While considered a poor man's Bette Davis during her career at Warner Brothers, time has been more than kind to Ida Lupino. It's ironic that in this campy TV mystery movie, she seems to be doing a Bette Davis imitation, and enjoying every minute of it. I'm wondering however if the blue tinting of practically every scene serves a purpose. There's a boat scene where everybody's faces indeed look like blueberries, and when they get to Lupino's estate, the tint continues, all except for the red staircase that Lupino makes her grand entrance down.
The major mystery concerns detectives Les Crane, David Hartman and Hagan Beggs hired by the presumably drunken Terry-Thomas to find an elusive billionaire. Everywhere they turn, they seem to hit a dead end, ending up on Lupino's spooky island along with her geeky son Hack Weston and her three daughters- Faith, Hope and...you guessed it...Charity. So from there, it's a sitcom like situation for these men, finding hidden passageways, a creepy laboratory and some wild critters that only a crazy broad like Lupino's off the beam matriarch would have. In many of her later films, Lupino was photographed rather unattractively, but here, is quite striking.
I wonder if her years directing sitcoms like "Gilligan's Island" made Lupino choose to overplay the Tallulah Bankhead and Bette Davis nature of this role. Certain elements of the humor would definitely appeal to pre-teen boys (my age at the time this was released), especially a very funny ink blot test. The art direction is closer to old Universal horror films (making Lupino sort of a female version of Karloff or Lugosi), and the tiny bit of sexuality with the three men equally matched with Lupino's daughters very subtle. I can only recommend this for its child like goofiness, and for classic movie fans, it's a nice change of pace from the dramatic and humorless characters Lupino usually played.
The major mystery concerns detectives Les Crane, David Hartman and Hagan Beggs hired by the presumably drunken Terry-Thomas to find an elusive billionaire. Everywhere they turn, they seem to hit a dead end, ending up on Lupino's spooky island along with her geeky son Hack Weston and her three daughters- Faith, Hope and...you guessed it...Charity. So from there, it's a sitcom like situation for these men, finding hidden passageways, a creepy laboratory and some wild critters that only a crazy broad like Lupino's off the beam matriarch would have. In many of her later films, Lupino was photographed rather unattractively, but here, is quite striking.
I wonder if her years directing sitcoms like "Gilligan's Island" made Lupino choose to overplay the Tallulah Bankhead and Bette Davis nature of this role. Certain elements of the humor would definitely appeal to pre-teen boys (my age at the time this was released), especially a very funny ink blot test. The art direction is closer to old Universal horror films (making Lupino sort of a female version of Karloff or Lugosi), and the tiny bit of sexuality with the three men equally matched with Lupino's daughters very subtle. I can only recommend this for its child like goofiness, and for classic movie fans, it's a nice change of pace from the dramatic and humorless characters Lupino usually played.
