Three on a Match
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
- For the NBC game show, see Three on a Match (TV show).
Three on a Match is a pre-Code film (made in 1932 and directed by Mervyn LeRoy) about three young women who are friends from childhood:
- Mary Keaton aka Mary Bernard (Joan Blondell), a "bad" girl who is sent to a reformatory
- Ruth Wescott (Bette Davis), a normal young woman who becomes a secretary
- Vivian Revere (Ann Dvorak), Mrs. Robert Kirkwood, a rather well-off young woman who marries well (her husband is played by the then-popular pre-Code actor Warren William, who died in the 1940s), and has a son, upon whom she dotes; Vivian's character as a child is played by Anne Shirley, then known as "Dawn O'Day".
Over time, Mary becomes a more stable individual; Ruth has a successful career as a working girl (secretary); but Vivian, the one who seemed to have the brightest future becomes an unstable, dissatisfied young matron, who drifts into very bad company and very bad habits which endanger the very son she loves. She becomes addicted to cocaine, this is not explicitly spelled out, but a young Humphrey Bogart, playing a hood, mimes the dissolute woman's habit by stretching open his nostrils in one scene, winkingly. Bogart, along with Allen Jenkins and Edward Arnold (as "Ace") are three very sadistic (this is a pre-Coder) hoods who ruin Vivian's life and end up kidnapping her and her beloved son for ransom. However Vivian knows that she and her son are doomed and will not be safely released.
In her one selfless act of contrition and sacrifice, Vivian scrawls a message in lipstick on her blouse and throws herself to her death, thus alerting the authorities to the crime scene and saving her son's life.
Robert Kirkwood, her widower, ends up marrying his late wife's friend, née Mary Keaton (Joan Blondell's character) and Vivian goes unmentioned and presumably unlamented as the film ends with Ruth and Mary's characters playing with the child.
The harsh, almost Gothic bloody ending signals that this was a pre-Breen Code film (i.e. made before the middle of 1934).
