Hollywood history is filled with bad takes. The most famous is probably the assessment of Fred Astaire after his first screen test at RKO: "Can't act. Can't sing. Balding. Can dance a little." That's so breathtakingly off the rails you just have to hang your head and laugh. It makes director Mervyn LeRoy's opinion of Bette Davis look positively even-handed. He didn't think she could act. His conviction in this was so strong that he actively marginalized her part in their only film together, Three On a Match (1932). In his defense, Davis was about ten or twelve films away from stardom at that point, with her roles in pre-Code films being almost entirely marginal. She was often grossly miscast. It's not for nothing that Robert Aldrich cribbed footage for Baby Jane Hudson's adult career in Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? from Davis's pre-Code film, Ex-Lady and Parachute Jumper, both made after Three On a Match. Perhaps on the advice of Davis herself, Aldrich picked those two films as her very worst performances. How much of this is on Davis and how much of this is on her earliest directors is open to debate, but it's hard not to cringe at her Southern accent in Parachute Jumper. What is most surprising about Three On a Match, then, is not that it squanders Bette Davis. She was consistently being squandered in her early films. Rather it is surprising that it also squanders its ostensible star, Joan Blondell. Blondell was top billed, and the film is categorically slanted toward her character and her rise from streetwise reform-school kid to high society paramour and wife. But LeRoy had eyes for his third lead actress, Ann Dvorak, who seizes the film away from her costars with a twitchy descent into degradation of the sort that would eventually ignite Davis's own stardom in Of Human Bondage two years later. Dvorak devours her part, vacillating between amoral social climber to reluctant kidnapper to trapped gangster's accomplice to strung out coke fiend. LeRoy abets her performance by filming her in the style of a madwoman from some silent melodrama.
Three On a Match is built from the superstition common in its day that if three people light a cigarette from a single match, then the third person to light up will meet with misfortune. Structurally, it's a so-called "three girl" film, a form common to the 1930s and 40s back when women were a valuable film-going demographic, crossed with Warner Brothers' gangster film. Like many of the gangster films of its period, this contains an extended prologue spanning the roaring 1920s in which we watch three friends grow up against the backdrop of the history of that period. Prohibition looms large, as do a succession of newspaper headlines detailing the main events leading up to the start of the story. The film begins with its three main characters in childhood. Mary Keaton is an incorrigible troublemaker who likes to sneak out of class and smoke cigarettes with boys. Vivian Revere is the reserved well behaved child. Ruth Wescott is a bookish girl who has no safety net. Eventually, Mary is imprisoned in a reformatory, only to be released as an adult. She gets a job as a chorus girl. Vivian marries lawyer Robert Kirkwood and has a son with him, but longs for something more in her life, so fulfillment or danger that's out of the reach of her lot in life. Ruth has taken a job as a secretary. By happenstance, the three meet and have lunch, after which, Mary lights a cigarette and offers the match to both her friends. They then go their separate ways, though they remain entangled. Vivian takes ship with her son to get away from her stultifying marriage. Mary comes aboard with two men from the rackets for a party before the ship sails, and Vivian meets Michael Loftus, a dangerous man who stirs a longing in her for a life of risk and excitement. She disembarks with Michael and lives an increasingly dissolute life with her new man. Mary is alarmed by her new life and how it affects Robert, jr., so she seeks out her husband and tells him where to find the boy. Both Mary and Ruth adore the child and when Robert, sr. divorces Vivian, he marries Mary. By this time, Vivian is an addict and desperate for money, so Michael attempts to blackmail Robert about Mary's criminal past. Michael is desperate for money, too. He owes a gang lord a significant amount of money, so when Robert refuses to be blackmailed, he hatches a plan to kidnap Robert, jr. He doesn't reckon on his creditors horning in on the action. When the gangsters take over the kidnapping, the ransom demand balloons from $5000 to $25,000. Meanwhile, a manhunt is on. When the police begin to go house to house close to where the child is being held, the lead gangster, Harve, resolves to kill the child and scatter. Vivian is not so far gone that she'll allow that to happen to her son, and contrives to get a message to the police in a ghastly self-sacrifice.
Three On a Match has a LOT of plot for its brief running time. The span of time it covers and the number of characters it follows is downright novelistic, but it contains it all within a mere 63 minutes. This is a film that doesn't waste time on bullshit. It's all story. Every shot adds information. I can't help but wonder if this film's efficiency benefits from the absence of the production code, though I'm aware of the fact that the pace of the film mirrors the pace of its making. The Warners, like every other Hollywood studio except MGM was in dire straits in 1932 and they were keen on streamlined, cheap productions. This film was shot in four weeks. Even so, the lack of censorial oversight helps. It doesn't have to skirt around its themes of adultery and drug addiction. It doesn't have to couch them in coded messages. It's bracing and direct. It doesn't have to waste time on catering to blue-noses. The main basis for objection to the film in its day was its similarity to the Lindbergh kidnapping rather than its more salacious elements. It's a case of a big elephant hiding a bunch of little elephants. The Lindbergh baby was found dead in May of 1932. Three On a Match was released in October. The kidnappers were still at large at the time, but the film itself got around the local censors by providing an alternate universe happy ending, and by punishing all the evildoers. It's still a fantasy even given its brutality, a fact not lost on Jason Joy at the SRC offices (the predecessor of the Breen Office, charged with the appearance of enforcing the production code, though without teeth). Joy pleaded the film's case in major markets.
By rights this should be Joan Blondell's movie. She's the audience's surrogate, the character we're supposed to follow. But her character arc is indistinguishable from a lot of women's pictures of the day (Joan Crawford made a career out of poor shop girls making good during this period). Bette Davis's main contribution to the film is a scene where she's talking to Mary in her underwear while putting on a pair of stockings. Ann Dvorak's character, by contrast, is the stuff of Greek tragedy. She's the hero who's fatal flaw brings her low and a decade before the advent of film noir. Noir is a good frame to view this film, because Vivian is led astray by an homme fatale, just as noir heroines sometimes are (and vice versa) and what redemption there is for her has to come in the next life. Dvorak's performance is a career best, and by rights should have catapulted her to the big time. I mentioned that it's a forerunner of Davis's star-making performance in Of Human Bondage and that's not an idle comparison given that both actresses throw any concerns for their screen image aside as they descend to the depths. Dvorak manages it in a little over forty minutes of screen time. The variety of moods she gets to play in this film is a whole career for some actresses.
While I think Mervyn LeRoy missed a trick with Bette Davis, I don't think he missed with one of his other bit players. That actor was Humphrey Bogart, who oozes menace as the merciless gangster, Harve. When the camera first notices him, it can't un-notice him even when it's looking at other actors (in this case, Edward Arnold and Lyle Talbot). Bogart has almost no dialogue in the film and in his first scene, he lurks in the background, but boy howdy does the audience feel his presence. LeRoy does, too, because he gives Bogart this shot, which in a film devoted to efficient storytelling is a luxury:
This was Bogart's first portrayal of a gangster, a character type that eventually chafed at the actor whose background couldn't have been more different. I suspect that his arrival in this film is what pegged him in the role. It took him eight years to climb out of gangster parts, though the aura of a tough guy remained.
The ostensible male lead in the film is Warren Williams, and he's an actor who looms large in the era. He played Caesar opposite Claudette Colbert's Cleopatra and was the second actor to play Sam Spade in the Maltese Falcon (opposite Bette Davis as it so happens, though both characters had their names changed for the film, and the film itself was titled Satan Met a Lady). Williams had a sonorous voice that must have seduced radio audiences and the kind of profile that could play statesmen or con men. He was the ultimate city slicker in his pre-Code films. Here, he's a romance novel object of desire: rich, a lawyer, a devoted father, a man wronged by his faithless wife. I like Williams and like Ann Dvorak, wish he was better remembered by film history.
The film as a whole indulges the pre-Code practice of putting a moralizing happy ending on its shenanigans, but this is a case where it categorically fails to smooth over the film's rough edges. The natural ending of the film is such a shock, is so utterly grotesque, that a few minutes of happily ever after simply can't overcome it. This is to the film's advantage, because it leaves a receptive audience stunned. It's a film that lodges in the memory. It's among the films I think of as a definitive example of what movies were doing between 1928 and 1934 and what movies lost when they stifled all that energy in the name of morality.
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