La terza ragazza a sinistra

"The Third Girl From the Left" is a film that is less a complete story and more just a character study of a woman who is getting older and is vaguely dissatisfied with life when the film begins....and is pretty much the same when it ends.

The story begins with Gloria (Kim Novak) reaching another birthday and realizing her life is passing her by. She's been dating Joey (Tony Curtis) for 13 years and she's getting a bit old to be a chorus girl. Surely, some sort of change is in order. The first opportunity for change is Joey asking her to marry him...though the film seems to imply that this has happened before and nothing came of it. The other change is a young man who is inexplicably smitten with her. He doesn't have a lot of ambition but is very sweet...sort of the opposite of Joey. Will she have a fling with the new guy, stick with Joey or just say none of the above?

This is how the film starts and, for the most part, it's where the film ends. Because of that, there's a vague feeling of dissatisfaction when you watch it. Interesting but missing something...and, by the way, the theme song is annoying and way overused.

Dory Previn wrote the teleplay (and the songs) for this Hugh Hefner-produced television drama about an aging chorus girl (Kim Novak, looking stunning) coming to a crossroads in her life: her thirteen-year relationship with a popular lounge singer is going nowhere, and the club where she works is going topless. What's a classy hoofer to do? Kim takes up with a strapping, 23-year-old delivery boy who promises her the moon, which lights a fire (finally) under her boyfriend. With gritty New York City locales and fabulous Gayne Rescher photography, this 'woman's picture' certainly looks terrific. It also features one of Novak's best performances, a fine job from a singing Tony Curtis, and lots of terrific character actors (as well as Hefner's then-squeeze Barbi Benton) in supporting roles. The sub-plot involving handsome lunk Michael Brandon doesn't really work (his early scenes with Kim are totally fabricated), though it gets the picture where it needs to go, and the freeze-frame ending is downbeat yet provocative.

Kim Novak was only forty when she made The Third Girl from the Left, playing a thirty-six-year-old character, and almost the entirety of the film is dedicated to harping on her age. She's described as an "aging chorus girl", and when she's tired of being ignored by her boyfriend Tony Curtis, she takes up with the significantly younger Michael Brandon. He's supposed to be twenty-three, but at the time he was twenty-eight. A twelve-year age gap, and it's supposed to be the end of the world? Once, their relationship is even referred to as akin to mother-son.

Age aside, the movie had some pros and cons to it. Dory Previn's teleplay was very realistic, but if you're not a cynic you probably won't like it. At the same time, the plot itself was a little thin. Kim plays a chorus girl, but hardly any of the movie focuses on her time at work, an environment I found interesting and would have liked to see more of. If you really love Kim, you can rent this one, but there are also lots of other May-December movies you can choose from. I don't particularly like that genre, so I won't be singing this movie's praises too loudly.