In 1941 Warner Bros began to realise that their new star who had stolen They Drive By Night (1940) from established stars and had subsequently been top-billed in High Sierra (1940) was not to be messed with. She had gone on to star with Edward G. Robinson and John Garfield in The Sea Wolf (1941) and with Garfield again for In the Fog (1941), but then she began to refuse roles. Her contract at Warners allowed her to take some roles at other studios and Columbia chose her for Ladies in Retirement. The film was adapted from a Broadway play of 1940 by Reginald Denham and Edward Percy and was scripted by Denham and Garett Fort. In one sense she was perfect for the role and in another completely wrong. That doesn’t seem to have affected her performance. Her central role was of an English woman of indeterminate age, but certainly much older than Lupino’s 23. On Broadway (and in the original London cast) the role had been played by 40 year-old Flora Robson. Playing opposite Lupino was her husband at the time Louis Hayward who plays her nephew (several times ‘removed’ by stepmothers etc.).
The setting is a seemingly remote relatively large house in the Kent marshes in late Victorian times (it can’t be that remote as there are visitors on foot). Ellen Creed (Ida Lupino) is the housekeeper and ‘companion’ of Lorena Fiske (Isobel Elsom), a retired music-hall performer. There is a young maid Lucy (Evelyn Ankers) and two sisters from the local priory who occasionally come to visit. The only man around is ‘Bates’ who has a horse and cart that carries the ladies to and from the railway station. The ‘inciting incident’, which shatters the placid life of the house, is a letter for Ellen that arrives just as she is about to go on an errand to London for Leonara. The letter informs her that her two sisters, both suffering from mental health problems, are to be evicted from their London lodgings for being too disruptive. Ellen sets out to rescue her siblings and she persuades Leonora to let them stay for a few days in the house in the marshes. While Ellen is in London, a young man appears at the house, saying his name is Albert Feather (Louis Hayward). He claims to be Ellen’s nephew and charms Lorena into giving him £12 to cover his losses made taking out a local girl in Gravesend. He also flirts with Lucy and elicits a promise from both Lorena and Lucy that they won’t mention his visit to Ellen.
Ellen returns with Louisa (Edith Barrett) and Emily (Elsa Lanchester), both excited to see Ellen and to get away from their landlady. Leonora accepts them at first but after several days begins to get agitated. Ellen is determined that they will stay and we begin to wonder what this will mean. The cast is limited to the nine characters discussed here. The stage origins of the play are obvious. The setting is not realist but expressionist with the flat landscape punctuated by only a few trees, a river and bridges. Everything is layered by fog that seems to roll across the marshes all the time. The film is described as a film noir by some commentators but it is more of a gothic melodrama. Cinematographer George Barnes and director Charles Vidor do an excellent job on the film and Ida Lupino certainly looks a lot older than 23 (she often played older but this role would to a certain extent be repeated as the older sister in The Hard Way (1943)).
The original play was based on a real criminal case from the 1880s. It’s very ‘English’, even though Reginald Denham was and Englishman living in New York. As well as Lupino, Elsa Lanchester was part of the British contingent in Hollywood having arrived with her husband Charles Laughton. She is probably best remembered as Mary Shelley in The Bride of Frankenstein in 1935. Isobel Elstrom was also a well-known English stage and screen performer who was in the original production of the play in London and travelled to New York for the Broadway version, The film appears to be her first American screen outing and she went on to have an American career in film and TV lasting until 1965. Edith Barrett was another stage actor (since 1923) making her first film appearance as Louisa Creed. She was at this time married to Vincent Price. Following this début performance she later appeared in I Walked With a Zombie (1943) for Val Lewton and Jacques Tourneur and also in Strangers in the Night (1944) discussed on this blog. Queenie Leonard who plays Sister Agatha was again an English actor settled in the US I think. Emma Dunn was also born in the UK (in 1874) but had been on stage and in American films since the late 1890s. Evelyn Keyes was American and at this point a Columbia contract player. She never really established herself as an A List player and is best remembered for roles in medium budget pictures. She had a brief marriage to Charles Vidor a few years later. Louis Hayward was born in South Africa but educated in the UK and moved to Hollywood in 1935 around the same time as Lupino. They were married in 1938. In 1942 Hayward signed up for the US Marines and returned as a decorated soldier in 1945, but he was a changed man because of his war experiences and he and Lupino divorced in 1945.
Vidor himself was born in Budapest in 1900 and had arrived in the US in 1922. He appears to be yet another young Hungarian who benefitted from the help of Alexander Korda in getting started in the film business, He worked for many studios but his time at Columbia arguably produced the most interesting films despite his long-running battles with Harry Cohn. George Barnes was a distinguished cinematographer, Oscar nominated eight times and winner for Rebecca (1940). He also shot Spellbound for Hitchcock and later another Du Maurier adaptation Frenchman’s Creek (1944). David Hall as production designer was born in Northern Ireland. I’m particularly interested in the large English-born contingent, partly because of the play’s origins and the coherence of the playing, but also because when the film came out in 1941, the US was not in the war but we know that Ida Lupino was becoming increasingly concerned about her father Stanley Lupino who was dying of cancer in London and others in her family in London. Ida would become one of the ‘Hollywood British’ who would perform in the film Forever and a Day (US 1943) for Cedric Hardwicke. The film had multiple stars, directors and cinematographers, all working pro bono to support wartime charities and to celebrate the British war effort. It was shot in late 1941 but didn’t get a release until March 1943.
I confess that when I first tried watching Ladies in Retirement several years ago I could only find poor quality copies online and I watched only a few minutes before deciding to wait until I could find a better quality print. (This is an issue with trying to find many of Lupino’s early films.) I’m now grateful that some kind soul has uploaded a much better quality print and I enjoyed the film immensely. The combination of the playing, direction, cinematography and production design is very successful. The film was nominated for two Oscars for Art Direction (Lionel Banks and George Montgomery) and Best Music for a dramatic picture (Morris Stoloff and Ernst Toch). Ida Lupino is magnificent but this is genuinely an ensemble piece and all deserve praise – both Lupino and Isobel Elstrom received acting awards from the National Board of Review.
There is a great deal more information and commentary on this website: ‘The Last Drive-In‘.
Trailer (from Doctor Macro):
The Case for Global Film 