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Post by Fading Fast on Feb 18, 2024 21:14:45 GMT
Good point, I knew it was coming and still found it gripping. Warners, as a studio, was firing on all cylinders with this one. Yet, according to the Wikipedia page, the film received "tepid to poor" reviews. Too bad, as there's a lot to love here.
You have to wonder if the "it's good but a real downer" word-of-mouth talk killed it?
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Post by Andrea Doria on Feb 18, 2024 21:14:49 GMT
That was harrowing. It all went by so quickly I'm in a state of shock.
They really should never have stopped making films like this. They show a dark side of life that might tarnish a young person's innocence, but they also serve so well as a warning. The way Dunlap quickly brought Vivien down and almost enslaved her was something that happens to young women more often than we think. When we saw that he had forced Vivien to ask Mary for money I knew she was lost.
Good pick FadingFast! I'm going to watch it again.
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Post by Fading Fast on Feb 18, 2024 21:17:03 GMT
That was harrowing. It all went by so quickly I'm in a state of shock. They really should never have stopped making films like this. They show a dark side of life that might tarnish a young person's innocence, but they also serve so well as a warning. The way Dunlap quickly brought Vivien down and almost enslaved her was something that happens to young women more often than we think. When we saw that he had forced Vivien to ask Mary for money I knew she was lost. Good pick FadingFast! I'm going to watch it again. I find it powerful and shocking every single time I see it. Growing up in the 1970s, I thought we were the first generation to deal with widespread drug addiction (I was a kid with no perspective), movies like this (and the newspapers and books from the era, too) tell a different story.
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Post by galacticgirrrl on Feb 18, 2024 21:18:45 GMT
Good point, I knew it was coming and still found it gripping. Warners, as a studio, was firing on all cylinders with this one. Yet, according to the Wikipedia page, the film received "tepid to poor" reviews. Too bad, as there's a lot to love here.
I am convinced these are the gems to watch out for - the ones so different from the current milieu we can't understand them upon release.
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Post by Fading Fast on Feb 18, 2024 21:20:13 GMT
Yet, according to the Wikipedia page, the film received "tepid to poor" reviews. Too bad, as there's a lot to love here.
I am convinced these are the gems to watch out for - the ones so different from the current milieu we can't understand them upon release. That's a smart point.
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Post by Fading Fast on Feb 19, 2024 19:13:14 GMT
Three on a Match from 1932 with Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell, Bette Davis, Lyle Talbot and Warren William
Some people aren't happy being happy. A good marriage, a healthy child and financial security would check many people's happiness boxes. Yet some people become bored when everything is going well as we see painfully and graphically in Three on a Match.
Three girls meet in grammar school and then, after graduation, go their separate ways with one, played by Ann Dvorak, heading off to finishing school, another, played by Joan Blondell, after a hiccup, to reform school and a third, played by Bette Davis, to secretarial school.
Time passes and the girls reconnect as adults. Dvorak is married to a wealthy lawyer; Blondell is a struggling showgirl and Davis, a secretary. When bejewelled Dvorak gets in her chauffeur-driven limousine after a luncheon together, everyone knows whose life turned out the best.
Or did it? For some reason that Dvorak admits makes no sense, she tells her kind, loving and understanding husband, played by Warren William, that she's unhappy. At her request, he sends her and their infant son on a cruise to hopefully make her feel better.
Before Dvorak's ship even leaves port, though, she meets a handsome man, played by Lyle Talbot, and with her child in tow, bolts the ship with him. She changes her name and lives with her son and Talbot in New York where they party and, basically, neglect the boy.
William, frantic to find his wife and child, hires detectives, but it's Blondell, realizing the child is in danger, who tells William where his wife is. Dvorak, already in decline from her drinking and drug use, eventually has to let William take the boy and even gives him a divorce.
Blondell and Davis, meanwhile, tend to the boy as William's friends, with Blondell and William beginning to fall for each other. But the real story is back in Dvorak's world where the money is running out as she discovers Talbot is nothing more than a low-rent gambler.
Even for a precode, the movie from here becomes incredibly graphic. We see Dvorak physically in decline from her alcohol and drug use and from the encroaching poverty, which all happens while Talbot becomes abusive to her.
The final twist, no spoilers coming, involves a desperate act by Talbot to get money - he's in debt to the mob - which endangers both Dvorak, who is now in a full drug-addict downward spiral, and her son.
There is little Hollywood glamour to Dvorak's descent as her performance is raw and real. She's strung out on drugs and looks skinny, pale and filthy. Kudos to director Mervyn LeRoy and Warner Bros. for not holding back.
It's a frightening movie that had to shock 1932 audiences as it still has the power to do so today. Familiar as we now are with drug-addiction movies, Three on a Match cedes little to our modern take.
Despite being an A picture with an impressive cast, Three on a Match did not do well at the box office. Perhaps it was ahead of its time or perhaps it was too-depressing for a Depression era audience.
Today, Three on a Match is a valuable piece of history. Once the Motion Picture Production Code was fully enforced after 1934, drug addiction would be kept in the shadows if shown at all on screen, but here in 1932, we see drug addiction contribute to a woman's harrowing fall.
These types of addiction movies, usually with more redemption and hope than shown here, were all the rage in the drug-addled 1970s. Once again, though, precode cinema was forty years early in addressing social ills that felt "new" to many in that later decade.
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