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 Three wives have to go through a "long day to learn which of them has lost her husband to another woman." The wives get a letter before a boat trip from "alluring Addie Ross" saying that she has run off with one of their husbands causing each wife to reflect and wonder if it was her that was victimized. 1949, 103 minutes, VHS
Joseph L. Mankiewicz won Oscars for direction and screenplay for this movie back in 1950 (he would also win the same awards the very next year for All About Eve) so it may be a bit presumptuous of me to mention more than fifty years later that maybe the movie's excessive use of flashbacks and its relatively unsympathetic characters renders the central gimmick (who got their husband ripped off) a lot more toothless than all these awards would have you believe. Luckily for all of us, the last time I checked, the spelling of "presumptuous" doesn't lend itself to one of those "it makes an ass out of u and me" situations like the word "assume" does, thus freeing me to presumpt until the cows come home.
Now before all you Mankiewicz and Jeanne Crain fans start filling my inbox with special offers of intimate relationships with well endowed horses, I'm not saying this is a bad film. It's smartly written, adequately performed and holds your interest for most of its 103 minutes, but I didn't see anything in it that would merit a second viewing or cause you to implore your friends and family to rush out and find it (unless they were worried about their husband getting lifted by the town trollop, but the movie isn't as much help in that department as you would hope - do whatever your husband wants you to do is about the only tip you'll score upon this one's conclusion).
The film is structured in such a way that really sucks any drama out of a potentially juicy mystery: three women receive a letter from another broad who says that she left town and took one of their husbands with her as a memento. The question is whose husband was it that left? I was kind of hoping that these three dames would be busting the head of every snitch in Gotham City trying to dig up some info on which man of theirs had taken a powder. I even thought there might be some kind of hair pulling slap fight between these chicks that would end with all of them crashing into a giant fountain in the middle of town. Admittedly, two of them are almost bickering at one point during the film and one of the characters gets off a jewel of a line about how they were starting to act like they were in a movie about a women's prison (we wish!), but what do these women do once they get the letter? They go off to some all day picnic for some children's organization!
The bulk of the film then takes place as each woman wracks her brain trying to figure out if she was a crappy enough wife that it was her husband who ran away. I think it says a lot about these marriages that as soon as they got this letter, all three of them thought that it was a good possibility that it was their husband who left. If everyone is that insecure in their relationships, then this movie just gave me the perfect revenge scheme to bust out on some slugs in my own life who are in dire need of a letter with my trailer on the return address. Of course, in real life, this scheme would be tempered by how nasty the women I would be stealing are.
Since the movie insists on us actually caring which guy left which woman, we should probably run down the list and try to make an informed guess before getting bored and fast forwarding to the end of the tape and later pretending that we actually sat through of each of these ladies domestic debacles.
First up is Jeanne Crain. She plays Deborah Bishop and is married to Brad. Aside from the fact that she married a guy named Brad, what sort of problems is she having that is putting her marriage in jeopardy? Funny you should ask because she and I remember it as if it were just yesterday... (cue flashback). And it should be noted that director Mankiewicz even accompanies his flashbacks with funny noises (we all remember Wayne's World, right?). Oddly, the noise he selects is something that sounds like Peter Frampton's talking guitar!
Debbie and Brad met in the service and he brings her back to his hometown to live. All his fancy-pants friends live there including a really young Kirk Douglas! Debbie though is just a farm girl with low self-esteem and she copes with the worry of fitting in with Brad's friends by drinking herself into a stupor. It doesn't help matters that the dress she's wearing is an ugly thing with giant flowers sewn onto it. You'd be surprised how a lot of liquor and a tight little black dress can make you fit in a lot easier (at least with the husbands in your group). 
Kirk Douglas' wife, Ann Sothern tries to comfort Debbie by having her cut the flowers off, but that's botched and results in having to reattach the one in the front with a safety pin. Naturally it would later fly off onto some dude's plate while everyone is out dancing increasing the number of stressors Debbie experienced that night. Addie Ross also causes Debbie problems. Addie was Brad's long time gal pal and she's the one who sent the letter at the beginning of the movie. Addie was milling around during all this and even though the movie never shows her to us (another gimmick of the movie is that Addie is only partially seen, her face is never shown, and she provides a deity-like voice over describing all the action to us) we can surmise that she wasn't wearing an ugly dress with flying flowers on it. So Debbie thinks that maybe Brad took off with a woman who didn't camp out in a martini when the going gets tough and who knows how to dress.
Next up on the couch is Rita and George Phipps (Kirk Douglas and Sothern). Rita writes radio dramas and George is a schoolteacher. George doesn't make a lot of money, but he loves what he's doing. Rita is an ambitious sort who wants George to get into the radio business with her. In an effort to accomplish this, Rita invites a pair of sponsors over to her house for dinner. Things go into the crapper once the sponsors ask George his opinion on the quality of the writing on one of their most popular radio shows. George excoriates it and also drops a stinging monologue on them about how their radio programs and ads reduce life to a series of commercial opportunities. It's all true and is just as pertinent today regarding television, but those kinds of speeches have always struck me as mostly melodrama by self-important types. What? You mean people want to make money selling you stuff? Thanks for the news flash. Have you notified Tom Brokaw of this breaking story?
So Rita is wondering if George is fed up with her shallow ways and has demonstrated his deep, thoughtful approach to life, by running away with Addie Ross. What's his connection to Addie? Only that she actually remembered his birthday and sent him a record, while his wife only remembered to make sure that he wore his tuxedo to the dinner with the sponsors. This is pretty lame, because it's been my experience that a guy will forgive his old lady forgetting his birthday if later on that night she forgets about the headache she's been having for the last three weeks.
Finally, Frampton's guitar takes us back in time for the ugly courtship between Lora Mae Hollingsway and Porter Hollingsway. She's a chickie not from the wrong side of the tracks, but right on the tracks (the house shakes violently whenever a freight train rolls by) and Porter is a big shot businessman. She wants a rich catch and he just wants a hooch. Eventually, she twists his arm into marrying her. Gee, I can't imagine why she might be worried that he might be running away.
Surely after that rundown, you can't find much to root for in that bunch. I suppose that you might feel something akin to pity for Debbie, but she needs to be getting her drinking problem under control to save her marriage and not worry about this Addie skank. The other two are just materialistic slugs and I was thinking that Addie Ross couldn't really be that much worse for either George or Porter than their climber wives. The fact that I didn't give a rat's butt who got run off with kind of tempered my enthusiasm for the film. Then there was the weak happy ending where everyone realized they really did love each other. So, I just sat through the Cliff's Notes of three dull relationships for no reason? Thank you, gutless movie. I was worried that someone was going to be experiencing long lasting consequences for their mercenary behavior and poor self-esteem.
I also wasn't a fan of all these flashbacks. Once you see the first one, and the second one begins, you already know how the rest of the movie will play out and you've still got an hour to go. It was like one of those shows from the seventies that followed multiple characters and story lines (think Love Boat or Fantasy Island, but not as complicated and without Isaac). By the third story, I was stomping my Frampton Comes Alive LP into little pieces.
The main players are very good at delivering the material they get from Mankiewicz and there are some funny moments and strong exchanges between them, but the sum of it all doesn't redeem these good parts. Keep in mind that these complaints should be seen in the context of an Oscar winning movie with a good cast, so it's a little different that the complaints we'd be lodging against some Italian fashion model slasher movie. This one aims to be much more than that and so we hold it to a higher standard. It's worth a rental to be sure, but for all the praise that's consistently heaped upon it, I was left wondering what exactly I was supposed to be liking about it. Oh, and a little note to Mankiewicz: Dear Joe, I stole one of your Oscars, but I'm not telling you which one. Just a little something to remember my 103 minutes that I spent on this movie. Regards, MonsterHunter. (Begin dramatic soul searching and accompanying flashbacks.)
Reviews © 2004
MonsterHunter
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