The Sisters (1938) [Warner Archive Blu-ray Review]

Every studio in Hollywood’s golden age had a house style, and nobody did glossy, hard-luck, handsomely mounted heartbreak quite like Warner Bros. The Sisters is a prime cut of exactly that: a 1938 prestige melodrama that takes two of the biggest stars on the lot, drops them into a turn-of-the-century marriage headed for the rocks, and then, for good measure, drops an entire city on top of them. Warner Archive is bringing it to Blu-ray for the first time on August 4, freshly scanned in 4K from the original nitrate camera negative, and it’s a pre-order as I write this.

Here’s the headline that’ll get the classic-film crowd’s attention: this is the very first time Bette Davis and Errol Flynn shared the screen. Two of the most magnetic, most mythologized stars of the era, in the same frame, for the first time. That alone makes this a notable release. The fact that Warner Archive has given it a beautiful new master and a genuinely loaded disc makes it a keeper.

I’m going to be honest with you about what kind of movie this is, because it’s important to go in with the right expectations. The Sisters is not a great film. It’s a very good version of a specific, slightly old-fashioned thing: the deluxe weepie, the prestige soap, the “women’s picture” done with a seven-figure budget and total conviction. Take it on those terms and it’s a genuine pleasure. Let me walk you through why, and give you the history and the craft that make it far more interesting than its reputation suggests.

Bette Davis, at the absolute peak of her powers

To understand what you’re watching in The Sisters, you have to understand where Bette Davis was standing in 1938, because she was, at that exact moment, on top of the world.

If you’re new to old Hollywood, here’s the short version. Bette Davis was the fiercest, most fearless dramatic actress the studio system ever produced, a woman who fought her own studio in court for better roles and basically willed herself into becoming the most respected actress in America. In 1938 she had just won her second Academy Award, for Jezebel, playing a willful Southern belle who torches her own life through sheer stubbornness. She was the queen of the Warner lot, and she knew it. The run she was about to go on, Jezebel into Dark Victory into The Old Maid into The Letter into Now, Voyager, is one of the greatest sustained hot streaks any actor has ever had.

The Sisters lands right in the middle of that, and here’s what makes her performance fascinating: she deliberately plays against everything you’d expect. Davis specialized in fierce, difficult, often venomous women. Here she plays Louise Elliott, a warm, patient, gentle, thoroughly decent woman who loves a man who does not deserve her and quietly endures. Davis said at the time that she took the part precisely because it was a change of pace, that she was always hungry to play a new kind of person. You can feel her enjoying the restraint. There’s no scenery-chewing here, none of the famous Davis fireworks. It’s a study in stillness and quiet strength, and if you only know her as the grande dame of camp classics, it’s a genuine revelation.

She also, characteristically, refused to be pushed around. The film was originally going to be billed as “Errol Flynn in The Sisters,” and Davis wasn’t having it. She fought for and won equal billing above the title. She also pointed out, with her usual sharp tongue, that the original wording carried an unfortunate double meaning that nobody at the studio had apparently thought through. She won that fight too. Errol Flynn got top billing in the end, but make no mistake, and everyone involved knew it: this is Bette Davis’s picture.

Errol Flynn, cast completely against type

And then there’s Flynn, which is where The Sisters gets genuinely interesting as a piece of casting.

By 1938, Errol Flynn was the reigning king of the Hollywood swashbuckler. He’d exploded to stardom in Captain Blood, and that very same year he made the film most people still think of first when they hear his name, The Adventures of Robin Hood, all bounding athleticism, flashing swords, and impossible charm. If you want to see what made Flynn a legend in his prime, Warner Archive’s Errol Flynn 6-Film Collection is the essential document, packed with the dashing-hero roles that defined him. That’s the Flynn audiences in 1938 expected: the gallant, grinning adventurer.

So casting him in The Sisters is a real curveball. Frank Medlin isn’t a hero. He’s a charming San Francisco sportswriter with dreams of writing the great American novel and nowhere near the discipline or talent to do it. He’s weak. He drinks. He self-pities. He marries Louise on an impulse and then slowly, miserably lets his own failures curdle into resentment, drinking to numb his wounded pride until he finally deserts his pregnant wife and ships out to sea rather than face what he’s become. It is about as far from Robin Hood as you can get.

And here’s the surprise: Flynn is good. Genuinely good. He was often underrated as an actor precisely because he made the swashbuckling look so effortless, but given a weak, self-loathing man to play, he finds real notes of shame and charm and evasion. There’s a haunting question the film puts in his mouth, essentially asking why marriage made his wife strong and made him weak, and Flynn plays the not-knowing of it beautifully.

There’s a sad irony hanging over the performance, too. Flynn was playing a charming man undone by drink and his own weaknesses, and that would become the story of Flynn’s own life. The dashing star of 1938 would spend the next two decades slowly destroying himself, and his later performances carry a real melancholy as the athleticism faded and the hard living showed on his face. Warner Archive’s disc of the 1948 western Silver River captures that darker, more troubled Flynn a decade on, the swashbuckler turned cynical and tired. Watch The Sisters and Silver River back to back and you can see the whole arc, and it’s genuinely poignant. In 1938, though, he’s still young and beautiful and just beginning to hint at the shadows underneath.

Two icons who couldn’t stand each other

Part of the fun of this first Davis-Flynn pairing is knowing what was happening off camera, which was, by most accounts, not romance.

Davis, by her own later telling and everyone else’s, did not much care for Flynn. She thought him unserious about the craft, a lightweight coasting on his looks (an assessment The Sisters itself quietly disproves). Flynn, for his part, reportedly made the sort of advances Flynn was famous for making, and Davis, the consummate professional, shut them down flat. There wasn’t a lot of love lost between them on set.

And yet the screen doesn’t care about any of that. Whatever friction existed between takes, the two of them generate real heat and real tenderness in front of the camera. That’s the strange alchemy of movie stardom: two people who found each other tiresome in real life playing one of the great doomed romances of the WB catalog and completely selling it. They’d reunite one more time, in 1939’s lavish The Private Lives of Elizabeth and Essex, and that was it. Two films, a decade of Hollywood mythology, and a partnership that worked far better on screen than off.

The story: three sisters, one very rough marriage

The plot, adapted from a 1937 bestselling novel by Myron Brinig, is pure turn-of-the-century melodrama, and I mean that affectionately.

It’s 1904, in the small mining town of Silver Bow, Montana. The film opens at an election-night ball (the whole story is cleverly bookended by presidential elections, opening on Theodore Roosevelt’s win and closing on William Howard Taft’s, a nice way of marking the passage of years). The Elliott sisters, daughters of the local pharmacist, are all at that ball looking for love. Helen (Anita Louise) will chase money. Grace (Jane Bryan) will settle for security. And Louise, the eldest and steadiest, the one you’d bet on to make the sensible choice, takes one look at charming, feckless Frank Medlin and throws all her sense out the window. She elopes with him to San Francisco within days.

What follows is the slow, sad education of a good woman married to a weak man. Frank can’t sell his writing. His pride festers. He drinks. Louise endures, works, holds the marriage together with her bare hands, suffers a miscarriage in a smoke-filled boxing arena, and keeps enduring, until Frank finally cracks and abandons her entirely, shipping out to sea and leaving her alone and pregnant in San Francisco. In the spring of 1906. Which, if you know your history, means Louise is about to have a very bad morning, because the ground is about to open up.

I’ll be honest about the film’s central weakness here, because it’s a real one. It’s called The Sisters, but it isn’t really about three sisters. The other two are barely developed, their subplots feel dutiful, and the movie clearly knows where its gold is: every time it drifts away from Louise and Frank, it sags, and every time it comes back to them, it comes alive. This is a one-sister story wearing a three-sister title. The novel, for what it’s worth, actually ended Louise’s story differently, marrying her off to a different, better man. Hollywood, being Hollywood, rewrote the ending to reunite her with Frank, because audiences wanted their handsome leads back together and the box office agreed.

It’s soap. Posh, well-upholstered, expensively mounted soap. But it’s played with such total conviction, and anchored by such a beautifully controlled Davis performance, that it works on you anyway. And there’s a genuine undercurrent of something more serious in it, a real interest in a woman discovering her own strength precisely because the man she married had none, a small nod to the dawning women’s movement of the era that gives the melodrama a spine.

The earthquake: where the money went

Now for the sequence everybody remembers, and the one that makes The Sisters a genuinely impressive piece of studio craft.

The 1906 San Francisco earthquake is the film’s centerpiece, its reason for existing as a big-budget prestige picture rather than a modest weepie. And Warner Bros. spent real money on it. The earthquake sequence reportedly took three weeks to shoot and cost around $200,000, which in 1938 dollars was a staggering sum, a substantial chunk of the film’s entire budget lavished on a few minutes of catastrophe. In today’s money that’s several million dollars, all of it going into one set piece.

And it’s all practical. This is decades before computers, so every collapsing wall, every buckling street, every shower of debris was engineered and built and destroyed for real on the Warner soundstages, timed and triggered by technicians with the actors standing right in the middle of it. The result is genuinely thrilling, a chaos of falling masonry and fleeing crowds and a whole world coming apart, staged with the full weight of the studio’s technical departments behind it. When people talk about the craftsmanship of the studio system, the invisible army of set builders and effects technicians and stunt coordinators who could conjure a disaster on a soundstage, this is exactly what they mean.

Here’s the detail that makes it real: Bette Davis did her own stunts in that sequence, and nearly paid for it. She later wrote that she was risking life and limb daily during the shoot, and described one moment when director Litvak called for the effect and the ground opened beneath her and walls came crashing down around her, and that if she’d been standing even a fraction off her marked position, it could have killed her. That’s not CGI. That’s a movie star standing in the path of real falling scenery for the sake of the shot. It’s the kind of thing that makes these old films feel weightier than their modern equivalents, because the danger on screen was, to a real degree, actual danger.

This sequence is also the single best argument for the new 4K restoration. A set piece this detailed, this full of dust and debris and intricate destruction, is exactly the kind of thing a fresh negative scan brings roaring back to life. Every fleck of falling plaster that a worn old print used to swallow should now be right there in front of you.

The people who made it look this good

The Sisters carries the full A-list craft resources of Warner Bros. at its 1938 peak, and that pedigree is a big part of why even a soapy story feels so classy.

It was produced and directed by Anatole Litvak, a Ukrainian-born émigré who’d come up through European cinema before landing at Warner Bros. Litvak was a serious, capable filmmaker who’d go on to make some genuinely important pictures, including the taut thriller Sorry, Wrong Number and the harrowing mental-institution drama The Snake Pit, and you can feel his intelligence in how he keeps this melodrama from tipping over into pure schmaltz. The cinematography is by Tony Gaudio, an Academy Award winner, and it’s gorgeous, all that silvery turn-of-the-century atmosphere rendered in deep, glowing black and white. The costumes are by the great Orry-Kelly, Warner’s premier designer, who dresses Davis to perfection.

And then there’s the music, which deserves its own moment. The score is by Max Steiner, and if that name doesn’t ring a bell, he’s arguably the single most important composer in the history of Hollywood. Steiner essentially invented the modern film score. He wrote King Kong, he wrote Gone with the Wind, he wrote Casablanca, he wrote Now, Voyager. His music is the emotional engine under a thousand classic movies, and his work here does exactly what a great melodrama score should: it tells you how to feel and makes you feel it, swelling and aching right along with Louise.

This is the kind of prestige melodrama the studios did so well in the 1930s, and if you enjoy the mode, Warner Archive’s disc of the 1934 MGM crime melodrama Manhattan Melodrama is another handsome example of Golden Age Hollywood taking a big, unabashed melodramatic premise completely seriously. There’s real pleasure in watching these machines run at full craft.

A cast deep enough to swim in

One of the great joys of any Warner Bros. film from this era is the bench, the astonishing depth of character actors the studio kept under contract, and The Sisters is stacked with them.

Anita Louise and Jane Bryan play the other two sisters, doing what they can with underwritten roles. Ian Hunter, warm and decent as always, plays Louise’s kindly employer, the good man who quietly loves her while she throws herself away on Frank (Hunter made a whole career of playing the steady, honorable fellow who doesn’t get the girl, and he’s lovely at it). Donald Crisp lends his gruff authority as Frank’s loyal friend. Beulah Bondi and Henry Travers, two of the most beloved character faces in all of classic Hollywood (Travers is the angel Clarence in It’s a Wonderful Life, if you need a reference point), play the sisters’ parents with warmth and lived-in decency. Alan Hale, Lee Patrick, Laura Hope Crews, and a dozen more familiar faces fill out the world. You can see the full, deep cast and crew over on IMDb, and it’s a who’s-who of the studio’s stock company.

There’s a lovely small thread in the film worth watching for: a neighbor of loose reputation, the sort of woman the respectable townsfolk look down on, turns out to be one of the few genuine friends Louise has when everything falls apart. It’s a small, humane touch in a film that has more heart than its soap-opera bones might suggest.

So, is it any good? An honest verdict

Let me level with you, because I promised honesty. The Sisters is not a masterpiece, and it isn’t top-tier Davis or top-tier Flynn. The three-sisters structure is lopsided to the point of being slightly false advertising. The plot is thin, the pacing sags in stretches, and it’s fundamentally a glossy soap opera that periodically remembers it has an earthquake to get to.

But not everything has to be a masterpiece to be worth two hours of your evening, and The Sisters is genuinely, warmly entertaining. It’s posh soap done with total conviction and considerable style. It gives you Bette Davis at the height of her fame, doing something quiet and unexpected and lovely. It gives you Errol Flynn stretching well past his comfort zone and pulling it off. It gives you a first-ever pairing of two Hollywood legends. It gives you a Max Steiner score, a Tony Gaudio image, and a spectacular practical-effects earthquake that a whole department of studio craftsmen risked a movie star’s neck to create. As a two-hour window into what the Warner Bros. machine could produce at its glossy, confident peak, it’s a delight.

The disc: how it looks

Here’s the genuinely great news, and the best reason a fan should be excited.

Warner Archive’s Blu-ray is sourced from a new 2026 1080p master taken from a 4K scan of the original nitrate camera negative. That’s the holy grail, the first-generation element, the actual film that ran through Tony Gaudio’s camera in 1938. When the negative survives and Warner Archive scans it at 4K, the results are usually spectacular, and it’s a major step up from the manufactured-on-demand DVD that’s been the only way to own this since 2011.

But a black-and-white prestige picture shot by an Academy Award-winning cinematographer is precisely the kind of title that benefits most from this treatment. What a fresh 4K pass off the original negative should deliver is a clean, filmic image with natural grain left intact, a rich and stable grayscale with deep blacks and bright, glowing highlights, and fine detail throughout, in the period costumes, the elaborate sets, and especially in all that intricate earthquake destruction. Warner Archive’s recent run of black-and-white restorations off original negatives has been consistently gorgeous, so the optimism here is earned. I’ll confirm the specifics once I’ve run the disc.

The film is presented in its original 1.37:1 Academy aspect ratio with side mattes on a BD-50, exactly as audiences saw it in 1938.

The disc: how it sounds

Audio is the original mono, delivered as a DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 track, which is the correct and faithful way to present a 1938 production. On a melodrama like this, the sound has two jobs: keep the dialogue clean and clear (and there’s a lot of it), and give Max Steiner’s score the room to do its emotional heavy lifting. Good elements and lossless encoding should deliver both, letting Steiner’s music swell without turning muddy and keeping every hushed, heartbroken exchange intelligible. English SDH subtitles are included, the Warner Archive standard.

What’s in the case

This is a properly appointed release, not a bare-bones one, and Warner Archive clearly treated it as a title worth dressing up.

The Sisters (Warner Archive Collection)
Master	New 2026 1080p HD, 4K scan of the original nitrate camera negative
Aspect Ratio	1.37:1 (with side mattes)
Audio	DTS-HD Master Audio 2.0 Mono
Subtitles	English SDH
Disc	BD-50
Runtime	99 minutes
MSRP	$24.98
Release Date	August 4, 2026

The supplements are a lovely vintage program that recreates something like the full moviegoing experience of 1938. You get “Breakdowns of 1938,” the studio’s own year-end blooper reel, a genuinely fun artifact stitched together from flubs across that year’s Warner productions, so you get to see the whole star roster crack up. You get a classic Warner Bros. short subject, “The Night Intruder.” You get a full Lux Radio Theater broadcast, a condensed radio adaptation of the film, and there’s a delicious bit of trivia buried in it: the radio version stars Irene Dunne, and Irene Dunne was at one point actually announced to play Louise in the film itself before the role went to Davis. So the extras let you hear the version of this story from the leading lady who almost was, alongside David Niven and hosted by the one and only Cecil B. DeMille. And you get the original theatrical trailer, which, in true Warner fashion, sells the earthquake hard.

For a catalog melodrama, that’s a rich, thoughtful package, and the kind of curation that makes Warner Archive discs feel like preservation rather than product.

Should you buy it?

Yes, with clear eyes, and let me split it the usual way.

If you’re a classic Hollywood collector, a Bette Davis devotee, or an Errol Flynn fan, this is an easy pre-order. It’s the first-ever pairing of two of the biggest icons the studio system produced, it’s never looked remotely this good, the 4K negative scan is exactly why you buy Warner Archive discs, and the extras are among the better packages in this wave of releases. It slots beautifully onto the shelf alongside their other Davis and Flynn titles.

If you’re new to all this and just wondering whether a 99-minute black-and-white melodrama from 1938 is worth your evening, here’s my honest pitch. Go in expecting a lush, old-fashioned, big-hearted soap opera rather than a masterpiece, and you’ll have a genuinely good time. You get to watch one of the greatest actresses who ever lived doing something quiet and surprising, opposite one of the most charismatic movie stars who ever lived doing something brave and against type, in a gorgeously mounted production that climaxes with an entire city falling down around them, all of it built by hand. That’s a lot of movie for your money, and it’s the kind of rich, unhurried Golden Age pleasure that streaming will never bother to put in front of you. This, right here, is what physical media is for.

Find The Sisters at MovieZyng

The Sisters is available to pre-order now from the Warner Archive Collection and ships August 4, 2026. You can reserve a copy at MovieZyng, the label’s dedicated storefront, which, as I’ve covered in my Warner Archive sale guides, is run by the same people who actually manufacture the discs.

Two legends, one lousy husband, and a whole city coming down around a woman who deserved so much better. Bette Davis and Errol Flynn met for the first time here, and after decades in soft, murky prints, this beautiful old Warner weepie is about to look like a million bucks again. Which, in 1938, is roughly what it cost.