JohnHowardReid This one is a lavishly and glossily produced weepie melodrama, full of the usual tried and true plot devices. In fact, I would go so far as to say that the situations are even less convincing than the average. On the other hand, it does have a remarkable flashback sequence where the off-screen commentary (by Barbara Stanwyck) is impishly biting and satirical. Most of the players are also more convincing than we might expect. Barbara is delightfully cool and assured in a tailor-made role. She has the lion's share of the action as well as the most fetching costumes. George Brent, on the other hand, starts well but soon reverts to type. On the other hand, it's always a pleasure to watch players like Gene Lockhart and Donald Crisp go through their paces. Donald Woods has an impressive opening scene, but then unaccountably disappears from the action altogether. But most impressive of all is young Larry Simms, of all people ("Alexander" in the Blondie series), who gives a surprisingly skilled and realistic portrayal in a rare dramatic part. P.S. I would describe Erville Alderson's role as that of a witness rather than a farmer.

gkeith_1 I thought this movie was a Betty Grable-or-someone movie, maybe The Dolly Sisters type movie, or some song and dance 1942 outing to relieve the seriousness of wartime, but boy was I mistaken. Still, finding out that it was a drama piece actually good by Barbara Stanwyck standards, I decided to watch it. That is, after I turned on the DVR recording and found out the drama part by the host's introduction. I was intrigued enough to watch. I found the movie very interesting and impossible to stop watching. It started out with the Lusitania disaster and a wealthy woman's being killed on that unfortunate ship. Next, a World War I era soldier, in a wealthy mansion, was signing his last will and testament before he went off to war to get even with those enemies who torpedoed the ship. I looked for officer's insignia on his uniform, but didn't see any. I assumed that being so wealthy, he wouldn't just be an enlisted man. Turns out he was a major. Anyway, he meets his demise after going off to the front in World War One, and his three minor daughters are orphans. The woman killed on the Lusitania was his wife and the girls' mother. Next thing we know, the girls are grown up and supposedly penniless. An evil bad guy is trying to take away their mansion, and we spend most of the film seeing people trying to avoid him. He is successful and handsome, a namesake of our current basketball guy Charles Barclay/Barkley (?). The sisters have secrets from each other. All have been married. The eldest secretly married the bad guy, and had a child as a result of the first night of the marriage. The second sister married an English lord, but he is on the other side of the pond while she makes a play for the youngest sister's boyfriend. The youngest sister is married but trying to get an annulment while messing around with Gig Young (played by Gig Young, lol #^$%%r!!!). Later she says she got an annulment with some money, apparently to pay a lawyer, but it is fuzzy as to how this happened. I will leave plot holes to the other reviewers. Anyway, her marriage is over, and does she marry Gig Young? I don't know. The middle sister: her husband dies in a British plane crash, but she is SOL with Gig Young as he is in love with the youngest. As for the oldest, Fiona (Barbara Stanwyck), first she supposedly divorced (??) the bad guy, then at the end he says he's still her husband. Supposedly they marry/re-marry/cohabitate (??), and plan to live with the son they finally admit to having. Poor little kid. He wanted Gig Young for his uncle. I thought the monkey in the zoo was really cute. This movie was funny, maudlin, historic, etc. I enjoyed all the lawyers, especially Donald Crisp and Gene Lockhart.

mrsastor Spoiler alert – although I think this one was spoiled coming out of the can… It's hard to even imagine that a film with these stars, from this studio, made at this time period, could be so awful, but it is. It is the film's biggest flaw by far that it just doesn't make any damn sense.Rich widower American aristocrat Penn Gaylord leaves his small daughter "in charge" and goes off to World War I where he is killed. Then we flash forward to present day (1942) and total confusion. The three sisters are in court where they are said to have spent the last twenty years, and some jerk named Barclay is trying to take their home away from them. This is just the beginning of an endless series of unanswered questions that comprises the script, more holes in it than The Warren Report. What happened to the Gaylord fortune? If the will is worth half a billion, why has the family home gone from an opulent palace to the house on The Munsters? Who the devil is this Barclay clown? And why is he able to take someone's home away from them? The questions just pile on top of more questions.The usually affable and charming George Brent is playing Barclay, who is inexplicably a total sod tromping all over everyone, taking whatever the heck he wants no matter who it belongs to and without a twinge of guilt; yet no one besides Fiona (Barbara Stanwick) seems to particularly dislike this cretin. Why? None of these questions are ever answered. We instead just follow Fiona's life from one train wreck to another, the evil Barclay takes away her home, her fortune, and even her child. What does she do? Shoot him? Set him on fire? No, too logical. In a completely improbably wrap-up, this woman, who's only prior romantic involvement with Barclay was, save for the technicality of marriage, rape, suddenly decides mid-sentence (literally) that she does not hate him, she loves him. And they're going to live happily ever after. All of a sudden for no reason in the world, this early female role model of independence and authority is transformed into the usual helpless ankle-twisting twit more commonly found in films of this era. Yeah, sure, steal everything in the world that belongs to me and I'll fall in love with you. On what planet does that happen? I can only guess the reason I never heard of this film before I happened to catch it on Turner is that it was as lost on contemporary audiences as it is today.

zetes Three girls, the youngest descendents of the Gaylord family, one of America's most royal families, are orphaned at a young age. Right before he goes off to France to fight in WWI, their father tells the oldest, Fiona, never to sell the land. By the time the sisters have become adults, they have had to squander most of their money to pay for lawyers to defend their property. Through certain loopholes in the father's will, a man named Charles Barclay stands to gain possession of the Gaylord land, on which he wants to build a complex called Barclay Circle. Barclay is actually based on John D. Rockefeller, who was buying up land and buildings from affluent families in New York so he could build Rockefeller Center.This film deals mostly with the melodramatic concerns of the three sisters. Fiona, well played by Barbara Stanwyck, although it's certainly not to be counted as one of her best roles, seems like a cold, domineering woman, and it becomes clear that she has some skeletons in her closet. Susanna, played by Nancy Coleman, is a little ditsy and completely in love with a young modern artist named Gig Young. Coleman's was my favorite performance in the film. Evelyn, played by Geraldine Fitzgerald, is a rather pretentious seductress with a monocle who married into noble blood in England, but that doesn't stop her from trying to steal Gig from her sister. The three sisters are developed quite well but, as is the major trend in The Gay Sisters, never well enough. Charles Barclay is played by George Brent. He isn't very good. Well, he would be satisfactory if the story had played out the way it should have, but he always seems like a scumbag in the film. When we're asked to sympathize with him late in the film, it's impossible. Gig Young is played by, huh?, Gig Young. No, he's not playing himself. What happened is that the actor, who had acted in several movies previously under his real name, Byron Barr, was pressured by Warner Brothers to change his name to something more catchy. I'm not sure who made the final choice, but he eventually changed his screen name to Gig Young, after the character whom he plays in The Gay Sisters. Weird, eh? Young is quite good through most of the film, but the script does some unfortunate things with his character late in the film which ultimately harm the audience's sympathy for him. In two other supporting roles, Helen Thimig and Gene Lockhart are quite good.The Gay Sisters had great potential to turn out to be one of the great cinematic family sagas. The characters are all interesting, as are their situations. Unfortunately, the script never strives for anything more than the simplest melodrama. If it had made the interrelationships of all the major characters more complex, fleshed out, for example, the rivalry between Evelyn and Susanna or made the flashback more intricate, the film could have been fantastic. It also could have fleshed out the prologue more, let us know more about the Gaylord family. We need to care more about the characters and we need to sympathize with them more. And the ending needed some major fixing. It basically just gives up at the end. Fiona's problems are solved so poorly that it hurts. Whatever sympathy her character had gained as the film progressed falls apart. It's also far too happy. This story seems moving towards tragedy, or maybe just a sense of historical significance or loss. And we still hate Barclay. And the conflict between the two sisters and Gig is never solved. As bad as Fiona's story ends, Susanna's, Gig's, and Evelyn's is even worse.I still liked the film. It's thoroughly watchable, even if it doesn't involve us like other great films of the era. 7/10, mostly for its potential. It should have been remade, or the novel should have been re-adapted, at some point during the studio era. It is too dated to be remade now. The 1950s would have been the best time, during the time of films like Giant.