All the things that stick in the memory supposedly come in threes – three magic wishes, Goldilocks’ three bears, the Three Musketeers – and here, a Broadway saga of three beautiful chorus girls, Sally, Irene and Mary. Filmmakers in the 1920s never seemed to tire of cinematic tales of backstage life, nor did audiences. They lapped up this film’s mixture of glamour, laughter, and tears, served up in style by a dream trio in the title roles: Constance Bennett (Sally), Joan Crawford (Irene), and Sally O’Neil (Mary).
The world of showgirls, sugar daddies, stage door johnnies, and lounge lizards, and life upon the wicked stage had captured the popular imagination ever since Florenz Ziegfeld began “glorifying the American girl” in 1907, in his spectacular annual Follies revues, an image later leavened with knowing wisecracks by Avery Hopwood’s 1919 hit play The Gold Diggers. Everyone knew there was an underside, beyond the glamour of the footlights, a maelstrom of ambition and heartbreak: chorines were working girls, too, and no matter what, the show must go on. Sally, Irene and Mary presents its trio’s fates and fortunes in the traditional package of dressing room scenes, onstage spectacle, and snappy intertitles, interwoven with an episodic plot about innocents from the tenements at the mercy of big city temptations, pursued by “Broadway wolves,” while still dreaming of their ordinary, decent boyfriends back on the Lower East Side.
The property started life in 1921 as a vaudeville sketch by Eddie Dowling, who also starred as Jimmy Dugan, with three chorus girl friends, each named after the title characters of recent smash musicals, Sally, Irene, and Mary, complete with performances of their respective hit songs. The vaudeville sketch grew into a Shubert touring show, and then a full-fledged Broadway musical that ran almost a year, 1922-23, with a revival in 1925.
By the time it reached the screen, the simple story had been transformed by the multi-talented Edmund Goulding into a mélange of comedy and melodrama. The script may skirt originality, but its scenes and characters are vivid and memorable. Goulding was a prolific, inventive writer (he co-wrote the film Tol’able David and the play Dancing Mothers, and went on to concoct the story of M-G-M’s landmark talkie The Broadway Melody), but he also had a gift for the sensitive handling of female players. This was only his second film as a director, but this skill is already in evidence, and would be throughout his career, working with Garbo (Love), Gloria Swanson (The Trespasser), the all-star cast of Grand Hotel, and Bette Davis (Dark Victory and The Old Maid).
The opening five minutes compactly introduces each of our heroines, on their way to the theatre for their show, “The Dainties”. Each is immediately given a distinct personality.
Sally, played by cool blonde Constance Bennett, is elegant, worldly wise, all too familiar with the ways of the showbiz world, and surprisingly carries a torch for the old sugar daddy who keeps her in style, with a plush apartment, chic ensembles, and chinchilla wraps.
Joan Crawford is Irene, naïve, romantic, superstitious, ever on the brink, yearning for love, but with tragedy looming. As Lucille Le Sueur, she was a recent newcomer to Hollywood, fresh from the chorus line of a Shubert revue on Broadway. She had no dramatic training, but she could do a mad, abandoned Charleston. And she was desperate to learn her craft. Luckily, she found the right tutors: cameraman John Arnold, and Edmund Goulding. This was only her fourth film, but it was the first in which her star quality and soulful eyes were noticed; she had photogénie in buckets. Goulding recognized her potential right away, reputedly telling Walter Wanger: “She’s the find of the year, Walter – the greatest find of the year! Beautiful, wonderful emotional quality – bound for stardom.” Crawford always remained grateful; years later she told a reporter, “I would still be dancing the Charleston on table tops if it weren’t for Eddie.”
However, the character who dominated the film at the time was Mary, the feisty young Irish girl from the tenements, who keeps her head though flushed with success and excited by the new world around her. The role was initially announced for Eleanor Boardman, but petite, perky Sally O’Neil (real name Virginia “Chotsey” Noonan), blessed with an innate sense of humor, was cast just before shooting began. Photoplay pronounced O’Neil “a knockout!”; audiences thought so too. She is certainly well paired with handsome, boyish William Haines as her plumber boyfriend Jimmy Dugan (a much reduced role compared to the Eddie Dowling stage original). Even so, the film is notable today for Crawford, whether it’s in her first scene, watching a boy dancing in the street, dropping her make-up case and staring into its ominous broken mirror (our first glimpse of those Crawford eyes!); or madly kicking up her heels in the show’s Charleston production number; or her later reappearance in spirit, rejoining the cast in a ghostly Charleston that rings down the curtain, and stays in the memory.
It is Crawford, too, who features in the most visually haunting sequences. Aside from that opening broken mirror shot, there’s her assignation with a lounge lizard, with the lyrics of Victor Herbert’s romantic “A Kiss in the Dark” on a player-piano emoting in counterpoint to her disappointment at being ushered out when he realizes she’s a decent girl. Even more striking is the suspense created by the Western Union telegrapher who types Irene’s telegram telling Mary about her elopement. The message is revealed in fragments, intercut with the speeding car racing a train, ending in a fatal crash.
Among the film’s other visual treats are the showgirl costumes by Russian émigré Erté (Romain de Tirtoff), celebrated as an illustrator for Harper’s Bazaar and designer of eye-popping creations for lavish revues in Paris and New York. His tenure at M-G-M was short, but happily Sally, Irene and Mary gave him full rein in one production number, featuring a revolving perfume bottle-stopper decorated with arching chorines in jewels, with Mary glorified at its pinnacle, sporting an Art Deco headdress and draped in little else but long strands of pearls. The sight shocks Mary’s plumber boyfriend Jimmy Dugan, who exclaims: “Where’s her clothes?” Note too Sally’s exquisite art nouveau bedroom, with its butterfly motif (described by Variety’s reviewer as “a nightmare”), and Sally’s lounge, littered with scattered pillows for her guests. The gritty world of the theatre, the street outside, and the tenements created by Cedric Gibbons and Merrill Pye counterbalance the fantasy, and offer a welcome glimpse of reality.
Irene’s demise is a cautionary tale; Sally rends our hearts when she finally breaks down and confesses she actually loves the philanderer who keeps her. Mary turns out to be the survivor, who leaves the empty glitz and glamour behind. The final scene is touching, and joyous, with the two lovers, Mary and Jimmy, reunited on the tenement rooftop, under a studio moon.
As for the real-life Sally, Irene, and Mary – Constance, Joan, and Sally – the trio of actresses had mixed fortunes. Sally O’Neil’s meteoric stardom didn’t last, despite films with Buster Keaton and John Ford; her wayward personal life, family run-ins with the law, and bouts of temperament intervened. Constance Bennett’s life paralleled her onscreen part: regarded as the star property of the film, she left her contract to marry a millionaire, though her retirement was short-lived; she returned in 1929 to become one of the highest-paid actresses in Hollywood, starring in a string of women’s films, including What Price Hollywood. It was Crawford who became a screen goddess, and a legend. When she died in 1977, she was still every inch the star. Writing in the New York Times, George Cukor paid tribute to her lifelong love affair with the camera: “Many found it difficult to overcome some understandable nervousness as this juggernaut ground closer and closer. Not Joan Crawford. The nearer the camera, the more tender and yielding she became – her eyes glistening, her lips avid in ecstatic acceptance. The camera saw, I suspect, a side of her that no flesh‐and‐blood lover ever saw. … I thought Joan Crawford could never die. Come to think of it, as long as celluloid holds together and the word Hollywood means anything to anyone, she never will.”

Catherine A. Surowiec