A LETTER TO THREE WIVES (1949)

It took twenty Hollywood years (silent inter-titles & scripting @ Paramount; A-list producer @ M-G-M; five learn-on-the-job directing gigs over three years @ 20th/Fox) for Joseph L. Mankiewicz to find his signature erudite film voice as writer/director with this witty, amusing, believable and quietly revolutionary upper-middle-class suburban satire.  Taken from a serialized novel*, it begins with a letter to all three wives announcing that one of their husbands has run off with the town’s most bewitching divorcée . . . but which guy?  Three flashbacks fill us in.*  Was it Jeanne Crain, out of her social depth as wartime bride to rich local catch Jeffrey Lynn?  Successful radio dramatist Ann Southern, losing unambitious but happy High School teacher hubby Kirk Douglas?  Or that scheming wrong-side-of-the-tracks looker Linda Darnell who hooked self-made chain-store success Paul Douglas, himself on the hunt for a broad to class up his act.  (A guy with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves but no books.)  Mankiewicz brilliantly mixes & matches personal relationships with social commentary, grass-is-greener jealousy and romantic philosophy.  And he’s yet to stop thinking visually to plug his wordsmithery.  Well, mostly, just a bit on Mankiewicz mouthpiece character Kirk Douglas.  Douglas also yet to fall into bad habits, though no one here can touch the great Thelma Ritter as his part-time housemaid (wife Ann Southern paying the tab), or Paul Douglas, phenomenally assured in his film debut at 42 after his starmaking BORN YESTERDAY run on B’way.  Double Oscar’d this year (and next for ALL ABOUT EVE), Mankiewicz’s script much admired and copied.   Yet its situations, characters & dialogue still feel freshly caught, thoughtful, even touching by the end.

ATTENTION MUST BE PAID/LINK: *Mankiewicz’s use of ‘taking’ instrumental transitions in & out of the flashbacks now more dated than clever.  But the ‘vocal’ technique had recently been popularized in 78rpm kiddie record sets like ‘Rusty In Orchestraville.’  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iS_0goEIuYk

SCREWY THOUGHT OF THE DAY: *Cosmopolitan’s serial had FIVE WIVES, initially adapted down to FOUR by LAURA novelist Vera Caspary, then further reduced from Mankiewicz’s script by producer/studio chief Darryl F. Zanuck to THREE.  Today, they’d probably expand to EIGHT for an interminable streaming mini-series.