Movies : Drama : TV Rip : English
In 1949, three-year-old Kathy Fiscus fell down a well in California. The massive news coverage of an attempt to rescue her kept America on tenterhooks for days. Cathy didn't make it, but the event formed the inspiration behind both the Kirk Douglas classic Ace In The Hole (1951) - Billy Wilder's blistering assassination of a morally corrupt media - and Robert Wise's Three Secrets (1950). However, though they share the same source material and plot device, the two films don't bare comparison. Three Secrets comes from an entirely different angle.
When news breaks that adopted five-year-old Johnny Peterson is the sole survivor of an air crash halfway up a Californian mountain, alarm bells ring for three women. Susan Chase (Parker), Phyllis Horn (Neal) and Ann Lawrence (Roman) all handed over their newborn baby boys to Johnny's adoption agency on the day that he was registered. The film speeds the women to the crash scene to find out if Johnny can be saved from his cliff-top peril, and to discover which of them is his birth mother.
On the way, the script by Gina Kaus and Martin Rackin peeks into the lives of the women to hear each of their confessions on why they gave up their babies for adoption. Ace reporter Phyllis wanted to pursue a career, former showgirl Ann was sent down for murdering a former lover, while wholesome Susan discovered she was pregnant two weeks after her fiancée dumped her. By the time she told him, he'd already got married. Skilfully delivered by Parker, Neal and Roman, their stories are still resonant half a century later, adding emotional clout to the melodrama building at the crash site.
Most people will know of director Wise's work through West Side Story and The Sound Of Music. But he also directed The Andromeda Strain and Executive Suite and knew a thing or two about how to build tension. With David Buttolph's score to swell it further still, Three Secrets can be gripping stuff. If you want to see, in microcosm, how script, delivery, direction and music work together to tighten the nerves, watch the scene in which Patricia Neal guides Eleanor Parker's binocular sweep up the mountainside towards helpless Johnny. Hitch couldn't have done it better.
