Three Bad Sisters (1956) User Reviews

Suds'd-up trash so blatantly, vulgarly bold it beggars all description

[bmacv · 5/10 · 28 August 2003]

The title tells a lie: It's actually two bad sisters. The middle sibling Lorna (played by Sara Shane) proves as virtuous as she is dull, compared to the psychotic (Valerie, played by Kathleen Hughes) and the nymphomaniac (Vicki, played by Marla English) with whom she shares a mansion and their dead father's millions. (Also in the mix is a boozed-up busybody of an aunt played by Madge Kennedy.)

The trouble, which has been brewing for three lifetimes, boils over when dad dies in a plane crash. The pilot (John Bromfield) claims to have tried to save him, but doubts abound. Valerie, sniffing an opportunity, schemes to have him brought into the family business and marry him off to Lorna, engaged to the estate's executor (Jess Barker). She hadn't reckoned on Vicki, who throws herself at Bromfield as though lust had just been put on the market in easy-to-swallow caplets (`I graduated magna cum laude from Embraceable U,' she coos at him).

Valerie and Vicki make Goneril and Regan look like Little Sisters of the Poor. They openly and viciously taunt one another, and Lorna, about age, and looks, and anything else their stoat-like minds can come up with. In one eyes-like-saucers scene, the twisted sisters get into a cat-fight concluding with Valerie's taking a riding crop to Vicki's face, driving her (quite literally) around the bend. All the while she's photographed in pitiless close-up, her thickly-lipsticked maw stretched wide in ecstatic triumph. But wait! There's more....

Suds'd-up trash so pungent it's hard to pass it by, Three Bad Sisters was a late-50s Z-movie template for the motivelessly malignant soaps and serials that soon became a staple of television screens, filling the days of our lives. Script, acting and production boast no redeeming qualities whatsoever, except excess and sheer effrontery. In regard to those qualities, Three Bad Sisters offers an embarrassment of riches.

"I graduated summa cum laude from Embraceable U"

[Handlinghandel · 7/10 · 1 August 2007]

That hilarious line is typical of what these naughty sisters say. (It's funny on its own terms and pretty funny unintentionally , too.) Only two of the sisters are really bad. Boy, are they bad, too! One is given to pinup poses and salacious comments where e'er she goes. The other is got up to look like Marilyn Monroe. She has those sensual, slightly parted lips. And, not to give anything away, she is even more bad than the other.

All three sisters are played by starlets. The man who stumbles into their lives is played by John Bromfield. He had something of a career.

This looks today like possibly the first mainstream soft-core porn ever marketed. Well, of course not the first but the raciest at that time.

The girls wear as little as possible and let's not forget about the female audience members: Bromfield is shown shaving with an electric razor -- whose fetish was this? -- bare-chested. He also is shown sopping wet in a swimsuit.

There's a real plot here, too: The girls' family, see, is cursed. They are prone to suicide -- or dramatic deaths that can be made to seem like suicide.

The movie is not bad. I truly don't know where it was shown. Maybe it was made for drive-ins. Somehow, and I could be wrong, I felt that the typical male audience was not the primary target here. The women are scantily dressed. They often resemble lurid covers of mags like Police Detective or jackets of dime novels.

But the guy seems to be the central focus. Not everyone in the movie likes him, but all the girls love him. And I think the audience is meant to also.

It's lots of fun -- and on its own terms, too.

Cheap, a bit trashy and still a lot of fun and surprisingly effective.

[planktonrules · 7/10 · 5 December 2011]

This is a very low budget soapy thriller--and it makes no attempt to be anything other than entertaining. It ain't the least bit sophisticated and is a bit silly--but it IS enjoyable on a low-brow level. Just sit back and watch the fireworks. I guarantee you won't be bored!

"Three Bad Sisters" begins with a plane crash. A rich guy is killed--leaving his vast fortune to three really screwed up but beautiful daughters (sort of like really bad versions of Hilton girls). One daughter, Valerie (Kathleen Hughes), is greedy and wants to force the pilot of the plane, Jim, to work with her to somehow cheat her sisters out of the money--but how is never really stated. The guy (John Bromfield) seems to have no choice and comes to stay with the family on a trumped up pretense. He soon learns that one of the sisters, Lorna (Sara Shane), is emotionally unstable and seems to be struggling with suicidal impulses--and she's by far the best of the bunch! Vicki (Marla Craig) is a combination nympho and home-wrecker. And, Valerie is just evil. What's Jim to do? And what exactly is Valerie's plan? Tune in to this VERY juicy film to find out more.

Subtle it's not nor is it especially believable. But, it also it great fun and the actors do pretty well with what they've been given. Sure, a few characters are a bit broadly written but it never bores...never. It's sort of like a poor man's "Peyton Place"...on crack! I'd not say it's a great film but it's a wonderful guilty pleasure--the sort of overwrought trash that can be very difficult NOT to watch.

Better than i was expecting

[gordonl56 · 7/10 · 21 November 2015]

THREE BAD SISTERS 1956

This one is a real potboiler. It is about three sisters going hammer and tongs over a multi-million dollar inheritance. The three are played by Kathleen Hughes, Sara Shane and the drop dead gorgeous, Marla English. Also in the mix are John Bromfield, Anthony George and Madge Kennedy.

The three sisters all suffer from mental problems, Hughes is just mad about money. Miss English suffers from a somewhat overdeveloped sense of attraction to the male of the species. Sara Shane is just loose in the brain pan and has some real self-esteem issues. Stuck in the middle of these dingbats, is, John Bromfield.

This story has to be seen to be believed. One of the highlights is a nasty cat fight between Hughes and English. If you are a fan of over the top melodramatics, then this is the one for you. It is really quite fun.

King Lear, Updated and Happily Ended.

[rmax304823 · 2/10 · 3 August 2007]

Somebody called Howard Koch a schlockmeister but he did write the screenplay for "Casablanca", didn't he? Or didn't he. Maybe there's more than one Koch slinking around in Hollywood, and I'm not too fond of "Casablanca" anyway. Wait a minute -- yes, there is another Howard Koch slinking around Hollwyood. That's the one who wrote "Casablanca." No matter. I'll put as much care into this comment as "Howard W. Koch" put into this production, which is to say only a little.

You know what this sounds like? Somebody read Cliff's Notes on Shakespeare's "King Lear" and decided, since no original thoughts were aboard the Inbound Inspiration Express, to update it and Hollywoodize it with a happy ending.

There are differences. Lear decides to divvy up his vast estates between three sisters and before doing so, asks them how much they love him. Two of the sisters throw themselves at his feet and brown nose him to get at his money. The third is the good girl and refuses to go operatic on Lear. But in the play, Lear remains alive to regret his decision to give the two connivers his stash and deprive the honest girl. He winds up crazy and naked during a gale on the moors, putting flowers in his hair and hallucinating. Kids can do that to you. (Take my kid, for instance. After all the effort I squandered on raising him, does he show any interest in becoming a doctor or a lawyer? No.) In the end, everybody in the play dies.

In the movie, evidently, the good sister is morose and suicidal but when she tries to off herself, somebody jumps in and saves her, so the ending is, more or less, happy. That's the difference between Hollywood and a genuine tragedy, unless you define Hollywood as a tragedy sufficient unto itself.

There's only one queen bee.

[mark.waltz · 4/10 · 3 January 2021]

Willing to sting her own sisters to death, Kathleen Hughes is a camp delight in this turgid melodrama about the three daughters of a wealthy man recently killed in an airplane crash and one sister's attempt to claim the fortune for herself. Hughes seemingly had no love lost for her father and certainly has no use for her sisters which includes the innocent Sarah Shane and the easy virtue Mara Corday. Corday's cat like beauty can allure men and sets Hughes up to destroy that allure (even though that long mane only makes Corday look cheap), and the innocent Shane is easily victimized by Hughes whose destiny is obvious.

When the sisters meet John Bromfield, the copilot on their late father's plane, Hughes sets up a plot to destroy Shane to further send the sensitive girl over the edge. Jess Barker and Anthony George also become pawns in Hughes' scheme, given further assistance by the drunken aunt (Madge Kennedy, resembling Lillian Gish), always claiming that she doesn't want to interfere with her "but" indicating otherwise.

Each of the sisters, as well as the elder Kennedy, gets an opportunity to over emote, making this a camp delight. Corday's cat fight with Hughes has a really horrific twist with Hughes getting the better of her in the cruelest of ways, leading to ah unforgettable chase sequence. As cinema, it's fun trash. As art, it has no worth. But it's certainly a piece of arty trash that you won't soon forget.

A Camp Classic

[jromanbaker · 8/10 · 10 February 2020]

I have a weakness for so called exploitation films made for the youth of America in the 50's and this is one of the best. I do not agree with one reviewer who said it was possibly the first soft core porn film made for the mainstream. Clearly the UK censor of the time had similar thoughts in mind and banned it. To my knowledge it has never played in a UK cinema or shown on television here. It has its moments of violence, but this is a film in the tradition of Bette Davis, Joan Crawford and Olivia de Havilland as the ' good ' sister. And yes in this black and white melodrama there is always a good sister and the good/slash bad hero goes for her. In fact in its over the top way it as moral as any major Hollywood film of the 40's or 50's. If anyone wants to check this point out take a look at ' Female on the Beach ' with Joan Crawford plus a male and female pimp selling Jeff Chandler in sexy swimsuits to the highest bidders. It is just as violent as this film plus a not too moral ending. This in contrast keeps more or less to the straight and narrow. But in its delirious and improbable scenario and in its acting it is a Camp film and Marla English stands out as really quite a good actress. And the ending in its crazy way reminded me of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr in ' From Here to Eternity '. I would like to lay a bet it was on the mind of both director and writer. In all it is not to be missed just to see both how well made it is and how it makes censors often look like fools, especially in the UK in the 1950's.

Preposterous potboiler is a reel guilty pleasure!

[melvelvit-1 · 10/10 · 25 June 2007]

When a rich tycoon is killed in a plane crash, his spinster twin sister, Martha Craig (Madge Kennedy), doesn't believe he grabbed the controls in a suicide dive (even though self-snuff runs in the family) but his three beautiful daughters couldn't care less. The pilot, Jim Norton (John Bromfield), goes to work for Valerie Craig (Kathleen Hughes) who soon coerces him into helping her wrest control of the estate from her troubled sister, Lorna (Sara Shane) and the family lawyer (Jess Barker). Valerie wants Norton to seduce Lorna when he's not fending off the advances of another sister, the nymphet Vicki (Marla English), but her plans are thrown into a tailspin when Norton falls for his prey. All bets are off as a world of woe -including corporate chicanery, seductions, suicides, blackmail, a murder plot, the Mann Act, double-crosses, disfigurement, and poetic justice- befall "Craig Manor", an imposing mansion on a bluff overlooking the sea...

This preposterous potboiler would have made a perfect second feature for WRITTEN ON THE WIND, also from 1956. Douglas Sirk's saga of a powerful (and powerfully dysfunctional) oil clan was said to have inspired the 1980s night-time TV serial DALLAS but the Craig's low-brow excursion into insanity seems right out of it's sinful sister-soap, DYNASTY. All three siblings (only one of whom is really bad) are great beauties but it's Kathleen Hughes' cartoon villainy that stands out. Valerie is relentless in her quest to inherit the family fortune and her unbridled enthusiasm for evil is one of the movie's many guilty pleasures. Teenage sister Vicki is quite a piece of work as well, reminiscent of Carmen Sternwood in THE BIG SLEEP. When they first meet, she pulls the equivalent of trying to sit on Norton's lap while he's still standing by coming on to him with the line "I graduated summa cum laude from Embrace-able U." Whew!

THREE BAD SISTERS, produced by schlockmeister Howard W. Koch, is a terrific trash-wallow in exploitation excess and the cast is B-Movie Heaven: Marla "She Creature" English, 50s hunk John "Revenge Of The Creature" Bromfield (once married to French sexpot Corinne Calvet), Universal starlet Sara Shane (discovered by Hedy Lamarr), Jess "Mr. Susan Hayward" Barker, Kathleen "It Came From Outer Space" Hughes, and former silent screen star Madge Kennedy give it all they've got -however much or little that is. Future Eurotrash star Brett Halsey (TRUMPET OF THE Apocalypse) is seen briefly as one of Vicki's victims.

B-Movie rating: 10/10 Marla (and her body English) made marvelous movies! THREE BAD SISTERS was recently seen on the big screen as part of the Palm Springs Film Noir Festival but the jury's still wiping soap suds out of ...aw hell, it's noir (5/10 on the noirometer).

Should be One Bad Movie

[howdymax · 8/10 · 1 August 2007]

We have to remember that the 50's were practically a blank slate when it came to movies. Hollywood was in transition from patriotic war movies, noir, two reel oaters, etc to movies with a message. We had Blackboard Jungle, On the Waterfront and so on. Some folks might think that was an improvement. I don't. Who was the mogul who said: If you want to send a message, call Western Union? He was right. These psychological thrillers are less entertainment than some kind of remote therapy.

This one is a pip. It's about three sisters trying to wrest control of their dead father's estate. One of them, maybe the only one worth redemption enlists the aid of the company pilot to help her keep the rest of the family at bay. He's initially in it for the bucks, but eventually falls for her. Meanwhile the rest of the family schemes to sabotage the romance. The results are predictable. You get a little bit of everything in this movie. Sexual tension between the sisters. A little subtle masochism. Hereditary insanity - if there is such a thing. We never get to meet the parents, but they must really have been screwed up The cast is practically unknown. One or two of the actors sound vaguely familiar. The acting is so bad it's hard to believe. It was released under the United Artists umbrella by a company called Bel-Air Productions. It was shot in and around LA mostly at night and probably without permits. The end was so bizarre that I thought it was a joke. It was as if they ran out of money and the producer decided to wrap it up in the middle of a scene.

I can't explain it - not even to myself - but I gave this pile of trash an 8/10. I'm familiar with the term "It's so bad it's good", but I don't think I ever ran into the phenomenon before. Well, maybe "Hot Rods to Hell", but this one certainly fits. You might want to try this if you love movies that seem like they were made in somebody's basement.

Three Bad Sisters: Badly Good Entertainment

[Denise_Noe · 24 April 2024]

Directed by Gilbert Kay with a script co-written by Gerald Drayson Adams and Devery Freeman, the best thing about Three Bad Sisters is the three young beauties who are the title characters. Of course, as other reviewers have pointed out, there is a bit of a problem with the title since the three Craig sisters include two who are wicked and one who is virtuous. Blonde bombshell Valerie (Kathleen Hughes) and sultry brunette Vicky (Marla English) are in a competition for nastiest sister title; blonde beauty Lorna (Sara Shane) is sensitive, somewhat timid, but always well-meaning. The chief male love interest is hunky pilot Jim Norton (John Bromfield). As others have also pointed out, it is possible to count nasty sisters to three if we take the sister of the late father, Aunt Martha (Madge Kennedy), into the mix.

The film begins with the off camera plane crash death of the millionaire father of the main three. He was the sole passenger of pilot Jim Norton who survived. Was the pilot negligent? Did he even actually murder dear old dad? Will the three daughters share and share alike? Not likely. The movie poster shows the back of a woman's legs, the seams going up her stockings, and the legend: "What They Did To Men Was Nothing Compared To What They Did To Each Other!" The script has a super boo-boo at one point. Bad sister Valerie actually says to good sister Lorna, "It takes a woman to hold a man like Jim, not a psychopath!" Huh? What? Didn't Adams and Freeman know what a psychopath is?

Dialogue makes more sense when an exasperated Jim exclaims, "I'm getting tired of being blamed for what goes on in this nuthouse!" As readers have probably guessed, Three Bad Sisters has no artistic pretensions, no moral pretensions, and no social or political "message." It is fast-paced, titillating, trashy fun. Plane crashes, car chases, intense confrontations, dirty dealings among the fabulously wealthy, flirting and cheating, all make for a flavorsome popcorn box of a movie. It is especially good at underlining the sensual charms of its female protagonists as when Vicky raises her shapely high-heeled legs up from her position on a couch.

Kathleen Hughes enjoyed a rich and varied career that lasted most of her life. Perhaps her most well-remembered achievement was a photograph of her in an attitude of terror, hands thrown up, eyes super wide, mouth open as if in a scream. The famous picture is often used for comedic purposes and is iconic of a "scream queen." Both Sara Shane and Marla English left acting for other careers.

Sara Shane had a busy acting career in the 1950s and early 1960s before retiring from acting in 1964. She went into business. In 2018, she directed a health center in Australia where she resided. She also published books, including a book entitled Take Control of Your Health and Escape the Sickness Industry. She returned to the cameras (in front of them and behind them) in 2008 when she wrote, produced, and co-presented the documentary One Answer to Cancer.

Marla English started acting after winning a "Fairest of the Fair" beauty pageant while still in her teens. She bore a striking resemblance to Elizabeth Taylor and was known as a scream queen. However, she left acting when she was only 21 years old to marry a wealthy business executive and become a housewife. She took care of his daughter from a pervious marriage and bore four sons.

Although Three Bad Sisters did not call for great acting, it got adequate performances from all its major actors and can be counted a colorful feather in their caps, regardless of how long or short their acting careers were.