Movies You’ll Never Watch, But Might: A Letter to Three Wives (1949)
The suburban dream as pitiless tournament
A Letter to Three Wives, the 1950 Oscar-winner for best writing and direction, is the story of three suburban women who spend a day wondering if they will get to hang on to marriages that diminish and humiliate them, or whether theirs is the husband who has skipped town with a local frenemy whose last act before leaving is to pointlessly stoke their anxieties. IMDB calls this a comedy, or a drama, or maybe a romance.
Me, I think it probably fits better in the horror/suspense category — but only just. Suspense is really only possible if you agree something precious is at stake. Whereas the entire premise of the movie is that the women are married to men they can’t (or don’t, or won’t) trust, to where it’s at least conceivable to each that her own husband may have left her for another woman without a word of warning. I suppose we could debate whether the men are not to be trusted, or the women just prone to jealousy or insecurity. But what can’t be disputed is that the three women learn one of their husbands has basically eloped, and the universal response is: Yup, could be him.
It’s hard to feel much suspense about which husbands will return, when you’d be more gratified to see the women escape this neurotic arrangement, perhaps even to go solo and discover their real potential.
The plot is simple enough. A letter has arrived, addressed to the three wives, who are friends. The letter is written by Addie Ross, a local free agent on the village scene, who informs the women she has left town for good, and there’s a kicker: She has taken one of their husbands with her. The letter does not specify which. So the women will all have to wait to find out whose life has been destroyed. The letter arrives as the women are departing for an activities day-trip with underprivileged children, which is how the script contrives to prevent them from phoning their husbands for an answer.
The story then unfolds mostly in flashback, as each wife prods her memory for hints to her fate. We learn from this that Addie is some kind of harlot Svengali who inspires quasi-reverence from the menfolk and clucking jealousy from their wives. (Addie never appears in the film, except in silhouette, but narrates the story with gems like: “Women are so silly” and “It was Brad who gave me my first black eye and my first kiss.” From the tone of the narration you are left with the impression that Addie is telling this story from either inside a boudoir or from atop a throne of ice.)
We also learn that the women have built marriages that worry and confuse them. Deborah (Jeanne Crain) is just a simple girl, from a humble background, who’s found her way to the big leagues and doesn’t know whether she can hack it. Rita (Ann Sothern) has big plans that clash with the more prosaic expectations of family life in the suburbs. And Lora Mae (Linda Darnell) is that gold-digger who knows what she’s got and you’re gonna have to buy it from her. They are archetypes, yes. But really what they have in common is a sense of regret that they may not have earned the loyalty of these husbands.
This is weird. You kinda feel like the burden of culpability ought to fall on men who left their wives feeling anxious and exposed. Instead, it’s the women who are forced to answer the tough questions. Am I good enough? Am I too independent? Am I kind enough?
Suburban America — the meta-subject of Three Wives — arose in earnest in the immediate post-war period, as families began to flee the cities en masse for leafy commuter hamlets that offered more space, stability and protection. The suburbs were seen as a reward for good choices and sacrifice, places that offered the pastoral comforts of traditional American small towns without the costs to ambition. This had a seismic effect on the cities, which lost a big chunk of their tax bases and went into a decades-long decline before beginning to recover. The cultural consequences were at least as great.
Lives in the suburbs were often flattened, homogenized, reduced to dull morning-evening routines and soulless accumulation. John Cheever: “My God, the suburbs! They encircled the city's boundaries like enemy territory and we thought of them as a loss of privacy, a cesspool of conformity and a life of indescribable dreariness in some split-level village where the place name appeared in the New York Times only when some bored housewife blew off her head with a shotgun.” Yes, women had it especially hard.
Leaving the cities meant women were often disconnected from extended family that could provide relief and support, while it left them still more dependent on the family bread-winner. Meanwhile, there was tremendous pressure to provide a home life that would appeal to husbands who for all intents and purposes lived separate and in many ways obscure lives away in the city during the week.
I was raised mostly in the suburbs and disliked it: the isolation, the superficiality, the torpor. (Fortunately, we were never far outside the big city.) Something about the place didn’t seem right. People worked hard for the suburban life so their kids would have a chance at … the suburban life. But the suburbs were a place to avoid the practical adversities and risks that are the actual substance of life. The hard edges were sanded down. (If you were surprised to learn of participation trophies and college-admissions scandals, you never lived in the suburbs.) You moved there so you would not be exposed to the world as it is, but to a world that was more safe and digestible. That might work for a generation. But the idea of endlessly recapitulating this cycle seemed grotesque — a punishment out of Dante. For your sins, you and your issue must fret over the PSAT scores of each succeeding generation, lest the dream come to an end.
Especially in modern Hollywood, the image of life in the suburbs is a split screen — part idyll, part trap. The surface is often sumptuous and alluring — green grass, handsome homes, the chirp of crickets, the soft whir of sprinklers on a golf course. But there is a subterranean level where a different, seamier reality edges in. There is a reason the suburbs are so often the backdrop for slasher films — Halloween, Scream, The Nightmare on Elm Street. The suburbs might look like the reward for society’s “winners,” but there’s no escaping — and no protection from — malign nature. The dream is the doorway to horror.
When they are not fantasies about (often secretly) super-gifted kids — really, just about everything aimed at the pre-teen audience and its parents — films set in the suburbs tend to follow the slasher model. They are survival stories. But it’s a different kind of survival. It’s not the survival of mortal threat, but of the more mundane effects of suburban culture: unreasonable or unmanageable expectations, purposelessness, banality.
Every kid is basically a version of Kevin from Home Alone — cut adrift, trying to figure out how to make it. The adults are usually hanging on for dear life to the dream that’s also killing them, or collapsing under the weight of an impossible standard. The world of the suburbs is artificial, so the values are distorted. You succeed only for more success, only to move up one more rung in the local seeding. (One really admirable thing about American Beauty, from 1999, is that it captures the make-or-break nihilism that is really at the heart of the suburban dream. The protagonist’s fantasy is inseparable from his death urge. It’s a road to Hell, anyway — why not try to bed your daughter’s hot friend?)
Three Wives is a survival film (though it doesn’t intend to be). It is about the trade-offs. What’s it really worth to you to live inside this fantasy of an ideal life? Are three boozy nights a week at the local country club worth the instability, the gossip and low-grade strife? Is it worth your dignity?
The film answers the questions this way: If it isn’t, then what is?
Great writing!