alr

Three Women

Live Musical Accompaniment by Robert Humphreville
Screening on Film
Directed by Ernst Lubitsch.
With May McAvoy, Pauline Frederick, Marie Prevostg.
US, 1924, 35mm, black & white, silent, 83 min.
Print source: George Eastman Museum

After introducing sexual satire to American silent comedy, Lubitsch radically renews American screen melodrama by emphasizing female desire, as he had done in his German star vehicles for Pola Negri. In Three Women, a widow and her grown daughter both fall for the same rake, and then all is further overturned by the arrival of a third woman, played by Marie Prevost, whom Lubitsch cast after noticing her skill at playing a worldly young woman in The Marriage Circle. The film deftly balances comedy and pathos, with the mother’s ache at her descent into middle age given real weight.

Part of film series

Read more

That Certain Feeling... The Touch of Ernst Lubitsch

Current and upcoming film series

Read more

Jean-Pierre Bekolo, 2024 McMillan-Stewart Fellow

Read more

The Practice (and Other Works) By Martín Rejtman

Read more

Chronicles of Changing Times. The Cinema of Edward Yang

Read more
Gene Hackman crouched beside a toilet with audio equipment

From the HFA Collection...

Read more

Being In a Place. Rediscovering Margaret Tait