Three Women

Over the years I've enjoyed a number of the silent features Ernst Lubitsch directed in Hollywood. His 1920s output includes some dazzling gems, such as Lady Windermere's Fan, The Marriage Circle, and So This is Paris. But until recently I'd never seen Three Women, a film that seldom receives public screenings, and isn't available in any format suitable for home viewing. This past weekend a rare print was shown at NYC's Film Forum, with live piano accompaniment provided by Steve Sterner, and it proved to be an engrossing, entertaining drama. Three Women bears the hallmarks of its director's famous style, yet at the same time its story ventures into a darker and more melodramatic realm.

This is the story of Mabel Wilton (played by stage veteran Pauline Frederick), a wealthy widow of a certain age who is worried about the relentless passage of time. When we first meet her she's nervously weighing herself on a bathroom scale, and is distressed at the results. Actually she's a perfectly attractive middle-aged lady, but the fact that her daughter is now a college undergrad—and has just reached her 18th birthday—is a disturbing reminder of her own advancing age. Daughter Jeanne (May McAvoy) yearns for a closer relationship with her mother, and can't understand why Mabel pushes her away. Into this uneasy mother-daughter relationship steps the disreputable Mr. Lamont (Lew Cody), a slick but shady businessman, a "womanizer" and spendthrift who struggles to keep his many creditors at bay. When he's introduced to Mrs. Wilton at a society ball Lamont coolly sizes her up, and this is conveyed to us in a very Lubitsch-like fashion: with a series of closeups noting the lady's jewels and expensive trinkets. That's all this guy can see.

Lamont approaches Mrs. Wilton to discuss a business deal, but before long his sales pitch turns into a courtship. In the midst of their affair Lamont meets Jeanne, and swiftly pivots to her instead. She's flattered, and feels lonely due to her mother's neglect; this, despite the attentions of a nice young medical student from college who is devoted to her. Unwisely, Jeanne agrees to marry Lamont. Her mother is initially shocked and hurt, naturally enough, but comes to accept the relationship. All too soon, however, Lamont is seeing another woman, Harriet (Marie Prevost), the third woman of the title. Tensions escalate into heated conflict and sudden death.

As even a brief synopsis suggests, we're not in typical Lubitsch territory here, story-wise. The first half of Three Women plays very much like a characteristic Lubitsch comedy-drama, complete with those stylish "touches" we associate with his work, such as the witty sight gags which convey the characters' true feelings, sometimes at odds with their outward show of behavior. A good example of an emblematic directorial technique comes when the young medical student Fred Colman (Pierre Gendron) is indecisive about giving Jeanne the gift of a bracelet. He hesitates, delays, decides to give her the bracelet, then changes his mind—and this is all conveyed with close shots of his hand reaching for his jacket pocket, where we know the bracelet rests. Very cinematic, and very much in the Lubitsch tradition. But the film's final scenes, especially the trial, with its tense build-up to the jury's verdict, feel quite different from this director's usual fare. A moralistic theme is introduced and emphasized, suggesting that Mabel Wilton deserves punishment for being a frivolous, negligent mother. This motif may come as a surprise to anyone expecting more continental-style sophistication along the lines of, say, The Marriage Circle.

In sum, I found Three Women well-made and interesting, if not on par with the best silent era work by this director. I especially admired the strong and sympathetic performance by Pauline Frederick, while Lew Cody is, as usual, a first-rate scoundrel; he really cornered the market in those roles in the '20s. He's such a cad, you have to wonder why an urbane lady of the world such as Mabel Wilton doesn't spot him for what he is more quickly. Maybe she should have gone to the movies more often!

Lew Cody is flat broke, so he takes up with wealthy Pauline Frederick. When her daughter May McAvoy comes home, he shifts his sights. Never mind that Pierre Gendron intends to propose to her as soon as he gets his medical license; Cody is tired of getting a hundred grand here and there from Miss Frederick for 'investments' that go bust. As Miss McAvoy's husband, he would have her trust fund, half of Miss Frederick's wealth.

Ernst Lubitsch's society drama is a far more serious affair than the effervescent comedies he is best remembered for, but his handling is just as light and sure, with the little touches that inform the audience of what is going on without many titles. Cody seems seedy from his first appearance, Miss Frederick fluttery and fearful of passing youth, and if the party scenes are not as abandoned as they are in a DeMille movie, that seems an indictment of the participants' lack of imagination, rather than the film makers' or the audience's.

Lubitsch making a drama sans his trademark cheeky comedy is bound to be viewed less favorably than his bubbly classics, but there's enough here to make Three Women worth seeing. In it, Pauline Frederick and May McAvoy play a mother/daughter pair who are pursued in turns by a predatory leech, played by Lew Cody, who ends up having yet another woman on the side (Marie Prevost), hence the title.

In a good way, Cody reminded me of Warren William in some of his dastardly pre-Code roles, and Frederick and McAvoy are also strong, even kind of looking like they're related. There is a lot of life to the dancing scenes, both among the Cal-Berkeley kids and the socialites, who among other things have a giant slide near the dance floor. The quality of the print I saw was quite good, which allowed me to see the attention to detail in the sumptuous costumes and set designs, something I liked. It's a melodrama but the story is reasonably compelling, and I have to believe most viewers will truly begin to despise Cody's character, and wonder where this is going. Happily, the ending was not dictated by a Production Code. Where it falls a bit short is in its pacing, even at just a 70 minute runtime. I had to put myself in 1924 mode as the story played out, and wish it had been jazzed up just a bit. Overall, it's not great, but it's well made, and mildly entertaining.

Lew Cody stars as a scheming cad who happens to meet a rich millionairess (Pauline Frederick) at a party. He's told she's worth three million dollars. He gets an introduction.

Frederick is an aging woman (she about 42) who's afraid of getting old, so she pretends to be younger and starts an affair with Cody. Alas, she has a college-aged daughter (May McAvoy) who is away at school but who shows up suddenly.

Frederick is angry that she comes home and of course as soon as Cody spots her, he dumps the old lady and goes after McAvoy, especially after he learns her trust fund is worth more than a million dollars.

As soon as he marries silly McAvoy, he starts playing around with a floozy (Marie Prevost in a VERY brief role) and ignoring his wife.

Onto the scene comes Fred (Pierre Gendron) McAvoy's old boyfriend from college. He happens to be at a nightclub where Cody and Prevost are living it up, but when Cody gets conked by a bottle of champagne, the good Gendron (now a doctor) takes him home, where all is revealed (including Frederick's past affair with Cody).

Cody goes wild and gets his comeuppance.

Stars Pauline Frederick and May McAvoy are especially good, Cody is appropriately sleazy, and Prevost is fun. Gendron plays the stalwart leading man. There's also Raymond McKee, Jane Winton, Max Davidson, Mary Carr, and Tom Ricketts (as the butler).

Supposedly, future star Charles Farrell is among the party revelers.

Odd errors in this one include intertitles with bad sentences that make no sense and the fact that Cody's character is called George but referred to in a courtroom scene as Edmund.

The music has too much percussion and tends to drown out the action.

Reuniting with his regular writing partner from Germany, Hanns Kraly, Ernst Lubitsch followed up his delightful The Marriage Circle with another attempt at bridging the gap between tragedy and comedy in a domestic setting, and this doesn't quite click the same way the previous film did. It demonstrates Lubitsch's continued command of the physical production and ability to find small bits of humor amidst larger scenes, even managing large scale set pieces well in addition to performances. The story up to the end holds up fairly well, it's really just that the ending tries to do way too much, especially tonally, and it just falls flat.

Edmund Lamont (Lew Cody) is a penniless cad who owes money all over town. At a large society party (including a long slide that is the source of a few comic pratfalls), he meets Mrs. Mabel Wilton (Pauline Frederick), a woman in command of a three million dollar fortune. When she gives him a playful eye, he moves in and immediately starts wooing her, dismissing the younger, more attractive women at the party. He's quickly in her good graces, offered control of $100,000 to invest as he sees fit. He's on top of the world again (though we never really see how he spends much of the money), and when Mabel's daughter Jeanne (May McAvoy) comes to visit from college across the country, leaving her innocent beau Fred (Pierre Gendron) behind. Jeanne misses her mother who has refused to come and visit, sending nothing for Jeanne's birthday, and is spending all of her time with Edmund.

However, Edmund's cad tendencies take over when he both sees Jeanne for the first time and learns that she has, in trust, half of Mabel's fortune. Prettier and still wealthy? He's on board, and he quickly changes tactics, balancing both women against each other without their knowledge until he's caught by Mabel and announces his engagement to Jeanne. The emotional core of this film is Mabel's growth as a woman learning to accept her age as well as the failure of her quest for romance combined with Jeanne's growing up into a woman entering a world of predators. You see, Edmund doesn't stop being a cad because he's married to Jeanne. He lied endlessly to Mabel about where he was going at nights, and he does the exact same thing to Jeanne.

The third woman of the title is a very minor character named Harriet (Marie Prevost) who appears in the opening party scene, disappears for a while, and then shows up as Edmund's date after he marries Jeanne. She doesn't have much in the way of character, and after the confrontation that stems from Fred, who has moved to New York to study medicine, lifting Harriet at a party so she can grab a stuffed monkey. Edmund takes it personally and starts throwing punches. Fred hits him with a champagne bottle, and Fred, being a good guy, takes Edmund home where he sees Jeanne for the first time since she left.

Much like The Marriage Circle, it feels like the film is going for straight up tragedy for a while. Fred has lost the woman he loves to an unscrupulous man. Jeanne is trapped in a marriage to a cad. Mabel has been wronged by the same man but she can't do anything about it because he holds her love letters over her which, if published, could invite scandal. She takes drastic action that dooms her but frees Jeanne, and we have the makings of a story that ends with a woman having to take herself beyond moral behavior to undo her own mistakes and save her daughter.

But then there's a quick trial and she's free and everything's happy.

It's...weird. It doesn't work. It happens too swiftly, balancing some weird tonal shifts poorly over a very short period of time.

I'll also say that the building of character is largely better than in most of the other films that Lubitsch worked on with Kraly as writer, but it's a step down from The Marriage Circle. Mabel's need for love is understandable, but her attachment to Edmund feels underdeveloped. That's the big character problem in the film, and it's not a small problem. The whole movie kind of hinges on it when a not-unattractive older woman with several million dollars in the bank and should be fending off lots of suitors, she only seems to have one that she immediately falls for. I also don't quite see the appeal that Jeanne has for Edmund. His appeal to women seems to be more implied that actually shown which is important when the movie really hinges on him being irresistible to two women.

However, with that being said, everything else is actually quite good. I especially like the lovelorn Fred, selling his watch to buy his girl a birthday present. He's also ready to defend her when he finds out the intolerableness of her situation. The acting is quite good all around as well with Lubitsch understanding how to get the best from his actors pretty consistently.

So, the film more firmly fits as a tragedy, but Lubitsch and Kraly wanted to end it like a comedy. I think the central problem is that it's too short. Give it another ten minutes and you can give Edmund a few moments early to demonstrate his irresistibility and draw out the ending to find more human moments of emotion instead of the whiplash through some plot points towards a happy conclusion. There's enough skill on display in both the writing and direction to make the film almost worthwhile. It's a near miss, I think.