THEY WERE SISTERS

New Zealand Listener, Volume 14, Issue 353, 29 March 1946, Page 25

THEY WERE SISTERS

(Gaumont-British)

DON’T know whether Mr. Rank’s organisation was responsible for this film, but to my mind it is a bad advertise-

ment for the New Urder in British Pictures. It has almost all the faults that we used so rightly to complain about when we made comparisons with Hollywood products, and few of the new virtues. They Were Sisters is slow, it meanders, its production values are poor, and with very few exceptions the acting is amateurish. I am not very enthusiastic about the story either, though admittedly there is occasionally accurate observation of real life in some of the domestic sidelights. One of the poorest features is the acting of the children. We may dislike some of the children in some Hollywood films because they seem precocious by our standards, but at least it can usually be said that they behave with natural spontaneity and a complete lack of self-consciousness (some of the best acting seen in American films, in fact, comes from juveniles). But the English children in They Were Sisters are natural only in the sense that the average self-conscious infant at a school break-up is natural; they look at the camera, they speak their lines as if they did not know what they meant, and you can feel them pause for their cues. James Mason’s juicily malevolent performance as a_ sadistic husband-yes, another of them-is the only thing worth serious notice in this depressingly long, depressingly incompetent, and, in brief, depressing British melodrama, I remember three lines of dialogue: "You deserved a better fate," "I’m talking too much," and "The trouble with me is I could never help being a bore"-re-marks which struck me as applying very aptly to the film and some of the people in it.