Ladies in Retirement

One of the new-to-me movies that I had the chance to record during 31 Days of Oscar back in April was Ladies in Retirement. Recently, I sat down to watch it and do a review of it here.

Ida Lupino plays Ellen Creed. She's a single woman in mid-1880s England who works for Leonora Fiske (Isobel Elsom). Fiske is a former actress who apparently could afford to retire fairly well, as she's got a nice house in a rural part of County Kent, and not just Ellen living with her but maid Lucy (Evelyn Keyes). However, things aren't going so well for Ellen as she gets a letter from London.

In that letter, a landlady informs Ellen about Ellen's two sisters, Emily (Elsa Lanchester) and Louisa (Edith Barrett). Both of them are apparently "dotty", more than the aunts in Arsenic and Old Lace but not quite as insane as the aunts' nephew who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt. In any case, Ellen seems to be the only one who can take care of her two sisters as they cause problems everywhere else they go and the landlady is threatening to call the police and have the sisters sent to an asylum.

Another problem for Ellen shows up, although she doesn't know about this one yet. A man from Gravesend not too far away shows up, and rather rudley asks Leonora if he could borrow £12. Tha man is Albert (Louis Hayward), who claims to be Ellen's nephew, which would be by a fourth, unseen sibling who must apparently be dead or else that sibling should be helping to take care of Emily and Louisa. But enough thinking of possible plot holes. Albert leaves before Ellen sees him, although he's going to come back later on and we learn that he's in much deeper financial difficulties and embezzled from the bank's till to get the money so the police are after him.

The police might be about to be after Ellen, too. Not because of the two sisters, at least not directly. Ellen asks Leonora if the two sisters can come to visit, Leonora not knowing about the sisters' mental state. Leonora would be thrilled to have more guests, at least until she finds out the truth about them and wants to be rid of them while Ellen is scheming to come up with a way to get them to stay on permanently.

Ellen's ultimate plan is to send everybody away from the house for a day and, while alone with Leonora, kill her and claim that Leonora sold the house to her. Of course, it's a scheme that wouldn't work in real life, and definitely isn't going to work here since the Production Code would never allow it. Oh, it does seem to work for a while, but Albert returns, romances Lucy, and together the two of them start snooping and guess the truth about Ellen. Not that Albert can do much about it since he's got his own legal problems, of coures.

Ladies in Retirement was originally a stage play, something which is fairly obvious considering how much of the movie is set inside the house. But director Charles Vidor does a good job of opening up the action, and plays aren't necessarily a bad thing, especially if they're not stagey. Unsurprisingly, Lupino gives a good performance, and the movie is mostly about her character. The ending may be a bit of a problem for some, but then they had to come up with something that would placate the Production Code office. (I couldn't find what differences there are between the movie and the play.) Definitely worth a watch.

If you're wondering why TCM was able to show Ladies in Retirement in 31 Days of Oscar, it's because the movie got an unsurprising nomination for its black-and-white art direction as well as a more surprising one for the score.