by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2017 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I squeezed in a movie in between 60 Minutes and Madam Secretary: My Sister Eileen, an item from the two-volume, eight-movie package of
screwball comedies from Columbia I’d just cracked open to screen Theodora
Goes Wild. My Sister Eileen was made in 1942 — a bit late in the day for the
heyday of screwball; American movies, even the comedies, had turned more
serious once the U.S. got into the war — and its tale of two rambunctious
sisters from Columbus, Ohio who come to New York City to succeed actually had
roots in real life. Though the family name of Eileen and her sister Ruth was
changed in the film from “McKinney” to “Sherwood,” Ruth McKinney and her sister
Eileen did come from Columbus,
Ohio to New York in search of fame and fortune in the arts, Ruth as a writer
and Eileen as an actress. They did this in 1934, and like the ones in the
movie, the real McKinney sisters had to settle for a basement apartment in
Greenwich Village (in the film the address is “Barrow Street” but in real life
it was 14 Gay Street, just above the Christopher Street subway station: just
about every Gay tourist who goes to New York gets him- or herself photographed
on the fabled corner of Christopher and Gay Streets, the location of the
Stonewall Inn where the 1969 riot of bar patrons against police staging a raid
is commonly — but ridiculously inaccurately — thought to have sparked America’s
Queer rights movement) where they had to deal with an eccentric landlord, a whole
cast of Greenwich Village characters coming in and out of their apartment at
odd moments, and the noises of the subway extension that was then under
construction. Ruth McKinney managed to write a series of stories about her life
in Greenwich Village with her sister Eileen, who was younger, more attractive
and far more interested in men, and though New Yorker editor Harold Ross at first didn’t think this
material was “classy” enough for his magazine, eventually he accepted
McKinney’s articles, they became popular and in 1938 they were collected and
republished as a book. Broadway producer Max Gordon saw the stage potential of
McKinney’s stories and bought the rights, bringing in Joseph Fields and Jerome
Chodorov to adapt them into a play, which he staged in 1940 with Shirley Booth
as Ruth and Jo Ann Sayers as Eileen. (The real Eileen McKinney met a sad end:
she married author Nathaniel West, moved to Hollywood with him, and the two
were both tragically killed in an auto accident in 1940.)
Columbia Pictures bought
the movie rights, though Gordon retained an interest and is listed on the film
credits as the producer, and filmed it in 1942 with Alexander Hall (who was at
his best with edgy comedies like this and the 1949 Bob Hope film The
Great Lover) directing, Fields and Chodorov
credited with the screenplay and Rosalind Russell as Ruth, the great comedienne
Janet Blair as Eileen and Brian Aherne as the New Yorker editor (though here it’s called The
Manhattaner) who squabbles with his
publisher, Ralph Craven (Clyde Fillmore), over whether to publish Ruth’s
stories. Russell and Blair don’t really look at all alike — even more than many
Hollywood movies that have cast quite dissimilar-looking people as siblings,
this one really requires a major
suspension of disbelief to accept these people as coming from the same family —
but in this case that’s less bothersome than usual because the difference in
their appearance and attractiveness to men is an integral part of the plot. The
gag is that Eileen keeps getting herself in trouble because so many men of
various income levels, social positions and potential usefulness to getting her
career started cruise her, while the more level-headed Ruth concentrates on her
writing and on keeping the two alive on the meager $100 allowance their dad
(Grant Mitchell) gave them when they left. (Their mom isn’t part of the picture
— given the usual attitude of classic Hollywood towards divorce, we’re probably
supposed to assume she’s dead — but they do have a female parental figure, their grandmother,
deliciously played by Elizabeth Patterson.) They end up in that basement
apartment on Barrow Street, which they rent for $45 per month from landlord
Appopoulos (George Tobias), who’s also an aspiring artist who gives one of his
works pride of place over their couch and won’t let them remove it. It turns
out that part of the dues you have to pay for living in a Greenwich Village
basement is that your window is on street level, so if you open the window —
something you practically have to
do in the middle of a New York summer — you’re just inviting all manner of
people to stare at you and accost you, from two drunks who cruise the sisters
to a cop who blames them for
attracting this unwanted male attention to a professional football player named
“Wreck” Loomis (Gordon Jones) — remember that pro football was still considered
a very low-class way of making a
living, and Loomis laments that he tried wrestling but couldn’t do it because
“you have to do so much rehearsing” — who’s hung a bundle of bedsheets from a
neighbor’s clothesline to use as a tackling dummy.
Eileen attracts the
attentions of alleged reporter “Chic” Clark (Allyn Joslyn), who first offers to
“interview” her as a star-struck young woman seeking a stage career in New
York, then offers to place Ruth with his paper on an assignment to cover a ship
from the Portuguese merchant marine that’s docking in New York. Somewhat to my
surprise, the paper turns out actually to exist, but they’ve sent out another
reporter — a man — to cover the ship coming in. After she realizes that “Chic”
sent Ruth on this wild-goose chase only to be alone with her in the apartment,
Eileen insists on joining Ruth at the docks, and they end up followed home by
six Portuguese sailors — one of them played by Kirk Alyn, Columbia’s future
Superman — who don’t speak a word of English. In one of the film’s most
delicious scenes, they form a conga line that stretches throughout the
neighborhood and ultimately sparks a riot that gets Eileen arrested. One could
make the case that My Sister Eileen
is essentially the stateroom scene from the Marx Brothers’ A Night at
the Opera extended over the length of a
feature film — in addition to the characters mentioned above there’s also a cat
who goes through the bars on the sisters’ window, a dog who also goes through
the bars to chase the cat, a soda jerk named Frank Lippincott (future director
Richard Quine, who had also played this part in the Broadway stage production)
who brings over a bottle of wine for what he thinks is going to be an intimate
dinner with Eileen and ends up with it spilled all over his suit, and Effie
Shelton (June Havoc, sister of Gypsy Rose Lee — 20 years after making this film
with her, Rosalind Russell would play June Havoc’s mother in the musical Gypsy), who in the original material was a prostitute but
in this version is a spirit medium who used to inhabit the Barrow Street
basement and still gets professional visitors there. This bowdlerization, and
the Production Code-mandated absence of any Queer characters (oh, how we could
have wished for a gag in which Eileen sets her sights on a nice young man who
proves impervious to her charms, and she’s crushed when she realizes that’s
because he’s Gay!), makes My Sister Eileen less fun than it could have been, but even under Production Code
restrictions it’s still a marvelous movie.
Fields, Chodorov and director Hall
do “open it up” a bit, starting the film with a prologue in Columbus that
establishes why the sisters are persona non grata there (Ruth wrote a review for the local newspaper
hailing Eileen’s performance for a local amateur theatre company in the lead of
Ibsen’s A Doll’s House before the
show even took place, only the paper’s publisher pulled rank at the last
minute, Eileen didn’t get to go on and the publisher’s daughter, whom we see
enough of to note she’s wretchedly incompetent — compared to her Susan
Alexander Kane was at the level of Sarah Bernhardt and Maria Callas — played
the part instead) and at least occasionally getting us out of that basement apartment
set that was probably the sole location of the stage version. My Sister Eileen was a hit film and in 1953 Rosalind Russell repeated
the part on stage in a musical adaptation of it called Wonderful Town, with a score by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by
Betty Comden and Adolph Green (his previous collaborators on the hit show On
the Town, which obviously inspired the
title change). A kinescope of a TV presentation of this show with Russell in
the lead exists, but it wasn’t filmed that way because Columbia wouldn’t either
buy Wonderful Town or relinquish
their rights to the underlying material. Instead in 1955 Columbia did their own
musical remake under the My Sister Eileen title, with MGM refugee Betty Garrett as Ruth and Jack Lemmon in the
role of the Manhattaner editor
played here by Brian Aherne (who wasn’t that great an actor or that big a star — in his memoirs
he jokes that he was the actor you called when Ronald Colman was unavailable —
but he worked well with strong women like Katharine Hepburn in Sylvia
Scarlett and Rosalind Russell here) with a
different set of songs (by Jule Styne, music; and Leo Robin, lyrics) and
Richard Quine promoted from actor to director. One thing I’m surprised Columbia
didn’t do with the material is a
TV series, since the episodic nature of the plot would seem to have made it a
“natural” as a TV sitcom, but the 1942 My Sister Eileen is a start-to-finish delight and it gives Rosalind
Russell one of her best ballsy-woman roles alongside His Girl Friday and another Greenwich Village story filled with
eccentric characters, Auntie Mame.
