Three Girls

“The genre was a winner for the movies, right from the start. Requirements were minimal: a big city, three pretty faces, some wolves. Sally, Irene and Mary was the first—silent but scrappy in 1925—a tale of three chorus girls looking for love and limelight in New York, New York (one of them was a hungry young actress named Joan Crawford). In Our Blushing Brides, 1930, it was three shopgirls—one of them, again, Joan Crawford. In 1932’s Three on a Match, the girls were childhood friends, all grown up and sharing bites of the Big Apple—shiny, wormy—only this time the Joan was blonde, as in Blondell....