Ladies in Retirement

Five years before making his tidal noir splash with Gilda in 1946, director Charles Vidor made this fascinating little film about three spinster sisters who resort to extreme measures to survive in patriarchal Victorian society. Set entirely in a large country home isolated on the English moors, Ladies in Retirement is a film about forgotten women: old maid Miss Fiske (Isobel Elsom), perhaps regretful at having no family, employs the mannish, middle-aged housekeeper Ellen Creed (Ida Lupino), who cajoles an invitation for her two eccentric sisters, who have been ejected from London, to stay at the house for a while. At 23, Lupino is made to appear forty-something and serves as a mother figure to kooky sister Louisa (Edith Barrett) and malevolent sister Emily (Elsa Lanchester); a fifth woman and the only one with an obvious sexual appetite is Lucy the maid, played by an extremely youthful Evelyn Keyes. When Miss Fiske disappears, the ladies are visited by Albert Feather (Louis Hayward), a mysterious gentleman claiming to be a relative. The nearby Catholic convent and its visiting nuns provide an unmistakably Catholic morality — the Protestant sisters call them “Romans” — which feeds into Ellen’s guilt (her surname is Creed, after all) and drives her toward ultimate penance. “Hell is like the kingdom of Heaven,” she says. “It’s within.” Appropriately, the Oscar-nominated art direction features gorgeous, unstoppable clouds of fog which give the film a beatific conclusion.