Available on DVD and Blu-ray from Mon 29 June 2015

Joseph L. Mankiewicz / USA / 1949 / 103 mins

We are in comfortable suburbia. Three women at different points of the class scale, and with very different marriages, are supervising a school trip. Before they embark on the boat that will take them to the picnic site, they are handed a poison pen letter suggesting the town’s man eating divorcee, Addie Ross, has run off with one of the women’s husbands. Each wife is left wondering if it is her marriage that’s failed and who is to blame, their stories told in flashback. The letter writer is heard only in voice-over (Celeste Holm’s tones drip with honeyed venom) and never seen.

The three wives are Lora-Mae (Linda Darnell), the manipulative and wily working-class minx and ideal trophy wife who ensnares her boss into marriage, Debbie (Jeanne Crain), the young farm girl ill at ease with the country club smart set, and Rita (Ann Sothern), the social-climbing career woman who earns more money than her teacher husband. If it sounds like the setup for Real Housewives of Miami, it’s certainly more entertaining (and possibly more authentic) than what constitutes most present-day chick flicks.

As a comedy of manners it is telling and as a tale of the battle of the sexes in pent-up suburbia it’s surprisingly modern. The women dis their husbands, but realise they can’t live without them. The script is full of great one-liners: no, that’s not a portrait of his ex-wife on the piano says Lora-Mae’s hubby, ‘I wouldn’t even have her fingerprints in the house!’

The message of the movie is: 1. Don’t take love for granted and 2. Wealth and acquisitions don’t (always) make you happy. More critical observers, however, might see it as: submit to your man or some other dame will take away. But see past the dated stand-by-your-man gender politics and it’s a fabulously engaging movie which reflects well the transitioning role of women, from Rosie the Riveter of wartime to the desperate housewives of the 1950s.

This was Mankiewicz’s touching and thought-provoking, Oscar-winning dry run for his classic All About Eve (1950), and the two movies have much in common, including Thelma Ritter, cast here in one of her best wisecracking roles. Look out also for a young and dashing Kirk Douglas, and the glossy cinematography of Arthur C. Miller, which gives the glamour just the right burnished sheen in this beautifully rendered Masters of Cinema presentation.