A Letter to Three Wives. 1949. USA. Directed and screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz. Adapted by Vera Caspery from a novel by John Klempner. With Jeanne Crain, Linda Darnell, Ann Southern, Kirk Douglas. Thelma Ritter. DCP. 103 min.
Three women receive a letter from a former friend, announcing that she’s run off with the husband of one of them…but not specifying which. Director and screenwriter Joseph L. Mankiewicz turns this ingenious premise into a wide-ranging, often satirical survey of American class relations at the dawn of postwar prosperity, as the peasant (country girl Jeanne Crain), the professional (radio drama writer Ann Southern), and the proletarian (Linda Darnell, a working-class beauty who married her boss) each try to find a place in the bright new middle class culture of the suburbs. Mankiewicz’s satiric fury seems a bit strong in the face of these vulnerable, striving women (he’d find a more appropriate target the next year, with the theatrical world of All About Eve), but the Darnell segment—which comes last and is meant to hit the hardest—has a whiff of anger and experience. Darnell is no longer the naïve teenager who had joined Fox a decade earlier, but a bitter woman conscious of her beauty and the power it gives her.