Three on a Match

Bette Davis, Joan Blondell, and Ann Dvorak fire it up

Mervyn Leroy's Three on a Match, from 1932, is a herky jerky affair that offers snatches of delight, but is too slight and wobbly to be a film I would recommend to the average viewer. Film buffs will want to check it out for the cast alone: Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell, Bette Davis, Warren William, Edward Arnold, Lyle Talbot, Humphrey Bogart, and Ann Shirley, then known as Dawn O'Day.

The film begins as a romantic melodrama, but morphs into a crime melodrama two thirds of the way through, drawing its inspiration from the major crime story of 1932; the Lindbergh baby kidnapping. The picture, which covers thirteen years in a scant sixty minutes, is padded with montage sequences detailing the events, fads, music, and fashion of different years. LeRoy's direction is inoffensive and brisk, only gaining some traction and emotional impact during the picture's final reel.

A prologue pictures the three female leads as schoolgirls: Dvorak as the pretty and popular one, Davis the brainy one, and Blondell as the bad girl. After a stint in reform school, Blondell becomes a chorus girl. Davis becomes a stenographer and Dvorak marries rich stiff, Warren William. William is perfectly cast as a boring attorney who Dvorak abandons for no-goodnik, Lyle Talbot. Dvorak has her three year old son in tow who she neglects while partying hard with Talbot. Blondell, alert to the squalid conditions the child is in, reunites him with William and, in one of cinema's shortest courtships, marries William.

Davis, since she apparently has nothing to do, becomes their live-in nanny. Davis hated her role, LeRoy, and the film. It is easy to sympathize because her talents are not on display here. Blondell fares better, serving as the film's reformed sinner and arbiter of morality. Dvorak's performance gets more interesting the more dissolute she becomes. Her portrayal of drug withdrawal and its accompanying self-revulsion is quite edgy for the era. Best of all is Bogart with a hard as nails performance as, for the first of many times before he became a star, an unrepentant thug.

 

A bizarre chunk of product from the early Warner days, Three on a Match has some amusing bits amidst its Hollywood hallucinations, but also plenty of WTF moments. I won't soon forget, though I wish I could, the close-up of Edward Arnold plucking his nostril hairs out with tweezers.

                                                 

Joan Blondell, Pre-Code!