Diagonaldi Very well executed

Phonearl Good start, but then it gets ruined

Beystiman It's fun, it's light, [but] it has a hard time when its tries to get heavy.

Gurlyndrobb While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

gavin6942 Although Vivian Revere (Ann Dvorak) is seemingly the most successful of a trio of reunited schoolmates, she throws it away by descending into a life of debauchery and drugs.This film has it all, and could very easily be called the exploitation film of the 1930s. While common decency kept it from showing nudity and having people cussing, it has a wealthy wife neglecting her son and getting involved in partying with gamblers and gangsters. This is very much the "bad girl" film of its time.Interestingly, in retrospect the biggest names attached are Humphrey Bogart (who barely has a supporting role) and Bette Davis, who still looks like she had the potential to be a movie star rather than the B-movie queen she became.

windie Though I'm a big fan of movies of the 30s and 40s, I was unaware of Ann Dvorak prior to seeing this one. I thought she gave a very realistic performance (for the time), and it's a shame she didn't have a longer career.Others have synopsized the plot in prior reviews, so I won't rehash it. However, I am surprised that no one else has made the connection to the Lindbergh kidnapping that seemed so obvious to me.On March 1, 1932, the young son of America's hero of the day, Charles Lindbergh, was kidnapped. Google the kidnapping and take a look at pictures of the child...the resemblance to the child in "Three On A Match" is striking. And certainly, the audiences of the day would have been well aware of the connection, as the kidnapping was the top news story in the country for months.A fascinating film!

blanche-2 Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell, and Bette Davis are "Three on a Match" in this 1932 precode film also starring Warren William, Humphrey Bogart, and Lyle Talbot. The story concerns three girls who grow up together - one, Vivian (Dvorak) is from a good family and marries a wealthy attorney (William); Mary (Blondell) ends up in reform school and goes into show business when she gets out; and Ruth (Davis) becomes a secretary. The three reconnect in adulthood, but the most successful one, Vivian, is bitterly unhappy. She eventually leaves her husband for a friend (Talbot) of Mary's and becomes a nympho drug addict. Ruth and Mary become concerned for her child and work with the boy's father to get him out of the bad situation.Heavy melodrama with a showy performance by Dvorak. Davis is unbelievably young and very pretty; she has hardly anything to do. Bogart is a thug whose boss is owed money by Talbot - he, too, has s small role. The film is almost like a history lesson - as each year goes by, we see sheet music for the popular song of the day and newspaper headlines.Short and entertaining, it's so interesting to see Bogart and Davis, who would end up on top 50 lists of greatest film stars in history, laboring away at these tiny parts. No one can say they didn't pay their dues.

evanston_dad This pre-Code melodrama is terse and blunt, and it also happens to be one of the most shocking of the pre-Code films I've seen.Ann Dvorak, Joan Blondell and Bette Davis play three friends who meet ten years after having attended school together. Dvorak is a society woman who's itching for something more exciting than the dutiful husband (Warren William) and young son she has, and falls in with a gang of druggies and kidnappers. Blondell is the take charge spitfire who decides to intervene and save Dvorak's son from her destructive behavior; she happens also to fall for Dvorak's husband in the process. Dvorak gives a harrowing and blistering performance as a woman who is driven literally insane by drug use, and the film's most shocking content occurs in the scenes that show her wasting away in the drug den, ravaged by cocaine. Blondell is typically cute and sassy. The young Davis might as well not be in the film at all, and only exists so that the title can make sense. The whole thing rushes like a steamroller to a slam-bang climax that will have your jaw on the floor.Like many Warners films from this time period, that movie pretends to be a sobering moral sermon while it's really just an exploitative bit of sensationalism, but whatever its intentions, it's a firecracker of a movie.With an appearance by a very young Humphrey Bogart.Grade: A-