The Endangered List (Case File #143)

THREESOME (1969)
a.k.a. MODELS INCORPORATED

Produced and directed
by
Lee Beale
[Brandon Chase]

Written by
Kenneth Pressman

Photographed by
Mikael Salomon

Music by
David Whittaker

Technicolor

A presentation of
V.I. Productions, Ltd.

Released by
Howard Mahler Films, Inc.

Running time: 90 minutes

Released unrated in 1969
MPAA rating: R (1974)

STARRING

SYNOPSIS

THREESOME is the story of Ursula, a beautiful young American girl who meets a Danish fashion designer in New York, marries him and returns with him to his homeland, Denmark. Deep in Ursula’s psyche is buried a trauma which causes her to be emotionally unstable. Until her marriage to Martin, there were no obvious manifestations of her problem. But now, transferred to a totally new environment, in a country where she has no friends, where she can neither speak nor understand the language and where her husband’s business interests keep him from her side, she begins to slip deeper and deeper into an emotional abyss. She becomes involved in nightmarish affairs and finds herself unable to resist sexual advances from men or women. She is torn between what she knows to be right and a sexual morass she cannot control. On the brink of collapse, she enters a mental hospital outside Copenhagen, where she befriends Peter, a young Dane whose problems, though of a different nature from Ursula’s, are nonetheless as severe. Together they try to fight their problems but fail with a resounding crash as Peter dies from an overdose of drugs. His death is doubly overwhelming to Ursula because in her effort to help Peter she was attempting to strengthen her own emotions. Ursula runs away from the hospital in despair and into the arms of Kirsten, Europe’s top fashion model. Ursula finds what she feels is real happiness in this lesbian affair only to be shattered again, when she finds she’s pregnant from her stay with Peter at the hospital. What happens to her life with Kirsten? And what of the child still unborn?

THREESOME is a hard, unrelenting and totally realistic look at what can happen to human beings incapable of functioning under stress and strain.

Re-released in 1980 by Group 1
as MODELS INCORPORATED