A Letter to Three Wives

The premise is golden. Three women friends are about to escort a group of schoolchildren on a boat ride and picnic. Suddenly a messenger shows up with a letter addressed to the three of them. It’s from a fourth woman who makes apologies to her close friends for not joining them on the outing because…well, because she’s run off with one of their husbands. If that poison letter isn’t devilish enough, she doesn’t bother to say which husband she’s plucked. And since the story takes place decades ago, the three friends don’t have cell phones in order to reach their loved ones. And, thus, they are forced to spend the day in torment, remembering moments of strain in their marriages, each of them wondering which of their husbands will be gone when they return home.

The film is a rich layer cake of drama, comedy, and social satire.

A Letter to Three Wives—released in 1949—is written and directed by the brilliant Joseph Mankiewicz. His film is a rich layer cake of drama, comedy, and social satire. It seduces you with Golden Hollywood, breezy good humor, while deeper down its characters bite at each other with snappy dialogue that reveals the depth of their anxieties.

The first of the three wives is Deborah, a farm girl who served in the Navy during World War II, where she met and married her upper-class husband, Brad. Now a civilian and living in Brad’s hometown, we learn that beneath Deborah’s sweet, natural beauty is a crippling insecurity that she won’t be accepted into her husband’s social circle.

Wife number two is Rita, a working mom who writes radio soap operas, while her husband, George toils as a schoolteacher. Their obvious love for each other as a middle-class couple is tested by Rita’s desire for her husband to get a better paying job. While George feels ashamed that he makes less money than his wife, he refuses to give up on teaching. He believes too much in the value of his work in the classroom.

Finally, wife number three is Lora Mae, who’s married to an older, divorced man named Porter. While Lora Mae grew up near the railroad tracks on the hardscrabble side of town, Porter is the wealthy owner of a department store chain. Money and sex brought them together—and are the twin battlefields of their trouble.

With a stellar cast that includes Jeanne Crain, Ann Southern and Linda Darnell, A Letter to Three Wives sizzles with acerbic wit while its characters stumble through the minefields of marriage and class conflict in post-World War II America.

As for the woman who wrote the letter to the three wives, who she is and which husband she ran off with…like everything else in this dazzling, literate story, the reveal surfaces like a perfect bubble in a great glass of champagne.

A Letter to Three Wives is a four-star masterpiece.