Ladies in Retirement

Ida Lupino is the housekeeper-companion to a retired lady whose money seems to have come from prostitution. The lady has been very good to her, but Ida abuses her kindness by bringing in her “crazy” sisters, who are about to be put into an institution. It’s going to be for a few days, but it stretches into months, and finally the lady is at wits end and orders them all out. Ida, who has vowed to take care of the dotty ones, kills the lady and tries to take her place. But her ne’er-do-well nephew, Louis Hayward, gets wind of what actually went down, and decides to blackmail her.

There is no one here to root for. Ida is despicable, though from good motives. The nephew is rotten to the core. Of the two sisters, one is just silly and possibly feeble-minded, as they used to say, but the other, Elsa Lanchester, is simply a bad person, not insane at all. So who cares what happens to any of them? I sure didn’t.