Tonight into tomorrow brings the second night of Barbara Stanwyck's turn as TCM's Star of the Month. One of her movies that I hadn't seen before and recorded the last time TCM ran it is The Gay Sisters. It comes on as part of the Star of the Month salute tomorrow (March 13) at 1:00 PM, so I made a point of watching the movie to be able to do a post on it here.
The movie opens with a brief establishing scene set about 25 years before the main action. As the movie was released in 1942 and set more or less at that time (possibly just before Pearl Harbor although World War II doesn't play into the action), that means the opening is set in the mid-1910s, which is the run-up to World War I. The Gaylords are one of the richest families in America, and the current patriarch, Penn Gaylord (Donald Woods), has a wife and three young daughters. Or should I say had a wife. She was somehow traveling alone on the Lusitania, which as we all know was torpedoed and sunk in the Atlantic. Eventually the Americans entered the war, and Daddy Gaylord for some weird reason went off to fight despite having those three young daughters and presumably being the same sort of captain of industry as Jerry Lewis in Which Way to the Front. Dad gets it in France, leaving the thre girls orphans.
Two dozen years pass, and probating the will has been a nightmare. Apparently, somebody over in France claims that Papa Gaylord wrote a codicil before getting killed in action in which he gave ten percent of the family fortune to a French children's charity. The remaining Gaylords back home naturally contested this, and somehow international legal delays have dragged the case out for all these years, while the Gaylord sisters grew up and slowly lost the estate's cash. They have, however, held on to the land, because family tradition has it that land is more important than money.
The three sisters are Fiona (Barbara Stanwyck), the eldest, who is foster mom to an orphan child Austin; Evelyn (Geraldine Fitzgerald), who married an English nobleman and has come back to America in the only sop to the fact that there's now another war going on in Europe; and Susie (Nancy Coleman), who got married except that it's one of those loveless marriages she'd like annulled. Her unseen husband is willing to do it for a price, but since the money has been spent on contesting the will, Susie doesn't have the money. So although she's in a relationship with painter Gig Young (the print TCM ran has the character being played by the Gig Young who became a prominent supporting actor; he was born Byron Barr and took his stage name from this character although I don't know if he did that before the movie was first released or TCM only has a re-release print). Complicating matters is that when Evelyn returns to America, she sees Gig and starts pursuing him.
But since Barbara Stanwyck is the star here, she gets the biggest complication. That comes in the form of Charles Barclay (George Brent), who is contesting the will on behalf of that French charity. Of course, he really wants the land the Gaylord house is built on because he's a land developer who has bought all the surrounding land in order to be able to build a skyscraper. He also seems to know quite a bit about Fiona's past. More, even, than Fiona's first lawyer Gibbon (Gene Lockhart) who gets replaced with Ralph Pedloch (Donald Crisp). Even the poor foster kid gets dragged into all of this.
The Gay Sisters was based on a novel that I'm guessing was popular at the time to the extent that you can see why a studio would want to turn it into a movie. However, something goes wrong in the adaptation, which I think is the screenplay since it seems to go all over the place, with the reveal of Fiona's past being a bit bizarre. And if the Gaylords were supposed to value land over money, couldn't they have just given up that ten percent right at the beginning?
Still, The Gay Sisters isn't a terrible movie. It's just not what you'd want to show as the first movie for any of the main players involved.
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