TVM: The Third Girl from the Left [1973]

DIRECTOR: Peter Medak
WRITER:     Dory Previn


In 1973 Kim Novak had been off the big screen for four years having retreated from Hollywood to her home on a hilltop in Carmel, Ca. with a menagerie of animals. Her last two movies, The Legend of Lylah Clare and The Great Bank Robbery, had been duds, and she was approaching an important milestone for many actresses: her fortieth birthday.

Unfortunately, without the distinction of The Third Girl from the Left being Novak and Tony Curtis's television movie debuts and the first and only movie written by legendary songwriter and performer Dory Previn, Third Girl would've vanished after it aired in 1973. It's hardly a memorable piece of work from either actors'careers, although Curtis is first-rate, or of the director Peter Medak.

Television is often a writer's medium and when the writing stinks it shows in the actor's performances because of the tight camerawork: mostly medium shots and close-ups. Dory Previn was a famed Oscar nominated songwriter but her narrative writing here misses the park. It's a promising premise: an over-the-hill showgirl begins a relationship with a younger man while everything else falls around her, including her relationship with Tony Curtis whom she's been trying to get to marry her for thirteen years.

 In an Earl Wilson column interview Dory Previn , a former chorus girl, stated she wrote Third Girl because she wanted to write about what happens to chorus girls as they grow older. "The girls never have names," she told Wilson, "The choreographer says, 'Third girl from the left, you're out of step.' Some try suicide." Given that Previn was a talented songwriter it's no surprise that the most memorable thing about the movie is her haunting song she wrote and sang: "Gloria."

Director Peter Medak was a director from England and had just helmed The Ruling Class [1972] with Peter O'Toole. Third Girl was Medak's American produced movie debut, an inauspicious one. The directing here seems routine - like I said television is mostly a writer's medium.  He would go on to work primarily in television except with some notable theatrical movies like Let Him Have It [1991] and Romeo is Bleeding [1993].

The cast includes Michael Brandon as Novak's lover, George Furth, Barbi Benton, Louis Guss, Michael Conrad, Larry Bishop, and Anne Ramsey.

Third Girl was produced by Hugh Hefner's Playboy Production company and aired on ABC as part of their Tuesday night "Movie-of-the-Week" series.