William Wyler | These Three / 1936

study in hypocrisy

by Douglas Messerli

 

Lillian Hellman (screenplay, based on her drama, The Children’s Hour), William Wyler (director) These Three / 1936

 

Based on Lillian Hellman’s notorious 1934 drama The Children’s Hour about a rumored lesbian affair between two women who run a private school, These Three—also scripted by Hellman—is a heterosexual melodrama about the two women characters, Martha Dobie (Miriam Hopkins) and Karen Wright (Merle Oberon), who are rumored to both have had sexual relations with a local doctor, Joseph Cardin (Joe McCrea), which results it the ruination of all their careers and personal reputations, despite the fact that the rumor was all based on lies spread by one child, Mary Tilford  (Bonita Granville) told her reportedly by another child, Rosalie Wells (Marcia Mae Jones).

      I’m sorry, but in 2021, with the real shocks of yet another war, the behavior of the majority of a US political party, and the fact that the world is still recovering from an epidemic, I find it difficult to get wrought up about the sexual relationships of three unmarried adults as reported by two of the women’s young students. And how this small Massachusetts community managed to find the trio guilty as charged, particularly given the second-hand reports of a minor who cannot even comprehend what her words are suggesting seems quite implausible.         

    Lest we tsk tsk an unenlightened puritanical past, however, we might remind ourselves of the California McMartin preschool case of 1982-1990, wherein an apparently deranged mother, on the basis of her preschool son’s difficult bowel movements, accused both her estranged husband and one of the McMartin family members of sodomizing her child, an accusation which eventually grew to a truly hysterical proportions ultimately suggesting that 360 children had been abused in the preschool facility run by Virginia McMartin and Peggy McMartin Buckey who were charged with 115 counts of child abuse involving 48 children along with Ray Buckey and three other teachers who were all acquitted or, in Ray Buckey’s case released after a second trial and a hung jury. These Three, also implied mild child abuse. And for that matter we might recall the dozens of university situations where university professors, deans, and even presidents have been drummed out of their institutions for having extra-marital affairs even as I write these words. Heterosexual sex between consenting adults amazingly can still ruin one’s life.

       The fact that in the case of William Wyler’s 1936 film, we know that the rumors created mostly by a truly evil young girl, Mary, based partly on the prattling of a dotty, mean-spirited aunt of Martha’s, Lily Mortar (Catherine Doucet), makes the situation all the more painful, as the characters and we simultaneously come to realize that much like the witch trials of Salem in early US history, it takes only the smallest of incidences to create a communal attack on some of its most reputable citizens. In this case it was simply some overheard words and a stolen bracelet.

       Wyler’s play, moreover, given the superb action of Hopkins, Oberon, Doucet, and the young child actor Granville in particular, transformed this work into a full-fledged drama. Even the always affable and good-looking McCrea helped to make this melodrama effective. If Hellman had originally written it this way, as a study in small-town mores about heterosexual behavior, hinting of a possible ménage à trois or polyamorous affair, this film might have been rightly praised for its insightful outrage against the puritanical values which continue to haunt American culture.

 

     Indeed, critics of the day were appreciative of her script and the performances, The New York Times critic Frank S. Nugent writing, "Miss Hellman's job of literary carpentry is little short of brilliant. Upon the framework of her stage success she has constructed an absorbing, tautly written and dramatically vital screen play. To it, in turn, a gifted cast headed by Merle Oberon, Miriam Hopkins and Joel McCrea has contributed lavishly of its talents, aided by superb direction and exceptionally fine photography. In its totality the picture emerges as one of the finest screen dramas in recent years.”

      In The Spectator British author Graham Greene went even further: "I have seldom been so moved by any fictional film . . . After ten minutes or so of the usual screen sentiment, quaintness and exaggeration, one began to watch the incredulous pleasure of nothing less than life."

     And the Variety review added: "Hellman, if anything, has improved upon the original in scripting the triangle as a dramatis personae of romantic frustration, three basically wholesome victims of an unwholesome combination of circumstance. McCrea was never better in translating a difficult assignment intelligently and sympathetically. The well-bred restraint of Hopkins and Oberon in their travail with the mixture of juvenile emotions at their boarding school is likewise impressive."

      Yet everything these reviews say is spiced with a great deal of unrecognized hypocrisy. Of course, it is easier for these critics to talk about a misbehaving heterosexual trio than it would be to engage in a discussion of the real Hellman subject, homosexuality, and not even “real homosexuality,” mind you but a lesbian relationship as imagined by 12-year-old girls.

   Homosexuality mentioned on stage was also illegal in New York State when Hellman’s play premiered two years earlier, but the author, director, and the cast persevered and authorities chose to overlook the subject matter.

    But no Hollywood director would dare to challenge the Hays Code by 1936, and even Hellman seemed quite willing to rework her not so-very-adventurous peek into the queer by way of false accusation only to make it an even more meek look at straight sexuality that didn’t fit into the societal ways of confining it. And no one came away from this work, surely, without some guilt in praising the daring narrative. Surely any well-read moviegoer would have known of the real story behind These Three, the film whose title titillates with the notion of a guilty straight threesome.

    At least we didn’t have to endure yet another required suicide of someone who might have even imagined loving another human being of same sex. In this version Karen runs off to Vienna who with her Doctor husband is sure to grow happily fat on the pastries next door to his hospital.

      Did this film not serve as a sort of preamble to Wyler’s 1961 version of Hellman’s work, it would not have been included in the My Queer Cinema series.

 

Los Angeles, April 1, 2022

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (April 2022).