Three on a Match: A Pre-Code Classic (or: Why I'm nuts about Ann Dvorak)

The Film: Three on a Match (First National Pictures, 1932). Directed by Mervyn LeRoy. Screenplay by Lucien Hubbard, based on a story by John Bright and Kubec Glasmon. Starring Joan Blondell, Ann Dvorak, Bette Davis, Lyle Talbot, Warren William, Humphrey Bogart. Running time: A mere 63 minutes!!!

(Above: Three pals, left to right: Bette Davis, Joan Blondell and Ann Dvorak, lighting cigarettes from the same match. Not a good idea.)

When I first saw it: On Turner Classic Movies a few years ago. Thank God for Turner Classic Movies!

A few words about the film: Directed by the versatile Mervyn LeRoy (Gold Diggers of 1933, I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang, Thirty Seconds Over Tokyo, the list goes on and on), Three on a Match is a potent pre-Hays Code motion picture that still packs one hell of a punch. The film was released in the fall of '32, during the depths of the Great Depression, when soup lines looped around entire city blocks and the nation teetered precariously on the precipice. In the film, three women (Joan Blondell, Bette Davis and Ann Dvorak) who've been pals since childhood get together and each light a cigarette from the same match. According to superstition, one of the three women who lights a cigarette from a match that lights the other two will die. Your job: Guess which one of the three gals will perish by the end credits? Will it be level-headed Mary (Blondell), who always does the right thing? Nondescript stenographer Ruth (Bette Davis), who isn't in much of the film at all but has pretty eyelashes? Or unhappily married Vivian (Dvorak), who is bored with her well-to-do hubby (Warren William) and sick of being a mother to her adorable little son? (Can you see where this is going?) Yes, it's a morality play. Yes, it lays it on thick. But this is a gripping melodrama in the finest tradition of Warner Brothers' Depression-era movies. Vivian goes on an ocean cruise with her son, but without hubby. She neglects the brat and shacks up with gambler Michael Loftus (Lyle Talbot). Vivian ultimately decides to leave hubby, becomes a cocaine addict and gets mixed up in Michael's entanglement with a group of gangsters (one of whom is played to the sinister hilt by Humphrey Bogart in an early role). Heroine Mary (Blondell) tries to intervene to save her downward-spiraling friend Vivian. Will she succeed before the coming of the end credits? That's for me to know and you to find out, bub.

(Left: Ann Dvorak, protecting her son from a group of ominous goons led by the great Humphrey Bogart.)

My reasons for digging it: Three words: Ann Dvorak, Ann Dvorak and Ann Dvorak. Actually, that's seven words, but who the hell is counting? I'm not kidding you, my friend - this woman was truly one of the finest actresses to ever come out of Hollywood. This is the time and place to recommend the wonderful website called Ann Dvorak: Hollywood's Forgotten Rebel. Dvorak had just recently starred in the gangster masterpiece Scarface, another one of my favorite movies, when she appeared in Three on a Match. In Three on a Match, she conveys a wide range of emotions in a way that is always utterly believable. She's the classic "fallen woman," and there isn't a false note in her performance. Throw in brilliant Humphrey Bogart as the menacing gangster called "Harve" who, through a simple facial and hand gesture, indicates that Dvorak's character is hooked on cocaine, and you've got the makings of a fabulous film. I've watched a lot of films from the early 1930s (it was a fascinating period of experimental filmmaking, in the limbo region between silent and sound) and not many of them from this era withstand the test of time the way Three on a Match does. Most movies from the period tend to be full of pops and hisses, stilted dialogue and overacting. Not Three on a Match. It keeps you watching until "The End" flashes on the screen. Even though Dvorak's character Vivian is selfish, she's also sympathetic. The viewer is left on the edge of her/his chair, waiting to see whether she survives the superstitious curse placed on her early in the film when she shares a match with Davis and Blondell.

In the final analysis: Part paleo-noir, part gangster film, part romance, part drama, this film has it all. There's humor. There's pathos. There's the nerve-racking last ten minutes of the film that made me bite my fingernails to the quick. Hard to believe Mervyn LeRoy packed all of this in to 63 minutes. Being a pre-Motion Picture Production Code movie, the film gets away with all kinds of edgy and risky moments that you won't find in movies made even a year after it. And Ann Dvorak - brilliant Ann Dvorak - how lucky we are to savor her amazing screen presence. Grade: A-.