The Three Weird Sisters

The sisters are irritated when their successful younger half brother refuses to help them in their philanthropic plans to help the ill-starred community rebuild. They are positively miffed when he later decides to leave his secretary all his assets (including the family house) in his will. Greed and pride in their heritage takes over, philanthropy is set aside, and they begin a program of steady, unsuccessful assaults on their half brother and his secretary, who represent London and modernity.

This interesting movie might as well have been titled "Escape from Wales." It is known that the script co-writer, the poet Dylan Thomas, took a dim view of Wales, his homeland, and one can't help but feel that the decrepitude of the sisters, and their fragile old house set in a bleak Welsh town where the mines are defunct, are emblematic of Wales as seen by the author and script writers.

Logically, the half brother and secretary want to leave as soon as the danger is palpable, but are thwarted in doing so at every turn. A doctor (recipient of the sisters' philanthropy in the past) zigs in and zags out like a confused, allegiance-less mosquito, for most of the time until the very end.

Nova Pilbeam as the secretary has a pleasingly crisp voice and comes across in 1948 as a Katharine Hepburn type, but is a much more natural actress than Hepburn, who usually announced her lines rather artificially instead of just saying them. Pilbeam was very good in Hitchcock's "Young and Innocent," and is better still in this film.

For all its melodrama and its interspersed (overly poetic?) political moments, this is an engaging "dark houser" that holds one's interest from the first minute to the last.