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-.

The Movie that Started it All...

The Film: King Kong (RKO, 1933). Directed by Merian C. Cooper, Ernest Schoedsack. Screenplay by James Ashmore Creelman, Ruth Rose (based on the story by Merian C. Cooper and Edgar Wallace). Starring Fay Wray, Robert Armstrong, Bruce Cabot. Running time: 105 minutes. 

When I first saw it: Circa 1972. I was about four. 

A Few Words About It: There isn't much I can add about this film that hasn't already been written. Entire books have been published on King Kong and its influence. It's an amazing film that holds up incredibly well today, three-quarters of a century after it was made. It has inspired numerous remakes, sequels, rip-offs and pale counterfeits. What can I say that you don't already know about the movie? One of the screenwriters, James Ashmore Creelman, committed suicide by leaping off a tall building in 1941. Co-creator Edgar Wallace wrote more than 150 novels, numerous plays and too many articles to count. It's difficult to say which figure involved in this making of this film had the greatest influence on its timeless, enduring style. Several King Kong experts have given credit to stop-motion-animation guru Willis O'Brien. Like Creelman, O'Brien's life contained some tragedy. He married Hazel Collette in 1925, divorced her in 1930, and the year Kong was released, Hazel murdered their two sons and then attempted to shoot herself. Her suicide attempt failed, but she later died of tuberculosis. O'Brien's Kong was more human than human: Filmgoers could see the happiness, pathos, anger and frustration in his face. He was far more sympathetic than any of the human characters in the film. Even in our Age of CGI, the special effects are still amazingly fresh in the film. You can almost feel the steam in the jungle sequences. And the airplanes strafing Kong atop the Empire State Building are astonishing. O'Brien's techniques improved even more later in the year with Son of Kong (1933) and 1949's giant ape film, Mighty Joe Young. The end of King Kong -- I won't give it away here if you're one of the three or four people in the world who hasn't actually seen it -- is still haunting after all these years. King Kong remains influential to this day, ranking number 41 on the latest list of the American Film Institute's Top 100. 

Why I dug it: There's something magical about the first film you've ever watched from start to finish. I I laughed, hid under my cushion and ultimately wept in Kong. The memories are still vivid. 

Parting Shot: The film looms large, not only in the popular imagination, but in my memory. I had to pick a Mount Everest of a film for my first entry. But you've got to start somewhere. Grade: A+.