Word: mankiewiez
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From beginning to end, this musical assumes the audience has not only seen the Alan Bates-Lynn Redgrave film of several years back, but has never forgotten a word of it. It is on the basis of this kind of assumption. I think, that Tom Mankiewiez, the author of the show's book, has felt it unnecessary to tell us anything about the show's principal characters: Georgy, the ugly duckling with the big heart; Meredith, the good-looking and cynical slut-next-door: and Jos, the amiable guy who toys with each of them...
While no one has the right to ask this musical to give us Lynn Redgrave and Alan Bates, it is not too much to ask author Mankiewiez to give us two characters strong enough to compensate for the performers' lack of intrinsic charismatic personality. Bates and Redgrave are the kind of beings who could have made Georgy Girl work regardless of the screenplay. Watling and Castle are mere actors, who-even if they are not great characters in their own right-could clearly come up with an equivalent of the film's personalities if given characters...
...sports Warren Duff's dialogue would be a credit to Mankiewiez. William Dietetle's direction shows near genius in the court room scenes, with Fd Regley, as the syndicate mastermind, radiating an injured innocence that makes Frank Costello look like a boy scout...
...common in Europe to have one man both write the script and direct the film. (Rossellini and Pagnol are outstanding examples of the success of this method.) Well, somehow or other, a man named Joseph L. Mankiewiez convinced 20th Century Fox that he could do it too. "A Letter to Three Wives" is by no means a work of art; but it is very funny, and has some value as a critical commentary on the American Way of Life...
...with your husband tonight." The action is then in flashbacks in which each wife recalls her married life to see if it has been such a failure as to force her husband to leave her. The best episode is the one involving Ann Southern and Kirk Doughlas. In it, Mankiewiez, through Douglas, makes a keen and cogent attack on the social status of the school teacher in America and on the candy-coated moralities daily gushing forth from the radio. Nothing is said, or shown, on these subjects, or any other in the film, that must not have occurred...
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