“Three on a Match” (1932)
Three on a Match, another film from TCM’s series, “Forbidden Hollywood vol. 2“, with then-subversive pre-decency-code movies. As with Night Nurse, there’s not a great deal to scandalize by modern standards: women singing suggestively to each other in a reform school, adultery, drunkenness and implied drug use, and child neglect. Also, one of the characters meets a particularly bad end.
Three schoolmates meet up as adults. One is a showgirl, another a secretary, and the other a depressed rich man’s wife. Each takes on some of the details of the others’ lives as they strive for the life each thinks she wants. The title refers to the superstition that it was bad luck to light three cigarettes off one match, and that the third was marked for death. Originally a myth of WWI, it was instead invented by a match manufacturer.
This wasn’t a good film. It was poorly directed with clumsy newspaper montages to mark the passage of time, and it had a heavy-handed didactic message. But it was worth it to see another example of what was once transgressive at the movies, for an underused bottle-blonde Bette Davis, and a young, handsome Humphrey Bogart in his first gangster role.