Drei Ehen

"They Were Sisters", a lush, Black and White studio film, has the cream of post-war British acting talent (Phyllis Calvert, James Mason, Anne Crawford.) You will need to get over the hurdle of tolerating that late 1940s bright, British way of talking, only nowadays to be heard in reduced form from the Queen. Also, accept and get used to the slightly wooden "Peter and Jane" style child actors - then you'll see a great weepy melodrama.

James Mason is deliciously malevolent and controlling of his drippy, sweet, doormat of a wife, the fragile Dulcie Gray. This sister's marriage troubles are timeless - what we would nowadays see as coercive control, or "gaslighting". Her sister Vera, played by that specialist of a high-maintenance woman, Anne Crawford, has a marriage more particular to the upper middle-class of the middle years of the century: a spoilt trophy wife, like a character from Noel Coward who's strayed into a melodrama, but still highly entertaining for it. The perfect, third sister Lucy has the perfect marriage, except she cannot have children, and so dotes on her sisters' neglected children. We're not great ones for family dramas like this nowadays, being rather individualistic and focussed on our ability to choose whether we marry and whether children quite fit our modern, choice-filled lives, so it is a refreshing pleasure to see this sisters' family drama, let's say from a "family" era.

Interestingly the wicked James Mason character's seventeen year old daughter is well played by Pamela Kellino, his future wife and already thirty in this picture - one of those actresses like Alicia Silverstone who seem able to play teenagers into their thirties. James Mason seems to have shown up as his smooth self in so many anonymous films that I'm inclined to avoid him; that's a bit absurd, because he's in so many good ones, in particular this one: see what he's made of here.

Give this great film a chance: if you can accept the accents and jauntiness and stop noticing them, it's a great melodrama, and the softer amongst you might finish up blubbing - maybe not quite "Wonderful Life" territory, but could be tear jerking.

Possibly the most compelling, if not nauseating depiction of non-physical domestic abuse that I've seen. Also, it seems about as clear as it could be at the time the film was made that the James Mason character is having a sexual relationship with his daughter, and the dynamic in their relationship is sometimes a bit too real to watch. James Mason seemed to get typecast in this sort of role for a while, probably because he's so good at it.

I once read an article which stated that Phyllis Calvert and Peter Murray-Hill would have been "Britain's Nick and Nora" had they made more films together. On seeing them act separately in films, I took that commentary to be a bit too hopeful. Then, I saw "They Were Sisters". And - move over Myrna and Bill! When together, Phyl and Peter did not seem at all like they were acting, they were just a happily married couple bantering, teasing the other lightly and ad-libbing as if they were not in a movie at all, but just out for a weekend picnic. Their scenes together were by far the movie's best.

At the other end of the scale is James Mason and Pamela Kellino (later Pamela Mason). They were playing father and daughter in the movie, and if you hadn't known about their off-screen relationship, seeing the way they interacted on the screen would have been a bit worrying.

With the wrong actors, "They Were Sisters" could have easily been a ridiculous farce, and at times it does begin to stray towards over-acting. But with the right actors, including the three youngest children, it comes across perfectly and is a movie well worth watching. 10/10

This is a women's film but extremely interesting for anyone to study in detail, as there are four different female characters developing in different directions, and each one is of paramount interest. The question is whose is the most interesting. Is it Phyllis Calvert as the strongest character who is doomed to a childless life with the best of husbands but makes the best of it by her honesty, or is it Anne Crawford as the more liberated Lucy, who is the one who from the beginning sees through the ugliness of James Mason's character, is it Dulcie Gray in her heartrending martyrdom gradually driven to the despair of alcoholism by the subtly increasing cruelty of her husband, or is it Pamela Kellino as James Mason's daughter torn between her loyalty to her after all loving father and her empathy with her mother? The drama is nonexistent at first, everything starts in a perfectly idyllic setting where nothing could even be suspected to go wrong, but gradually the tragedy sneaks in to grow surreptitiously into an overwhelming drama of human disintegration. It is marvellously composed, and Hubert Bath's idyllic music adds to it. James Mason of course dominates the whole stage from the first to the last in the extremely difficult performance of being convincingly inhumanly cruel after having started off as the perfect charmer, but every performance here is great, in a fascinating family chronicle of relationship complications that could happen in any family. Nine points at least.

This is a truly shocking film, and it is certainly not a weepie. Usually Gainsborough films have left me cold, indulging mostly in a fake delirium of both plots and characters. There are exceptions and this is one of them. It shows in tragic detail the details of false marriages, and the pain that children feel watching helplessly and not being able to escape or react. The plot is not melodramatic, and the suffering, intensely portayed by the three sisters of the title, and how only one of the three is happy with her husband rings true. To give away the plot is unfair, because the unravelling of the three marriages is so meticulously done. Dulcie Gray is the most tragic of the three and acts very well, and so does Phyllis Calvert but the third sister played by Anne Crawford ( who died far too young ) gives an extraordinary performance. Her coldness towards her husband almost equals the cold male brutality James Mason portrays as a real emotional killer. I also think in watching this film that viewers of our era should not find the mannerisms of the first half of the 20th C. to be out of date or ' funny ' in any way. Each period has its social mannerisms and if time allows at the end of this century people may look back and laugh. I do not find the film dated, and the subject matter of marital abuse and cruelty is as important today as then. Watch the scene where a father threatens to take away a loved dog from his child, by either giving it to a woman who does not want it or have it ' put down '. The devastation on the child's face is terrible to watch, and the director Arthur Crabtree excels in showing human tyranny and human suffering without sentimentality. Only the final scene nearly ruins what went before, but I guess after WW2 in 1945 an audience could only take so much. I would give it a 10 if that scene had not ( perhaps ) been tagged on.