Louis Hayward

(On Cable TV, April 2021) It took me some time to warm up to Ida Lupino — she’s wasn’t always a flashy actress and she didn’t go for a strong unified screen persona. (She’s arguably more interesting now as one of the rare female directors of the 1950s than as an actress, but that severely underplays her best and most captivating performances.) But as with many non-superstar actors, sooner or later there’s a film that makes people click with her, after which it any film featuring her gets an “Oh, It’s Ida Lupino!”  So it is that Ladies in Retirement is a good honest thriller that would be interesting in its own right as a natural blend of Victorian setting and noir aesthetics only one step removed from Gothic. But it does have an added dimension with Lupino as a 22-year-old playing a fortysomething protagonist who goes murderously crazy. She also plays against her then-husband Louis Hayward — he as a schemer, she as a housekeeper with a big secret. The almost-comic opening soon turns grim, and while the film (adapted from the stage) is much better in its atmosphere and development than its underwhelming conclusion, there’s a gender-bent domestic thriller here that stands adjacent to material in the vein of the not-much-later Gaslight.