What Do You Think? Number Three (MGM, 1938)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2023 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

My final film on TCM July 27 was a quite compelling short called What Do You Think? (Number Three), a vest-pocket little tale of the love story of aspiring violinist John Dosier (Arthur Rieck) and his girlfriend Mary (Mary Howard). They get married and set off on a one-year honeymoon, only at the close of it John gets a fatal disease and died. Mary suffered a premonition one night when they poured champagne to drink a toast to their happiness, but one of the glasses broke mysteriously and Mary took it as an omen of impending doom. Mary had the predictable reaction to losing John so suddenly, and after a year of hiding herself away from the world, she ventured out again to a party hosted by John’s mother (Mary Forbes), only just as she’s finally ventured out into the world, a strolling violinist plays the “Sonata for a Kiss,” which John had composed for Mary as a love token lo those many years ago. Mary’s adjustment to her grief is suddenly thrown in reverse and she goes back into her shell again. Deciding she has nothing to live for, she determines to commit suicide with an overdose of sleeping pills and plays John’s record of “Sonata for a Kiss” (on the real Victor label, not a phony one made up for the movie) so his playing will be the last thing she hears before she exits the world.

Only, wouldn’t ya know it, the final high note on John’s record breaks the glass into which she’s dissolved the sleeping pills and most of the lethal solution spills out onto the dresser on which she’d put the glass. Mary interprets this as a message from John telling her to keep on living and keep dating Fred (Roger Converse), who’d been the best man at their wedding and had been more or less dating her since John’s death. What made this film unusually interesting was its director, Jacques Tourneur, a year before he made his first feature (Nick Carter, Master Detective, a 1939 MGM “B” starring Walter Pidgeon as the title character, essentially a U.S. knock-off of Sherlock Holmes). It’s not a particularly ambitious film but it’s a perfect short vehicle for Tourneur’s unusual gift for atmosphere, especially evident in his three films for Val Lewton (Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Leopard Man) at RKO in 1942-43. Of course the whole point of the story by writers Carl Dudley and Jack Woodford was to pose the question to the audience – not, “Is it live or is it Memorex?,” as I inevitably joked when the first glass broke, but “Is it physically possible or is it supernatural?” – and leave us wondering, in the film’s title, along with narrator Carey Wilson, “ What do you think?” I think it was an engaging little film, probably the best of the four I saw that night, and given that Val Lewton’s whole approach to horror was to keep the audience in suspense as to whether the events in his films were real or supernatural, it was a good training ground for Tourneur in his Lewton collaborations and his subsequent films.