If
there is a problem with Three Secrets
it lies in the script. It’s a film industry truism that you cannot make a great
film from a mediocre script. The film stars three women: Eleanor Parker, Patricia
Neal, and Ruth Roman each of
whom has a secret. The secrets are that each woman put a baby boy up for
adoption with the same Los Angeles adoption agency around the same time. All
three babies were born on September 15th 1944, and now the boy might
be alone on top of a mountain, after a small plane crash killed his adoptive
parents. Since the boy celebrated his sixth birthday on the day of the plane
crash (September 15th, 1950), there are flashbacks to past events.
Eleanor
Parker plays Susan Chase, a married woman who had an affair with a soldier in
1943-44, became pregnant and when the soldier abandoned her decided with her overbearing
mother’s (Katherine Warren) guidance
to allow her son to be adopted. Parker’s husband Bill (Leif Erickson) has no idea about this because Susan never told him.
Patricia Neal plays Phyllis Horn, a celebrity war correspondent with a husband
(Frank Lovejoy) who was tired of having
a wife who put her career first and divorced her, not knowing she was pregnant.
So Phyllis put her child up for adoption. Ruth Roman plays actress Ann Lawrence
who fell in love with a womanizing man who had no intention of marrying her.
When she told him she was pregnant with his child and he rejected her, she hit
him with a statuette and killed him. Convicted of manslaughter she had her baby
while in prison and then put it up for adoption. The problem with the film’s
title is that Ann’s crime, prison sentence, birth of an illegitimate child and
later adoption were front-page news and so can hardly be considered a secret.
The
film is directed by Robert Wise who later
won Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for West Side Story (1961) and The
Sound of Music (1965). Wise seems to do his best work when he has a big
budget, and Three Secrets has
noticeably poorer production values with lots of backdrops standing in for
nature, and lots of sound-stage shooting. Also, Wise doesn’t do anything
interesting to make the film visually dynamic. He shoots it straight and
without imagination. The film improves when the action moves from the
flashbacks to the rescue site at Jackson Lodge at the base of Thunder Mountain,
twenty miles east of Bishop, California, near the Nevada border. There the
focus is on the reporters and the mountaineering rescue team, so this makes for
a great newspaper or radio film, but it’s supposed to be about the three women,
not the journalists. When the three women do get together in Jackson’s Lodge
near the end of the film, the film works, but we only get a few minutes of them
together.
Three Secrets takes place over a
thirty-two hour period but there’s really very little suspense. Everything is
positively resolved for everyone, which is not necessarily the way life plays
out. There’s no agonizing about life-changing decisions, no tension between
Susan and Bill Chase. One film critic, Andrew Wickliffe, suggested that the
film be written as a stage play, just to get the pacing right, and then
rewritten as a screenplay for a film.
Labels:
drama, Eleanor Parker
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