Three Secrets Blu-ray Review
Who's your mommy?
Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman, October 16, 2012
Three Secrets is a fairly standard melodramatic soap opera with a rather impressive pedigree, being one of the
early directorial efforts of Robert Wise, and one of the first films in Wise's directing
oeuvre that wasn't a B or
quasi-B
feature. Wise, who for most Baby Boomers will forever be associated with
West Side Story and
The Sound of Music, started his long career as an
editor, working on such iconic fare as
Citizen Kane. His first directorial efforts were solid if exploitative items like
The Curse of the Cat
People and
The Body Snatcher, but by the time the fifties rolled around, Wise had begun to find his
directorial voice and would soon offer the world his first undisputed masterpiece,
The Day the Earth Stood Still. One
year prior to that release, however, Wise came out with
Three Secrets, an uneasy amalgam that combined
elements of Joseph L. Mankiewicz's enormously successful 1949 sudser
A Letter to Three Wives with a sort of
presaging of another recent Olive Films Blu-ray release, 1956's
The Mountain. As with
Three Wives, we have a trio of females around
whom a mystery swirls. In the case of
Wives, it was which woman's husband had left her to have an affair with
the titular letter writer; in the case of
Three Secrets, it's which woman had a baby whom she gave up for
adoption and who is now a five year old stranded on a precarious cliff side after a harrowing airplane crash. Wise
weaves together the back stories of the three women alongside the rescue efforts to get the little boy down off the
mountain before he perishes.
Wise reaches right out and grabs the viewer by the heartstrings even as the film's credits are rolling by, with a
frightening
scene consisting simply of an airplane engine sputtering. It roars for a moment, cuts out, and comes back on, only to
fail
again. We quickly cut inside the craft to see a little boy turning toward the camera to ask his mother when they'll be
getting home, at which point disaster strikes. A rescue aircraft is quickly sent out to locate the wreckage, taking some
photographs of the twisted hull of the aircraft perched precariously on a precipitous cliff, and it's assumed that there
could
be no survivors. But a quick review of two photos taken seven minutes apart proves that the little boy is alive—or at
least
was when the pictures were snapped, as he's moved quite a distance between the two photos.
The rescue of little Johnnie becomes a media sensation (in fact some elements of this film are strangely reminiscent of
Billy Wilder's great
Ace in the Hole), and a kind of smarmy journalist quickly discovers that little Johnnie had
actually been a foundling who was adopted by the parents who perished in the devastating plane crash. That of
course sets the guy off on an attempt to figure out who the real mother is, hoping for a scoop that will play up the
human interest angle even more than it already is being. The journalist finds out what facility handled the adoption
and goes there, but is rebuffed by the no nonsense administrator, who, after he leaves, confides to her secretary that
there were four babies born the day that little Johnnie was and which were entrusted to her facility's care. One was a
little girl and three of them were boys.
With that intriguing premise set before the viewer, the film then starts to revel in a rather nonstop array of
bathos as we get to know the three "contestants" who may or may not be little Johnnie's biological mother.
Co-scenarists Martin Rackin and Gina Kaus aren't especially nuanced in their treatment of the three stories. They start
with Susan (Eleanor Parker), a young wife who has married well to an attorney named Bill (Leif Erickson), but who has
kept her past indiscretion secret. A visit from her mother and the shocking revelation of Johnnie's birth date and
foundling status set Susan off on the first of what will be several flashbacks scattered throughout the film (replete with
wavy imagery and echoing voiceovers saying things like "five years ago, five years ago, five years ago. . .").
Susan it turns out had been having a romance with a Marine ("five years ago" placing the bulk of the back stories in the
film resolutely in World War II territory). The Marine jilts her rather unceremoniously and she doesn't have the
wherewithal to tell him she's pregnant with his child. (One of the fascinating things about this film is how carefully it
skirts even the use of the word "pregnant" or even any outright assertion of illegitimacy or premarital sex.) Susan
attempts to commit suicide, but her mother saves her and insists that she give her baby up for adoption. At the
adoption agency, we also meet two other women who are signing away their parental rights that day, newspaper
writer Phyllis (Patricia Neal) and troubled dance star Ann (Ruth Roman).
Back at the rescue site, Susan bumps into Phyllis (called "Phil" by all her newspaper cronies) again, and we get Phyllis'
back story. She had been a globetrotting war correspondent whose long absences had alienated her from her
husband, though she manages to reclaim his affections at least briefly when she promises not to write anymore and
instead become a "dutiful" homebody wife. That soon ends when her editor hands her a plumb assignment, at which
point her husband walks out on her for good. Of course a few weeks later she discovers she's pregnant. Also showing
up to the rescue site is Ann, whose back story turns out to be quite a bit more dramatic than the other two women.
She had been the girlfriend of an extremely wealthy industrialist who attempted to ditch her. When she revealed she
was carrying his child, he arranged for a slimy guy to claim the baby was his and that she was a woman of loose
morals. Ann snapped and killed her lover, ending up with a five year prison sentence, something she has just been
released from.
The rest of the film plays out with the women trying to come to terms with their decisions and also having to decide if
they want to know for certain whether Johnnie is theirs or not. Phyllis' journalistic efforts may in fact solve the mystery,
but the film adds a little touch of pathos at the end as one character makes a noble sacrifice in order to better little
Johnnie's lot in life.
There's no denying the overtly soap operatic elements of
Three Secrets, but that really doesn't diminish the
emotional power of the film. All three leads are excellent, even if all three are required to look imploringly into the
camera in virtually every scene (try to keep count of the raised eyebrows, hopeful glances and watery eyes—you
probably won't be able to). Neal is especially effective as a gung ho career woman who doesn't cotton easily to being
told what to do or how a "real woman" (an actual quote from her soon to be ex-husband) should behave. The film is
unabashedly in the "women's picture" genre, but it's still a surprisingly effective little film that shows what a superior
director could fashion out of standard (or frankly even substandard) material.
