"Three lights off the same match and one will die."

Three on a Match is a graphic and realistic look at the lives of three young women from the years 1919 to 1932. The story follows them from carefree school days at Public School 62 in New York City through graduation and into early adulthood where they lose touch with each other. The story then skips ahead to 1930 where the three women meet up again and reminisce over lunch. When one of them lights all three of their cigarettes with a single match, they quickly laugh off the popular superstition that one of them will soon die.

The three main characters are all very different. Joan Blondell is Mary, the bad girl in school who cuts class to smoke with the boys. Later she winds up in reform school and then goes into show biz. Ann Dvorak is Vivian, the stuck up and pretty, popular girl. She snags a successful husband and has an adorable son, but seems completely bored by her lot in life. The third friend is Ruth, the valedictorian of their class, now an ambitious career girl. She has the smallest part in the movie but is played by the great Bette Davis. At this stage in her career she could still play soft and vulnerable and was actually fairly striking to look at, most notably in a scene at the beach.

This movie has a few other famous faces in supporting roles. The always-debonair Warren William plays Vivian's understanding husband. A virtually unknown Humphrey Bogart has a few scenes as a ruthless gangster, and Auntie Em herself, Clara Blandick has one brief scene as Mary's mother.

Thanks to the uncompromising script, and raw direction by Mervyn LeRoy Three on a Match holds up well today in terms of content and style. It is very un-Hollywood in the fact that it deals openly and unsentimentally with such unpleasant topics as adultery, kidnapping, child-neglect, drug addiction and suicide. The climactic scene will shock you.

It is also quite nostalgic as it uses newsreel footage, snippets of popular songs and newspaper headlines to mark the passing years.

Three on a Match runs just over an hour, but manages to pack in a whole lot of detail and drama, with first-rate acting throughout. This movie proves that certain societal problems that we think of as new or modern, have, in reality, been with us for a very long time.

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