LADIES IN RETIREMENT

New Zealand Listener, Volume 6, Issue 153, 29 May 1942, Page 22

LADIES IN RETIREMENT

(Columbia)

Not since Robert Montgomery carried a head in a hat box through Night Must Fall have audiences had such

a chance to enjoy a _ good, sustained shudder. If Ladies in Retirement doesn’t give them the creeps, nothing much will. Ellen Creed (Ida Lupino) uses no hat box but an old-fashioned, bricked-in Dutch oven, set in the parlour wall, to conceal what is left of her murder victim, Miss Fiske (Isobel Elsom). And since Miss Fiske disappears early in the piece, and since most of the action of the story takes place in the parlour, that confounded oven, with the corpse inside, is very much in the picture. If it gets on the audience’s nerves, small wonder that it eventually gets on the nerves of Ellen Creed, who has to live with it. But Ellen is made of stern stuff; she had to be to dispose of her kindly employer in the first place in order to secure a haven for her two mad sisters (Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barrett); and she is beaten in the end, not by the body in the oven, but by her very-much-alive young nephew (Louis Hayward) whose bad habit of poking his nose into secrets-and his fingers into other people’s bank accounts — brings them both to disaster. Ladies in Retirement is from a Broadway stage success, and as a film it is still very much a stage play, unable in its new form to overcome entirely the cinematic handicaps of too much talk, too little action, and restricted setting. But the director, Charles Vidor, and his cameraman, George Barnes, have done their best to work up an eerie atmosphere round the desolate house on the English marshlands in the year 1885 where three ladies, one ‘corpse, one pretty housemaid, and one inquisitive and amorous young man abide in uneasy retirement. Outside the house the director and cameraman concentrate on the familiar melodramatic devices of gaunt trees, howling wind, and fog which is a bit too thick, but inside they manage very nicely with flickering candles, lurking shadows, and glimpses of that confounded oven from all angles. But it is with the shadows in the minds of Ellen Creed’s two unfortunate sisters and the black mark on the soul of Ellen herself that the director and his talented cast are most successful. Elsa Lanchester and Edith Barret portray the mad Miss Creeds with such a keen sense of dementia that one can hardly blame the kindly, religious Miss Fiske for insisting at last that they terminate their already protracted stay at her house, and for suggesting that their sister, her housekeeper-companion, had better go too. Sister Emily’s obsession is collecting dead birds, and " tidyingup" river banks by bringing driftwood into the parlour (she just can’t bear to see anything wasted). She also makes unfortunate remarks about religion. Sister Louisa is milder; she likes to put frogs on the table and make them jump into the marmalade pot. So Miss Fiske tells

them to go, and so Ellen has to do something about it. Hence the oven. It may not sound as if there is much of the heroine about Ellen, but there is. Apart from garrotting her employer, she is a rather admirable girl, and certainly a courageous one. She commits murder only because she loves her two crazy sisters so much that she cannot bear them to be put away in an English asylum of the 19th century; and because of this, and because she is no much alone with her terrible secret, one hopes that she will be able to keep it, although one knows she won't. It’s that psychological law of sympathy with the hunted which I mentioned last week in connection with 49th Parallel. Anyone who has believed that Ida Lupino is merely a musical-comedy actress is in for a surprise on seeing Ladies in Retirement. She plays Ellen with the repressed intensity of emotion that not only makes for good melodrama but has often won Academy Awards. Popular appeal? Well, if you enjoyed Night Must Fall, if you like horror on the mental plane rather than on the physical plane of clanking chains and rattling bones, you should like this film. It’s strong meat, rather slowly cooked, and it’s my meat; but it was near-poison to the man I took with me to the screening. He couldn’t see why they’d bothéted to film the thing at all. So, though my personal inclination might be to stand up to applaud, I think I'd better keep my seat to do it.