The Three Weird Sisters

Three older sisters live on their family estate in Wales. This household once proudly reigned over a mining town, but the mines dried up and the estate and the town have fallen on hard times. When the land crumbles and a number of homes in the town are destroyed the sisters promise to rebuild the homes.

The sisters refuse to accept the reality of the situation, that being they have no money. They all live in the past when their name and wealth was foremost in the community. A half brother is a businessman who works in London. He is asked to travel to Wales and pay for the restoration of the town. When he refuses, weird strange events start happening and the half brother's life is in peril. Are the sisters trying to murder their half brother to get their hands on his money? His secretary believes this to be true, but the locals refuse to believe her.

'The Three Weird Sisters' was the feature film debut of director Daniel Birt, adapted by Louise Birt and Dylan Thomas from the novel 'The Case of the Three Weird Sisters' (1943) by Charlotte Armstrong. A barnstorming piece of Grand Guignol set in South Wales which meets 'The Old Dark House' going one way and 'The Addams Family' the other; it was a typically bold offering from Louis H. Jackson's ill-fated British National Pictures, which went into receivership the same year this film was released.

Madness runs in some families, in the Morgan-Vaughan's it practically gallops. The attitude to physical disability displayed here would be considered well beyond the pale today, with the three sisters described as "blind, deaf and warped". Nancy Price (who is here blind, and four years later played a wise deaf woman in 'Mandy'), Mary Clare and Mary Merrall are a blast as the unholy three; especially Clare as deaf Maude, who unnervingly is the only one who's always smiling. The rest of the cast all pitch in enthusiastically, the one outsider to the valleys being the lovely but agitated-looking Nova Pilbeam in one of her last films.

When a name as celebrated as Thomas's is associated with a project it's always tempting to attribute all its qualities to him, but both the crazy mood and the ripe, fruity dialogue certainly seem to have his finger prints all over them. You won't forget this in a hurry...!

A film worth watching and owning. Three elderly sisters try to manipulate their wealthy brother into underwriting the repair bill for both their house (mansion) and their Welsh village both damaged after a mine collapse. Set in Wales it has the Welsh imprimatur of Dylan Thomas as script co-writer.

It was directors Daniel Birt's first outing as a director and actress Nova Pilbream, the put upon secretary's, swan-song though she did a little stage work after the films completion. (Her life story would make a fascinating up-to-date biography if anyone had the time and skill.)

The film, though not exactly horror is gothic, and is essentially about murder. It's sinister leanings see it falling into the sub-genre of psycho-biddy of hagsploitation a le Bette Davis and Joan Crawford. The films three Morgan-Vaughan sisters are far more refined than their American counterparts; one reviewer described them, and the movie, as 'posh'. I guess compared to what was happening across the pond The Three Weird Sisters was 'posh'. Little in the way of histrionics, that deliberately cultivated BBC voice without which securing work in the UK was impossible and a gentler more controlled tone all contribute to an elegance absent from say What Ever Happened to Baby Jane.

The Sisters , released in 1948, pre-date the advent of the American psycho-biddy genre by a decade or two. Even so the defining trope, a formerly alluring older woman, three in this case, becomes mentally unstable and threatens those around her/them is immediately evident in the The Sisters.

This films real significance is it's place in cinematic history. It is never mentioned in scholarly discussions of the psycho-biddy genre and should be. It is no stretch at all see it stand comfortably alongside Lady in a Cage or Straight Jacket despite its British reserve.

Gothic tale of a dying Welsh mining town and the three old ladies who oversee it. Each old lady is afflicted: one is blind, one deaf, and one arthritic.

After the town collapses into the coal mine, the old ladies vow to rebuild the town but don't have the money. So they summon their younger brother (Raymond Lovell) from London to come help them and the town. But as he drives into town with his secretary (Nova Pilbeam), someone throws and rock and hits him in the head. At the decaying mansion of his sisters, a doctor (Anthony Hulme) is summoned.

But something else is wrong. The brother seems to be ill, and his secretary tries to get information from the doctor, but he seems oddly distant. As the secretary tries to warn the doctor about the sisters' odd behavior, he bristles and tells of how the old ladies put him through medical school.

Stranded in the old mansion, the brother again confronts the sisters about money and finally declares he will change his will rather than leave money to the old ladies to waste on a dying town. This seems odd since they are all about 20 years his senior.

Odd things keep happening, but when the lawyer shows up to draw up a new will, things come to a head when the doctor realizes that the secretary may be in danger since she is the new beneficiary.

The three old ladies are remarkable and are all noted British character actresses. Nancy Price plays Gertrude, the blind one (she also co-scripted the film); Mary Clare plays Maude, the deaf one; and Mary Merrall plays Isobel, the arthritic one.

Co-stars include Marie Ault as the housekeeper, Elwyn Brook-Jones as her son, and Hugh Griffith as the town troublemaker.

Nova Pilbeam, best known for her 30s films with Alfred Hitchcock, retired from the screen after the release of this film and THE DEVIL'S PLOT in 1948. She was 29 years old.

Co-scripted by Dylan Thomas, this tale of three ageing and infirm, although philanthropically inclined, spinster sisters presiding over a crumbling mansion in 1930s South Wales is an oddball post-War slice of Welsh Gothic. In their hermetically sealed universe, the sisters' otherworldly formalism is threatened, firstly, by a landslip caused by the family mine which destroys part of their small village at the outset and, secondly, by the return of their wealthy and apparently hard-hearted pragmatist brother and his primly efficient secretary, whose modernity further unravels the web of antiquity which has preserved their world. The narrative clunkiness is swiftly apparent from the somewhat obvious symbolism of the structural cracks and fissures which fracture the sisters' home at the beginning of the movie, and the stateliness of the family's surroundings is matched by similarly ossified pacing; Dylan Thomas' occasionally poetically barbed and witty insights notwithstanding. It's not just the old dark house that creaks here; even a nick of time climax does little to shore up the cracks of this crumbling edifice.