Mankiewicz: A Letter To Three Wives (1949)

This melodramatic classic was adapted from John Klempner’s 1946 Cosmopolitan novel, A Letter to Five Wives, which revolves around a circle of friends  – here  whittled down to Deborah (Jeanne Crain), Lora (Linda Darnell) and Rita (Ann Sothern) – who receive a letter from their arch-nemesis, Addie Ross (voiced by Celeste Holm), telling them that’s she’s run off with one of their husbands – Brad (Jeffrey Lynn), Porter (Paul Douglas) and George (Kirk Douglas) – moments before they board a boat for a charity picnic. As the day passes, and they wonder which of their husbands could be the philanderer, we’re presented with a series of flashbacks that anatomise the peculiar problems and challenges of their respective marriages. At the time the story was written, Cosmpolitan magazine was still very much a family publication, rather than an upwardly mobile professional publication, meaning that Klempner’s acerbic vision was destined to be read among the very small-town suburban tableaux that it describes. In that spirit, Mankiewicz also aims for a film that could be watched in the spaces it describes – which is to say, in 1949, a film that looks forward to its imminent remediation on television, carving out its own televisual niche. However, perhaps because it wasn’t quite omniscient enough at this point in time to have become part of the national consciousness, Mankiewicz frames television negatively, as the exhausation and marginalisation of radio over the three years that had elapsed since Klempner’s story was published. In that sense, it’s something of an experiment in outlining all the ways in which cinema might exceed radio, and thereby converge itself with the televisual future. And Mankiewicz makes a pretty amazing argument for film as the new cutting-edge of vocal technologies, subsuming the dialogue into Holm’s languorous, mellifluous voiceover – one of the most memorable in classical Hollywood, infinitely more ingratiating and intimate than any late-night radio broadcast – and orchestrating a synthetic voice, a proto-Vocoder, to connect the stories. Hallucinating melodrama into electronica, it’s fascinating to return to this moment when television was still a new perceptual horizon, a horizon that would only expand over the next decade, as film responded with the suburban science fiction that’s so memorably established here.