Returning again to the era of pre-code film we have Three on a Match, which takes its title from an old superstition that if three people light there cigarettes with the same match one will soon die. Here our three are Jr. high school classmates who meet up again about a decade later, so yes we get time passing montages. It's that old theme of young people having certain expectations in life and growing up to find that many of them are not meet (this same plot device is used in Moscow Does Not Believe in Tears among other movies).
Ruth Wescott (Bettie Davis) had the most realistic expectations, from a working class family she went to business school and got a secretarial position. Mary Keaton (as a child played by Disney's first child star Virginia Davis and as an adult by the great Joan Blondell) was a childhood trouble maker who goes to reform school and ends up a world weary, but essentially decent small time singer. Vivian Kirkwood (nee Revere) was the best positioned to start out well in life, from a wealthy family after Jr. high she went to a private girls school and eventually married rich and successful lawyer Robert Kirkwood (Warren William).
Vivian however seems never satisfied, she abandons her husband for a playboy type and takes there only child along (a strange little child actor whose name I can't find). Eventually Mary intercedes and gets the boy returned to his father, and after Robert and Vivians divorce they marry, and Ruth gets the cushy position of the childs nanny. Vivian and her new lover fall on hard times, and she eventually becomes quite addicted to cocaine and rather unhinged. Eventually a kidnapping plot of the strange child actor is hatched to pay for playboys debts to mob boss Edward Arnold, who dispatches henchman Humphry Bogart to insure all goes as planed, anyone really expect that it will? One of the three ends up dying to secure the child's safety, lousy match.
Female concerns Alison Drake (Ruth Chatterton) a young woman running her late fathers automobile company (interestingly in Dodsworth made three years later Chatterton plays the wife of the president of an automobile company). Alison's been at the job for five years and is good at it, but in ac lamenting herself to the cutthroat male driven world of big business she has also developed cadish relational traits. She loves and leaves her male secretaries, the whole factory is a candy box of men for her to chose from. This all really seems to amuse Pettigrew, Alison's short and elderly personal assistant. Yet Ms. Drake fears that no man really loves her for her, that they love her for her position and money. So one day she sneaks away from a party being held at her mansion and runs into George Brent who doesn't know her from Adam, and surprise she's smitten.
Conveniently Brent turns out to be Jim Thorpe, a talented engineer that Drake Motors has just stolen away from there competition. But Thorpe will not be just another of Alison's conquests and rejects her romantic advances, this causes her to become obsessed with finding out what type of women Thorpe likes and remodeling herself accordingly. A relationship blossoms but Thorpe insists on marriage, Alison balks so Brent skedaddles. Alison misses Brent, can't concentrate on work and becomes in danger of losing the company; she runs to Brent, tells him that she will indeed marry him, that he can run the company and that she wants "to have nine babies".
Chatterton's menanizing was daring, throwing the pillow on those fine rugs is her signal for wanting you know what. She embraces a quasi Victorianism at the end there which is a little disappointing, and takes the bite out of the films second half, still a more or less necessary concession to the conventions of the time, and I don't know how the story would have ended without it.
The Good Earth is post code, but its also the last of Irving Thalburg's epic productions and is thus very good, better and more enjoyable even then I thought it would be. Based on the Book by Pearl S. Buck it is the story of the marriage of Chinese farmer Wang Lung (Paul Muni) and former slave O-Lan (Luise Rainer). It's set in China and does a wonderful job at evoking the time, place and culture of its setting, but its also a universal story of the journey of marriage. I've heard it called an "almost biblical movie" and I would agree, the stories a kind of allegory that feels like it should sit beside Job and Esther, also there's a plague of locusts. Through times of thick and times of thin, we follow the changing fortunes of Wang and O-Lan and how there marriage survives a variety of challenges.
This is a pretty adult picture, I was surprised at the things depicted and hinted at. O-Lan loses one child shortly after birth (it could be read that she killed it as they were all starving at the time), another child suffers apparent mental retardation owing too hunger suffered during famine. You also have revolution and adultery. The cast is a mixture of actual Asians and white actors, which you have to expect from the time this was made. Generally its very respect full, Muni is strong like he always is, but Luise Rainer is the soul of the movie. She plays a timed character, and at first it seemed like the way you'd play this role was so obvious that you'd do it on auto-pilot. But Rainer evokes a lot, she says a lot in a part were she really doesn't have that many lines, especially considering how much she's in the picture. It's a beautiful characterization that earned Rainer, whose still with us at the age of 101, the second of her back to back best actress Oscars. Good flick.
Three on a Match: B
Female: C+
The Good Earth: A-
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