When Joseph L. Mankiewicz made “A Letter to Three Wives,” which I discuss in the clip above, in 1949, he was already a well-known and experienced screenwriter and producer. He had been in Hollywood since 1930, when, at the age of twenty-one, he was an Oscar nominee for the script of “Skippy.” He began directing in the postwar years (notably the Gothic-political romance “Dragonwyck,” the ironic Boston society romance “The Late George Apley,” and, of course, “The Ghost and Mrs. Muir”). “A Letter to Three Wives,” however, was an explosive revelation of his genius.
It’s the story of three couples and a wild card—the strong-willed, sophisticated woman one of the men used to love and all three of them admire, and who, to launch the drama, informs their three wives that she has run away with one of the husbands. It’s told mainly in flashbacks, as each of the three wives looks back at scenes from her marriage to consider whether it may have collapsed. The three husbands are lifelong friends, and it’s one of the movie’s many strengths that it conjures a deep backstory, a lifetime of experience that makes its influence felt through the febrile foreground of incident. (The movie could be called “Scenes from Three Marriages,” and, in fact, it foreshadows Bergman’s work in a fascinating way.)
In the clip, I talk mainly about one of the couples—the self-made businessman (Paul Douglas) and the smart salesgirl from the other side of the tracks (Linda Darnell), and the issues of sex, class, and power that their story runs on. I have a special fondness for the second story, featuring Kirk Douglas as George Phipps, a high-school English teacher with high aesthetic standards and a salty sense of humor, and Ann Sothern as his wife, Rita, who works freelance as a writer of radio soap operas and out-earns him. Scenes involving the debilitating encroachment of mass media into domestic and intellectual life give rise to some of Douglas’s splendid transports of fury, applied to rhetorically brilliant monologues and whirlwind dialectic. (Some of the lines Douglas delivers have made for longstanding inside jokes here in my family.) And there’s a special treat in their scenes: the presence of Thelma Ritter, who ought to have won an award for her supporting performance as the family’s maid, Sadie, who turns out to be related to the salesgirl to whom the businessman is married.
It’s one of those films in which, miraculously, (almost) everything comes together—writing, direction, performance, and even clothing, hair styles, set decoration, and special effects. Nuances of social propriety, the rituals of small-town families and friends, and the minor variations that resound with hidden significance seem to be just right—psychologically and emotionally—and so do the look, the texture, and even the taste of things: the bright and early martinis, the sheen of cheap clothing and the silent purr of finery, the lacquered weight of a 78 r.p.m. record and the wood grain on the side of a station wagon, a very funny yet poignant visual depiction (by means of splendidly clever set construction) of the meaning of life on the other side of the tracks, and even a sardonic card attached to the door of a poor family’s home (“We gave”) combine to conjure, by way of fiction, a moment in time that seems truer and fuller than a documentary account.
For this, Mankiewicz won the Oscars both for Best Director and for Best Adapted Screenplay. The feat wasn’t unprecedented (John Huston had done the same, the previous year, for “The Treasure of the Sierra Madre”); what was new happened the following year, when he repeated both awards for “All About Eve.” It’s worth noting that “A Letter to Three Wives” was released on January 20, 1949—at the very beginning of the year, a time that now offers little chance of Oscar consideration.
