Classic Movie Review: 'Three of Hearts'

Three of Hearts (1993)

Directed by Yurek Bogayevicz

Writtten by Adam Greenman, Mitch Glazer

Starring Kelly Lynch, Billy Baldwin, Sherilyn Fenn, Joe Pantoliano

Release Date April 30th, 1993

Published June 8th, 2023

Going into rewatching 1993's Three of Hearts for the new Everyone's a Critic 1993 podcast, I was concerned that a movie about a lesbian trying to gaslight her ex-girlfriend into coming back to her, via a straight, male, sex-worker, might not have aged well three decades later. I need not have worried. Three of Hearts would have to develop a pulse to be genuinely offensive. This non-entity of a rom-com is dimwitted, lazy and ill-conceived. Yes, based on the premise, it's a little offensive as well but not memorably or interestingly so.

Three of Hearts stars Kelly Lynch as heartbroken Dr. Connie Czapski. Lynch's conception of a lesbian is wearing a leather jacket and a doo-rag. That's about as offensive the movie gets, even its stereotypes are lazy. Connie is heartbroken because her college professor girlfriend, Ellen (Sherilyn Fenn), has dumped her and may not, in fact, be gay at all. She says she doesn't regret her relationship with Connie per se, but she confesses to not being the conception of gay that Connie envisions for her. Whatever that means.

In an effort to win Ellen back, Connie comes up with a bizarre plan. Needing a date to a wedding where she's playing the role of closeted lesbian, Connie hires a sex worker to be her date. Billy Baldwin co-stars as the sex worker, Joe Casella. Joe's primary business is sleeping with lonely older women, often married women tired of their boring old husbands or wealthy widows living high off of their insurance settlements. Keeping Joe in touch with new clients is his pal, and pimp, Mickey (Joe Pantoliano).

The date goes well, Joe charms Connie's family and while he can't get Connie into bed, she's still gay, she does like Joe and it inspires a scheme. She will hire Joe, and give him a place to live, if he seduces and destroys her ex-girlfriend. Connie's assumption is that if Ellen gets her heart broken by a handsome guy, she will come running back to her. The plan, of course, backfires. Joe begins to fall in love with Ellen while Connie... well, she disappears for a while as the movie shoehorns a mob story into the plot.

Joe has, apparently, been seeing the wife of a gangster while said gangster was in prison. The gangster is out of prison now and looking to take revenge on the man who was sleeping with his wife. For a while, Mickey is able to keep the heat off of Joe but when Joe tells Mickey he wants to get out of being a gigolo, Mickey lets the mobster have Joe and Joe is nearly beaten to death, saved only by Connie's quick thinking after she's randomly brought into this plot in the third act.

Three of Hearts was infamous at the time of its release after co-star Sherilyn Fenn began speaking out about mistreatment on the set. Fenn claimed that director Yurek Bogayevicz was openly angry with her for not wanting to strip down for the part. Fenn was already going to be quite nude in another 1993 release, Boxing Helena, and had been topless in a forgettable horror movie called Meridian: Kiss of the Beast and she was worried about being typecast for sexy roles. Her reticence to take off her clothes boiled over on the set and may have contributed to several rewrites of the script during production.

Beyond that, Three of Hearts is a desperately mundane and oddly crafted rom-com-drama. The movie is never funny but it doesn't have the weight to be dramatic. It just sort of lays there and enacts a plot that never comes to life. As with many movies of the time period, no one seems concerned about the actual ugliness of the plot at hand. A woman attempts to destroy her girlfriend emotionally and trick her into coming back to her. There is a dark streak of homophobia at play there and, in general, it's just an ugly plot all around.

It's no wonder that, as a culture, we've had to reckon with Me-Too, hatred of women is baked into our popular culture. When we treat a plot like Three of Hearts as a potentially comic conceit, it's indicative of just how deeply, desperately, and unfortunately ingrained misogyny is in our culture. Women have had to work incredibly hard to work through such inherent bias to reach a point where we are willing to recognize a movie like Three of Hearts is actually really gross rather than a comic lark as it was in 1993.

That said, removing it from a cultural perspective, Three of Hearts is far too bland to be truly offensive. It's a signpost of something in our culture but the film is far too forgettable to be a pivot point for a real conversation about any important subject matter. It's an ugly, stupid, deeply unfunny movie, but it's not memorable enough to linger in a real cultural conversation. It's a relic of the early 1990s and not a particularly valuable one.

Three of Hearts was recently the subject of my new podcast, Everyone's a Critic 1993. It's a spinoff of my main weekly podcast, The Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast. On the Everyone's a Critic 1993 podcast, myself and my co-hosts, teenager M.J and Gen-X-er Amy, watch the movies of 1993 in chronological release order. It's a fascinating look at the ways in which movies and popular culture in general have changed in a mere three decades. You can listen to the Everyone's a Critic 1993 Podcast on the Everyone's a Critic Movie Review Podcast feed, wherever you listen to podcasts.

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