Three Bad Sisters (1959)

Studio: MGM
Theatrical Release: January, 1956
DVD-R Release: March 27th, 2012
Rating: Unrated!
Directed by Gilbert Kay
Review by Craig Sorensen



With a title like Three Bad Sisters you would expect some ridiculous, melodramatic trash.  And you won’t be disappointed.  Things start out ridiculous right off the bat with a title sequence ripped right off of a dime store crime novel and what sounds almost like a parody of noirish jazz.    After that we are introduced to the three Craig sisters (no relation to your reviewer) one after the other on the day of their father’s death.  Valerie Craig (Kathleen Hughes of Cult of the Cobra) hears the news over the radio while with some sleazy boat hand.  You can see the perverse wheels spinning into motion as she hears the details.  Her father was in a plane crash.  The only survivor being pilot Jim Norton (John Bromfield of Revenge of the Creature).  Valerie hatches a plan to use Jim to try to gain control of her rich father’s estate.  Somehow this involves forged contracts and Jim seducing the good sister Lorna (Sara Shane of Tarzan’s Greatest Adventure).  The plot isn’t really all that important I suppose.  It’s just an excuse to get Jim in the house with Valerie, Lorna and sex-pot Vicki (Marla English of The She-Creature).  Also along for the fun is crazy aunt Martha (Madge Kennedy of The Day of the Locust).

So, really the plot is ridiculous and almost seems like an afterthought to the three sisters and their various psychological foibles.  Vicki is only happy when trying to steal another woman’s man, Lorna seems to have a death wish and Valerie is fond of controlling people through complicated mind games.  There’s also some kind of family suicide curse that’s mentioned a couple of times.  Of course, most scenes are stolen by Kathleen Hughes as Valerie.  She starts out as a typical scheming femme fatale but slowly you can see the lunacy just under the surface start bubbling up.  And when Valerie goes full on looney, Hughes doesn’t hold back.  Marla English is pretty good as Vicki as well.  There’s a hint of a wounded girl in her performance that pays off well in her big scene (which I don’t want to give away).  She also gets a ‘bare back’ joke that made me laugh.  Sara Shane is sort of the straight man (so to speak) in the trio but she still gets a lot to work with.  She gets to turn on the waterworks often.  There’s not much left for John Bromfield to do other than run around and shake some sense into these crazy broads.  He does a decent job though.  Director Kay keeps things moving pretty quickly (the films only 73 minutes) so you don’t have too long to dwell on the specifics of the plot, to the film’s advantage.  Something like this could overstay it’s welcome pretty quickly so it’s probably better to keep things fast and loose.  Kay seems to have a long career as a second unit director but only a few solo directing gigs.  He also co-directed (with José Briz Méndez) White Comanche, the movie where William Shatner plays twins.

Three Bad Sisters looks pretty good on MGMs new Made-On-Demand DVD-R.  There is some dirt and debris here and there but nothing that really distracts too much from the presentation.  My main issue with this is that the film is presented in 1.33:1.  It looks to me like this is just open matte and needs to be cropped to 1.85:1.  You could probably just zoom in if you are watching this on a 16:9 monitor but that’s never really an optimal way to watch things (you’ll just amplify any problems in the transfer that way).  The only audio option is a mono track, which is fine.  Everything sounds fine to me.  It’s not great but it certainly isn’t bad.  I guess no one could find a trailer because there isn’t one on the disc.  I wish there was because I would imagine that this thing had one hell of a trailer.