A Letter to Three Wives (1949)

Marc Cherry, the creator of Desperate Housewives, admits that he borrowed liberally from this movie in creating the basic situation of the series, and one can easily see how. The movie is set in a posh suburb of New York City (not identified as such, but the Hudson River is clearly visible in some shots; exteriors were filmed in Cold Spring). Three wives and good friends (not yet desperate, but about to become so) are headed out to chaperone a Saturday children's outing when they receive a letter from another member of their circle, an unattached man-trap who claims to have run off with one of her husbands. But which one? They'll have to sweat it out until the evening, each in the meantime doing a feverish mental inventory of the circumstances suggesting that it could be her husband.

The letter-writer is also the movie's sly narrator, thus fusing the roles of Edie (troublemaker) and Mary Alice (observer) in Desperate Housewives. It's not just the set-up that links the movie and the series so closely, though, it's the sardonic tone (very apparent in the narration). In fifty plus years, the suburbs apparently didn't change much. Certainly not in their potential for this kind of humor.

It's a marvelously entertaining movie all the way, guided with a sure hand by writer-director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (celebrated in the former capacity; under-rated in the latter). The principals are Jeanne Crain and Jeffrey Lynn, Ann Sothern and Kirk Douglas, Linda Darnell and Paul Douglas; Celeste Holm as the never-seen narrator; and, in one of her peerless supporting roles, Thelma Ritter. (Anne Baxter was originally slated to be a fourth wife; the source magazine serial was actually "A Letter to Five Wives." Three is about enough for one movie.)

All the actors are fine, with Kirk Douglas notably cast against type as a soft-spoken (until pushed) school-teacher; but it's the unrelated Paul Douglas, as a gruff retail tycoon, who engages in the entertaining form of larceny known as "stealing the picture."