|
|
Ron Miller's DARK CORRIDORS VOL. 8, No. 13 |
|
Why isn't this 1941 classic
available on home video?
of TheColumnists.com
For at least half a century, I've been nurturing my vivid memories of "Ladies in Retirement," one of the most ghoulishly dark thrillers I've ever seen, and trying to explain to friends why it probably helped turn me toward the dark side in my lifetime quest for unforgettable entertainment.
Based on a popular Broadway play of 1940 by Reginald Denham and Edward Percy, "Ladies in Retirement" was turned into a movie by Columbia Pictures in 1941 and given the studio's "A" treatment. My mother, who loved mysteries, probably took me to see it when I was a kid, not really aware it was more a horror picture than a mystery. I mean, doesn't that title make it sound like a whimsical comedy?
I remember seeing it again on TV when I was a little older, re-inforcing my memory that it was a very frightening movie. But then "Ladies in Retirement" disappeared. I'm guessing it was taken out of circulation because a remake called "The Mad Room" was produced in 1969 and they didn't want the original competing with it on TV.
But now "Ladies in Retirement" may be emerging from the mists of time. Turner Classic Movies (TCM) just showed it for the first time and, naturally, I was there with my trusty VCR to watch it, tape it and vow to watch it at least once a year. My analysis: My childhood memory was correct. Fifty-six years after its first release, it's still a corker. This film, never available on home video, is a great classic that simply must be given a new lease on life.
The storyline is deceptively simple: A young, hard-working and devoted housekeeper is also the paid companion to her employer, a retired actress who lives in an isolated house on a gray and desolate landscape near the Thames in England. When she learns that her two older sisters are being evicted from the flat they share in London, she begs her employer to let them come and visit her while she helps them find new lodgings elsewhere.
What she doesn't tell her boss is that her two sisters are mentally ill and they've been evicted a good many times from a good many places already. Our first impression of the housekeeper is that she has sacrificed her own life for the well-being of her sisters and is beginning to show serious signs of wear due to all the responsibilies she's taken on. By the end of the movie, we have an entirely different impression.
As you might guess, the demented sisters are under the impression they've come to stay and they're not exactly happy when the owner of the house starts to come apart at the seams and demands that they leave. Lonely house on the moors. Two psycho sisters and a housekeeper on the verge of a mental breakdown. With those ingredients, who needs any others to get a pretty good horror story going?
Well, there is another juicy ingredient: The housekeeper's villainous nephew, the police hot on his heels, picks this time to show up to see his nice old aunties. When he finds them living together in a roomy old house while the owner is apparently "travelling" somewhere, he figures why not move in and share the wealth, along with the pretty young maid, who isn't sure exactly what's going on in the house that's been taken over by the housekeeper and her dotty sisters.
Columbia borrowed young and beautiful Ida Lupino from Warner Bros.--she was very hot in 1941, the same year she made "High Sierra" with Humphrey Bogart--and cast her as the housekeeper. Some critics thought this was an awful thing to do to Lupino, sticking her with an unsavory character who gets nastier and nastier as the days go by. But I think it really gave Lupino the chance to show what she could do with a part that didn't depend on her beauty. I think she's fabulous in the movie.
Cast opposite her as the nasty nephew was swashbuckler Louis Hayward ("Anthony Adverse," "The Man in the Iron Mask"), who was just coming off his starring role in "The Son of Monte Cristo" (1940) and was Lupino's real-life husband at the time. This was also an abrupt change of pace for Hayward, whose character is a sinister charmer like Cary Grant in "Suspicion," and Hayward also does it quite well.
Playing the two crackpot sisters were Edith
Barrett, who would show up in two equally dark films in 1943--"Jane
Eyre" and "I Walked With A Zombie"--and the immortal
Elsa Lanchester, most famous then as "The Bride of Frankenstein."
That great character actress Isobel Elsom played the retired
actress trying to retain her sanity in a house full of lunatics,
crooks and killers. The saucy maid was played by Evelyn Keyes,
whose roles immediately after her showy part as Scarlett's sister
in "Gone With the Wind" cast her opposite some of Hollywood's
scariest actors--Boris Karloff ("Before I Hang," 1940),
Peter Lorre ("The Face Behind the Mask," 1941) and
Claude Rains ("Here Comes Mr. Jordan," 1941). Consequently,
Keyes must have felt quite comfortable in the murky atmosphere
of "Ladies in Retirement."
There are many very spooky moments in the movie, thanks to the
moody feel director Charles Vidor produces in the suffocating
setting of the isolated old house. The ones I remembered from
childhood involve the iron door on the oven built into a brick
wall. I remembered it as being way too deep an oven for just
pies and stuff. In fact, it looked more like the ovens they had
at Nazi extermination camps. Earlier in the picture we learn
that's where the old lady keeps her valuables, but when the nasty
nephew gets the door open he finds someone has bricked up the
oven space. What could possibly be behind those bricks? And where,
after all, is the old lady travelling?
A fair criticism of "Ladies in Retirement" is that there's no real hero or heroine in the movie. I can live with that, though, because it has such a delicious assortment of knaves.
I think "Ladies in Retirement" did pretty well on its original release, but its subsequent afterlife has been trifling for an era in which the Hollywood studios finally are beginning to find new ways to squeeze more cash out of the classics in their vaults.
If for no other reason, "Ladies in Retirement" should be revived and made available on DVD for those of us who want to explore the career of Ida Lupino, who left behind many underrated acting performances, then went on to become one of the first really successful female movie directors.
Meanwhile, bless Turner Classic Movies for finally dusting off this classic and making it available at least once for 21st century digital cable subscribers.
©2007 by Ron Miller. The photo is courtesy of Columbia Pictures. This column first posted March 19, 2007.
Ron
Miller is a former nationally syndicated television columnist
and the author of "Mystery! A Celebration," the official
companion book to PBS' "Mystery!" series. He currently
writes about television mysteries for MYSTERY SCENE magazine.
You can comment on this column online. Please address your message to either "The Editors" or . To send an email, click here and don't forget to mention name: talkback@thecolumnists.com
|
|
|
Archives |
|
|