Three Women (Warner Brothers, 1924)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Film Is Dead. Long Live Film!, TCM showed a couple of odd silent movies directed by Ernst Lubitsch: a 1924 comedy/melodrama from Warner Bros. called Three Women and a 1919 comedy/fantasy from his early years in Germany called The Doll. Three Women is a typical silent film about a no-good rotter named Edmund Lamont (Lew Cody, a specialist in these sorts of roles) who, as the title suggests, romances three women. One is middle-aged wealthy heiress Mabel Wilton (Pauline Frederick, one of the veteran Broadway actresses who got wooed into the movies by Goldwyn Pictures, which jocularly earned it the nickname “The Old Ladies’ Home”); one is her daughter Jeannie (May McAvoy, who three years later would play Al Jolson’s girlfriend in The Jazz Singer); and one is an anonymous bimbo named Harriet (Marie Prevost). We know right off the bat that Edmund is up to no good partly because of his thin little “roo” moustache, and partly because a heavy-set man named Harvey Craig (Willard Louis) is dogging Edmund for money he owes him. Edmund and Mabel meet at a charity ball at which Edmund is throwing around money he doesn’t have, and after he and Mabel literally bump into each other, Harvey points out that Mabel has a lot of money ($3 million, to be exact), and if Edmund romances her he can get the money he needs to pay his debt to Harvey and everyone else to whom he owes funds. Soon Mabel is inviting Edmund to her home, lighting incense in an elaborate sitting room and preparing to canoodle with him – while Jeannie, ostensibly a student at UC Berkeley (though there’s a major geographical glitch here: when we see her get on a train called the “Los Angeles Express” to visit her mom in New York, the train station from which she boards is clearly labeled “San Bernardino”), is getting restive. She’s surrounded by a lot of men, but the one who truly loves her is medical student Fred Colman (Pierre Gendron), who is broke but expects to be making a lot of money once he becomes a doctor. Fred hocks his watch to get the money to buy Jeannie a bracelet for her 18th birthday, but then gets aced when her mom sends her either the exact same bracelet or an even fancier one.

When Jeannie finally arrives in New York and moves in with her mom, Mabel is spending so much time with Edmund that Jeannie literally never sees her; she’s palmed off with soup for her dinner while Edmund and Mabel are dining out, and she complains that she’s lonelier at home than she ever was on campus (though since she was surrounded by people during the campus scenes, that’s all too easy to believe!). Edmund happens to meet Jeannie and starts a flirtation with her without knowing Mabel is her mother, and ultimately Edmund actually gets Jeannie to marry him after he finds out that she has her own money, an inheritance from her late father. Unfortunately, the point at which Edmond and Jeannie get hitched legally is the point at which Three Women abandons the path of light romantic comedy at which Lubitsch was best and turns into all too typical silent-era melodrama. Fred Colman shows up and announces that he’s got an internship in New York and wants to start dating Jeannie again – and he’s understandably miffed when he finds out Jeannie is actually married to someone else. Mom is also miffed, especially when she learns that Edmund is actually seeing the titular third woman, Harriet, at a typically preposterous 1920’s establishment called the Monkey Club. The reason it’s named that is the patrons are given papier-maché monkeys on stalks that they can manipulate. Mabel demands that Edmund give up Jeannie, but Edmund threatens to release Mabel’s love letters to him if she pushes it, which will embarrass her in a scandal. So Mabel, in Jeannie’s presence, pulls a gun on Edmund and shoots him, then tells Jeannie, “You’re free.” Jeannie takes the love letters with which Edmund was threatening to blackmail them, tears them up and throws them in the fire. Mabel is put on trial for Edmund’s murder but is acquitted, and she, Jeannie and Fred Colman end up together at the end.

Three Women was one of the projects on which Lubitsch worked with writer Hans Kräly, his working partner in Germany, whom he insisted on bringing with him when he emigrated from Germany to the U.S. Lubitsch was brought to the U.S. by Mary Pickford to direct Rosita (1923), which cast her as an innocent Spanish dancer torn between a lecherous king and the man who really loves her. Turner Classic Movies’ “Silent Sunday Showcase” host Jacqueline Stewart keeps insisting that Rosita was a major hit even though all other sources I’ve read say it was one of Pickford’s few flops, and it was a big enough career embarrassment it was one of the few Pickford films she did not bother to save in her archives. (The extant print was discovered in Russia.) Lubitsch stayed in Hollywood but ended up under contract to Warner Brothers (back when they were still spelling out the word “Brothers” instead of abbreviating it “Bros.”) when they were still a second-tier studio. Lubitsch’s films at Warners got better as his tenure there progressed, and by the end of the 1920’s he was under contract to the most prestigious studio at the time, Paramount, making films that reflected his unique brand of saucy romantic comedy with the so-called “Lubitsch touches.” Alas, his working relationship with Hans Kräly (with whom he seemed to have the sort of partnership that Dudley Nichols had with John Ford, Robert Riskin with Frank Capra, and Charles Bennett with Alfred Hitchcock) ended abruptly when he caught Kräly having an affair with Mrs. Lubitsch, and rather than react with the aw-what-the-hell detachment of a Lubitsch character, Lubitsch had a jealous hissy-fit and banned Kräly from his future projects. More’s the pity, I say, though one imdb.com reviewer called Kräly “a drag on Lubitsch.”