These Three

1936 melodrama

Rating: 12/20

Plot: Two college girlfriends, Martha and Karen, graduate with no real idea what to do with the rest of their lives. They decide to travel to an old house one of them inherited to turn it into a school for girls. When they get there, they find an uninhabitable house and a doctor playing with some bees in the attic. The doctor convinces them to fix the house up. The trio get the school going, and the brunette woman (Martha or Karen) and Dr. Joe become engaged. But when a troubled little girl, angry with being disciplined for being a pain in the ass, tries to get her revenge by spreading gossip, the lives of all three begin to unravel.

If I had to pick a least favorite decade in movies, it would probably be the 1930s. And These Three is ninety minutes of everything I hate about the decade. Actors who act like they're on a stage because they haven't figured out how to act in a movie, uninventive camera work, a suffocating score, unrealistic dialogue, and conflicts that are too easily resolved by the end of the movie. Although I like the central ideas (the ramifications that can stem from a single lie and the idea that children are evil), nothing about this thing rings true. When the characters spoke to each other, I couldn't help but screaming at my lap top (my dvd player is apparently broken), "People don't talk like that! Somebody slap those mo-fos!" I didn't mind Joel McCrea so much, and I enjoyed Walter Brennan in his small part as the "taxy" driver. But Miriam Hopkins and Merle Oberon, as Martha and Karen respectively, gave terrible, bloated, overly-melodramatic performances that actually made me want to spread vicious rumors about them. And the children's acting in this is brutal, especially Bonita Granville as the malicious Mary Tilford. Apparently, somebody (I'm blaming her parents) told her to "Give it your all, Sweety" before sending her to the studio to give a performance that I hated more than any other performance in recent memory. She screams nearly every line, has a few ear-piercing nervous breakdowns, and really makes any scene she's involved in almost impossible to watch. I looked her up and noticed that she played Nancy Drew a few years later. I was thinking about finding some Nancy Drew movies for my daughters to watch, but I would hate for Bonita Granville's wailing version of the detective to ruin the books for them.

This was recommended by Cory, apparently as revenge for my recommendation of How to Draw a Bunny.