THREE HUSBANDS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 664, 28 March 1952, Page 19

THREE HUSBANDS

(Gloria Films-United Artists) T is one of my idler fancies that if I were to visit one of the larger Hollywood studios and ask for the Records Division I would be directed to an imposing building, probably surrounded by an electric fence but, at any tate, adequately and ostentatiously protected from surprise, sabotage, and Senate investigation committees. If, after having been fingerprinted, attested, screened and disinfected by the security officers, I was deemed innocuous enough to enter I feel sure that. I would discover in some ‘inner fastness the Scriptorium. Here, under conditions of optimum temperature and humidity, are filed (in fireproof cabinets but instantly accessible) all the shooting scripts that Hollywood ever scripted and shot. Many of them carry little red-no, check!-little blue plastic indicators bearing such, legends, as "Reactivate 1954"... Among scripts thus reactivated a year or so ago was that filed under Wives, A Letter to Three, which has now reached us (with certain minor modifications of plot) under the title of Three Husbands. Not that you need entertain any idle intuitions about Hollywood to discover that. The title suggests the prototype, the film’s publicity emphasises it, and the plot and dialogue speak for themselves. Here again we have three spouses tormented by suspicion-they are the husbands this time, and the odd man out is none other than that Welsh Llothario, Emlyn Williams. There is the same flashback technique in the story-telling, the same rather self-conscious contriving of a happy ending (no cuckoldry allowed; only mock-cuckoldry for moderns), and the same episodic quality. I went along chiefly because, in a somewhat dim week, the name of, Emlyn Williams promised some sort of brightness. I found him, however, a little

disappointing. If it had been discovered at the film’s end, that he was a fake and a masquerader-a wide boy from the suburbs passing himself off with some success as a man of. distinction, gallant and bon vivant, then I would have considered Emlyn Williams’s performance apt to the letter. The script, however, presents the mischievous Maxwell Bard as a man of cultivation and esprit, urbane and charming, and I can only conclude that for once Mr. Williams’s touch was uncertain. I thought him slick and shallow in the part, with a penumbra of vulgarity shadowing even his brighter moments. I was more impressed with the joint work of Eve Arden and Howard Da Silva-there was an elusive touch of Damon Runyon about their performances that I found warming, and their misunderstandings somehow seemed more wholesomely funny than the others. I laughed most, however, at one ‘sequence showing the interior of an "intimate" little theatre exhibiting French films (with English sub-titles), It was packed with intimate theatregoers solemnly watching an atrocious caricature of a French film, and I think anyone who has wrestled with a foreignlanguage movie would enjoy it. It certainly kept me chuckling right up to the Fin (End).