A Letter to Three Wives, nominated for Best Picture of 1949, is the film equivalent of a five-paragraph essay. For those of you who are not English teachers, the five-paragraph essay is a formulaic way of writing. It's given as a model to students so that they can concentrate on generating and developing ideas instead of having to worry about coming up with a way to organize their thoughts. Such an essay starts with an introduction that contains a thesis with three distinct parts. Each of those three parts is discussed separately in a body paragraph, with awkward transitions such as "next" or "secondly" or "finally" thrown in on occasion. The essay ends with a conclusion that attempts to bring all of the ideas back together again, usually by either repeating the idea in the three-part thesis or by briefly summarizing the information in the three body paragraphs.
A Letter to Three Wives starts with the title characters getting ready to serve as chaperons for a picnic. It's a Saturday morning, and they've volunteered to spend the day with a group of kids on a boat trip to an island. All three of their husbands are engaging in some odd behavior for a Saturday. Deborah Bishop (Jeanne Crain) is trying to get her husband Brad (Jeffrey Lynn) to tell her when he will be home from a conference he's attending; he only promises to call and let her know later on that evening. Rita Phipps (Ann Sothern) notices, finally, that her husband George (Kirk Douglas) is wearing his blue suit on the weekend; she had figured on him going fishing like he normally does. And Lora Mae Hollingsway (Linda Darnell) doesn't even know that her husband Porter (Paul Douglas) was seen boarding the train earlier in the day.
Just before the women get on the boat, they receive a letter addressed to all three of them. It's from Addie Ross (whose voice-over is supplied by Celeste Holm), allegedly a friend of theirs. Addie has left town with one of their husbands, but she doesn't reveal which one in her letter. The women have no time to make a last-minute phone call before the boat leaves--remember, this was long before cell phones--so they have to carry on. Naturally, if you receive a letter like this one, you can't ignore it all day long; you'd start to wonder if your husband was the one who left with Addie. What follows is a series of flashbacks, one for each woman, that attempt to show Addie's role in their lives.
First up is Crain's Deborah Bishop. She and her husband have just ended their military service; he was in the Navy and she was in the WAVES. It's her first time to meet some of his friends at the local country club, and Deborah is worried that they'll see that she's still just a farm girl at heart. She's upset about her hair and her dress, and she starts to drink a few martinis to give her some courage. Of course, she winds up drunk before too long and embarrasses herself by losing one of the large flowers attached to her ugly gown. During the course of the evening, Addie sends champagne to the table, prompting the men to talk about how much class and taste Addie has. By the way, we also learn that Brad once dated Addie, and everyone thought they would be married until he came home with Deborah.
The second segment belongs to Sothern's Rita. She writes soap operas for the radio to help with the family's expenses. Her husband George is a teacher, a profession of which he's proud, but Rita wishes he could have a higher paying, more prestigious job, like the editor's position that has opened up at the radio station. She and George are entertaining her bosses, the Manleighs (Florence Bates and Hobart Cavanaugh), but the evening isn't going well because George would rather listen to the records his friend Addie has just sent to him; she's a former school mate of his. It's his birthday, after all, and Rita has forgotten (but Addie hasn't). By the end of the evening, George is fed up with all of the talk about the quality of writing for the radio serials and describes it as "bilge" to the Manleighs. Needless to say, he's not likely to be chosen for the job of editor.
I should mention that the Phipps family maid, Sadie, is played by Thelma Ritter. She brings her usual sarcastic charm to the role, and she gets some of the funniest lines in the movie. For example, Rita has purchased a maid's uniform for Sadie to wear for the evening, but Sadie would rather stay in the kitchen than have people see her in the outfit. In particular, she doesn't like the cap; she says it makes her look "like a lamb chop with pants on." Only Thelma Ritter could get away with a line like that.
The final segment involves the courtship of Lora Mae and Porter. It's a tempestuous relationship, to put it mildly. Lora Mae works in one of Porter's department stores, and he asks her out with the clear intention of making a pass. She, however, wants to get married and manages to keep stalling him date after date after date. He has also apparently had a relationship with Addie in the past; there's a large picture in a silver frame of Addie on his piano. Lora Mae tells him that she wants to be the kind of woman whose picture sits on a piano. They understand each other, and despite an apparent lack of romance between them, they marry. For most of the movie, whenever they are together, they're bickering. She even claims that if he's the husband who's run off with Addie, she won't be upset.
Before her marriage, Lora Mae lives with her mother and sister in a small home near the railroad tracks. It's so near the tracks, in fact, that whenever a train passes, the entire building shakes. This makes for a recurring sight gag that, I'll be honest, is funny every time it occurs. Ritter's Sadie is a friend of Lora Mae's mother, Ruby Finney (Connie Gilchrist), and even she gets to enjoy a cup of tea while the house rattles from the nearby train.
Of course, the picnic on the island eventually has to end and the women have to return home to find out whose husband has left. You can't have a formulaic structure without the payoff at the end. After all, the whole point is to build suspense for the audience and make us wonder which of the three men was the one who has abandoned his wife. Brad Bishop is the only one who's not home when the women get back to town. He's left a message saying he won't be home that night. Nevertheless, Deborah decides to go to the club with her friends as planned. It's pretty sad for Crain's character until one of the other men makes a surprising revelation. Well, actually, I don't think it's really all that surprising given the man in question.
A Letter to Three Wives won Joseph L. Mankiewicz two Oscars, one for his direction and the other for his screenplay. I know I've made it sound like this film is too formulaic in its structure, but to be honest, I suspect it was an incredibly novel idea in 1949. I don't even think we had the five-paragraph essay format back then; I believe it's a more recent development. Even though we've reached a point where there have been lots of films that follow a structure like this one, I still admire the cleverness with which Mankiewicz has linked the stories of these three women and the way he ensures that we never actually see Addie. She's only an arm or a puff of cigarette smoke or sometimes only a reference to someone at another table in a restaurant, but never a full person on screen. The cast, especially Sothern, who was never as fully appreciated as she should have been for her talent, are all very good. They make the different stories interesting to follow, and they make us hope that, at the end of the film, we will discover that Addie has been lying. It's poetic justice how it all turns out.
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