"They Were Sisters"

Warning: Spoilers included in this review; if you have not seen this movie and intend to see it, you may not wish to read this entry.

"They Were Sisters" begins in 1919, with three sisters and their courtships. Charlotte falls for James Mason's character, a sexy but cruel young man who marries her and then heartlessly destroys her soul with his psychological abuse. Vera, rather cold and heartless herself, marries her young man but warns him ahead of time that she doesn't love him. Throughout their marriage she has affairs and blows him off until he finally leaves her and goes to America alone.

The third sister, Lucy, is a good and sweet person who marries a kind and decent man and they are eternally happy together. Their only sadness is that their only daughter died young. Instead, they shower their love on their nieces and nephew, Mason's children and the only daughter of Vera, the "cold" sister.

Eventually, Mason's character (Jeffrey) drives his pathetic wife to suicide, and he tries to cover it up by convincing Lucy to lie on his behalf and cover up his wife's drinking problem (caused by his mental cruelty). But she does the right thing after all and betrays him at the inquest, accusing him of murdering Charlotte with his torture and undermining. Finally Jeffrey is exposed and gets his just desserts, his reputation in tatters (though he can't really be held criminally responsible for his wife's death as he did not push her in front of the car, she darted out in front of it). Lucy and her husband end up happily ever after, with custody of all the children.

A curious feature of this film is that Mason's wife Pamela Kellino played his daughter in the film. Not only that but just like in his later film, "Lolita," Mason as Jeffrey obviously has some lustful intentions toward his eldest child Margaret. He sits her on his lap, holds her in loverlike ways, and talks about taking her on a vacation, just the two of them alone without her mother or the other children present. When she finds a young boyfriend, Jeffrey tears up his letters to her and does his best to break it off. It's clear that just like Humbert (who hadn't even become a gleam in Vladimir Nabokov's eye yet), he is jealous of his daughter's normal interest in a boy. He seems to love her unnaturally and yet his cruelty and domineering character comes out with her too. In the end, she sees through her father and rejects him as evil, and he is left with nothing. You can't help but applaud the ending, particularly when the good husband says to his good wife, "God's in his heaven and all's right with the world."

Mason was the worst sort of cad in this film but he was also gorgeous and sexy. His rare and calculated tenderness with his wife was all but hypnotic, and it was easy to see how a woman could be taken in by this sort of manipulation. I also saw a connection to "Gaslight" when Charlotte was so bamboozled by his derision that she began to act like the fool he continually accused her of being.

It's not a pretty story but I enjoyed it, and found Mason's sexy villainy enticing, even though in real life a man like that is exactly the kind to run far away from, as his wife's sisters Vera and Lucy tried to warn her before the marriage.