A LETTER TO THREE WIVES

New Zealand Listener, Volume 21, Issue 527, 29 July 1949, Page 17

A LETTER TO THREE WIVES

(20th Century-Fox) PISODIC treatment could’ conceivably make a film dissolve into incoherent» fragments, but in this case’ it gives piquancy to a very good piece of comedy. The three wives, Jeanne Crain, Ann® Sothern, and Linda Darnell, are

told that the local vamp, Addie Ross, has run away with one of their husbands. Which one? The answer appears in flashback after flashback, revealing their past lives as ruthlessly as the probing voice of a psychiatrist. The first flash (Jeanne Crain and Jeffrey Lynn) isn’t so good, but the last two, involving Kirk Douglas and Paul Douglas as the husbands, contain some of the best comic scenes Hollywood has turned out in a long while. Kirk Douglas is an idealistic schoolteacher whose wife augments his meagre salary by writing commercial radio serials, and the sequence in which they entertain her employers — it involves several hours of listening to soap opera and ends with Douglas saying exactly what he thinks of it-should be greatly relished by many listeners, The third episode is the best. Paul Douglas is a wealthy business man who marries one of his shop assistants on a more or less cash basis-she wants to be a rich man’s wife, and he wants to make love to her. They lead a cat-and-dog life, snapping and snarling at each other from dawn to dark and after, and although the other two’ marriages are fairly rocky, theirs is the most precarious of the three, The letter from Addie has, . however, the unexpected _effect of making them all realise they are really happily married couples, lucky to have each other at all. The satirical atmosphere and the realistic portrait of- small-town social lifefather reminiscent of John O’Hara’s novel Appointment in Sammara-more than: make up for the film’s small weaknesses; an unconvincing happy ending and an attempt at whimsy by making Addie a semi-supernatural character. The funniest scene rs when Paul Douglas visits Linda ell’s home (just across the railway tracks) and an express roars past right outside the window. The whole house vibrates, tins drop off the shelves, the door of the frig. swings open, but nobody says a word. It is as much.a part of their life’ as the ‘street lamps outside or the hooting of car horns in the distance,