miss him.  His wife is a girl from a humble background and she doesn't really fit into the rather insular suburb said to be "28 minutes" from the Big City (apparently New York) by commuter train.  Rita and George Phipps are less well-off than Brad and Debra, but still, by modern standards, princes of their domain with a spacious house and a servant.  (The picture reminds us that people in certain parts of the country were wonderfully prosperous after World War Two and that, even, middle class families lived in comfort unimaginable in our more straitened and unhappy time.)  Rita writes radio scripts to the dismay of her husband who is a High School teacher, although probably employed in a private Prep School.  Kirk Douglas is cast against type, playing a sort of milquetoast character interested in Shakespeare and Brahms.  Finally, Porter and Lora Mae are mismatched and unhappy.  Porter is a Babbitt, a small-town entrepreneur, about 20 years older than his wife, a former employee whom he has sexually harassed into making a marriage of convenience with him -- as is often true in relations between the sexes, Porter thought he was the aggressor in the relationship; but he was wrong.  Lora Mae comes from a very poor family, headed by a loud, hard-drinking widow with her two sluttish daughters, who live in a flat located right on a railroad line that trembles as if to collapse when trains go roaring by.  Lora Mae is beautiful, hard as nails, and she knows what she wants --that is, a life of  privilege and so she has schemed to seduce Porter into marrying her.  But the couple is unhappy.  Porter bullies the girl and she acts with disdain toward him.  Each of the three husbands is unaccountably absent on the day that the film documents.  The three women meet and take a ferry up the Hudson with about four-hundred boys and girls for some kind of picnic.  There's no telephone and so the three heroines can't call to check on their hubbies.  Just before they board the ferry, a messenger hands them Addie Ross' letter, declaring that she has stolen one of their husbands, but not naming the man.  The three women spend the day at the State Park on the Hudson in a state of suspense.  And sounds that they hear trigger for them, flashbacks as to the dynamics of their marriages.  Each woman is granted one extended flashback that is designed to lay bare the inner workings of her marriage and supply a motive, as it were, to her misgivings about whether her husband has been the one chosen by the fatal Addie.  It's schematic but, actually, very effective as a plot device.  Debra recalls a particularly embarrassing debut that she made at the town's Country Club. (The story is set on the "first Saturday of May" when the local Country Club has its annual prom.)  Rita remembers a disastrous supper party with her boss, the formidable Mrs. Manly, resulting in a terrible quarrel about her work outside the home -- she writes for the monstrous Mrs. Manly's radio show, really just a string of bromides to sell the advertising which is her true interest.  Lora Mae's memory chronicles her mercenary scheming to entrap the hapless Porter who has been married before and doesn't want to repeat the experience.  This part of the film is a virtual museum of devices used by women in that era to trap men into matrimony and it's both amusing and scary at the same time.  Thelma Ritter, who is always great, plays Rita and George's maid and cook -- she's admonished not to announce supper with her familiar "soup's on" but forgets and does so anyway.  Everyone consumes vast amounts of alcohol and a scene at the Country Club dance in which poor Debra gets staggering drunk is so well-designed that it made me feel a little tipsy watching it.

I'm a member of the generation raised in the shadow of the notions of marriage expressed by this film and I can attest that it's true enough.  Unlike a picture by Bergman or Cassavetes, the horrible aspects of marriage are expressed with wit and resignation -- there's no rage in the picture.  The conventions that the film exploits soured into rage twenty years later.  It's an estimable picture and very entertaining.  The best thing in the picture is a single shot showing a forlorn gazebo empty in the park where the picnic took place, a patient-looking and resigned worker sweeping up the debris on a porch overlooking the empty lot from which the buses loaded with kids (and the three wives) have just departed.