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Saturday, March 28, 2009

Three Secrets (1950) [NR] ***/****


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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