Ladies in Retirement (Charles Vidor, 1941)

 

Isobel Elsom and Ida Lupino in Ladies in Retirement (Charles Vidor, 1941)

Cast: Ida Lupino, Louis Hayward, Evelyn Keyes, Elsa Lanchester, Edith Barrett, Isobel Elsom, Emma Dunn, Queenie Leonard, Clyde Cook. Screenplay: Garrett Fort, Reginald Denham, based on a play by Denham and Edward Percy. Cinematography: George Barnes. Production design: Lionel Banks. Music: Ernst Toch.

Ladies in Retirement, a nifty little thriller included in the Criterion Channel’s “Noir by Gaslight” series, centers on a steely performance by Ida Lupino. She plays Ellen Creed, a Victorian spinster trying to make a life for herself and her two eccentric sisters, Emily (Elsa Lanchester) and Louisa (Edith Barrett). The sisters have been living in London with a family that has become fed up with them, so Ellen is forced to persuade her employer to let them come live with her in a somewhat gloomy house on the edge of a marshland. The employer, whom Ellen serves as a kind of companion/housekeeper, is the imperious Leonora Fiske, a retired “actress.” (We later learn that she was only a fourth-from-the-right chorus girl, who managed to accumulate a small fortune from stage door johnnies and wealthy patrons.) Unfortunately, the sisters manage to alienate Leonora as well. Louisa is batty and hypersensitive, and Emily is brusque and a collector of things she picks up on her walks, like shells and birds’ nests and even a dead bird, which she leaves scattered around the house that Leonora bullies the maid-of-all-work, Lucy (Evelyn Keyes), to keep immaculate. Ellen knows that she can’t make a living for herself and her sisters, and she doesn’t want them sent to an asylum, so she decides to take things, which means Leonora’s neck, in her own hands. Curtain on act one. (The stage origins of the movie are apparent throughout.) Enter Albert Feather (Louis Hayward), a somewhat distant relative of the Creed women, who calls Ellen “Auntie” and charms the sisters. He also charms Lucy. Albert has been to the house before, while Ellen was in London collecting her sisters, and managed to flatter Leonora into giving him some money. But now he’s on the lam, wanted for embezzlement from the bank where he worked. When he finds that Leonora is gone – “on a trip,” as the story goes – he begins to suspect that Ellen is hiding something. And so the plot hinges on his quest to uncover Ellen’s secrets, with the aid of the infatuated Lucy. It’s a nicely paced movie, with fine performances, especially by Barrett and Lanchester as the weird sisters. Though remembered today more as a director than as an actor, Lupino, then in her early 20s, excels in a part that had been played on Broadway by the much older Flora Robson. Although Louisa and Emily are the more flamboyantly mad of the sisters, Lupino manages to hint that Ellen is the maddest of them all.