My Sister Eileen (DVD)

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In 1955, "Mister Roberts" launched Jack Lemmon's career as a serious actor. But that same year, hard as it is to believe now, Lemmon also starred in a pair of musicals—"Three for the Show" with Betty Grable, and "My Sister Eileen," with Janet Leigh and Betty Garrett.

It would be tempting to rate "My Sister Eileen" based on sentiment alone, or a fondness for fun film facts. After all, besides Lemmon doing his best Bing Crosby impersonation in a duet with Leigh, it's also the first film that Bob Fosse choreographed—and he also dances in it! Then there's the attraction for TV-fans of seeing Garrett sing and dance years before she'd become better known as Irene Lorenzo on "All in the Family" or Mrs. Babish on "Laverne & Shirley." Or the unexpected pleasure of seeing Dick York in action nearly a decade before he'd enter America's households as Darrin Stephens on "Bewitched." And if Lemmon's secretary looks familiar, it's because he's none other than Richard Deacon, who played the cranky Mel Cooley all those years on "The Dick Van Dyke Show."

As musicals go, this one isn't without its charms, even if it's a bit idealistic in its attitude and depiction of life in New York City. "My Sister Eileen" fits the old MGM musical mold from the Forties and early Fifties, but like so many of those crank-em-out studio songfests, this one isn't highly memorable. Mostly it's because the songs are so highly forgettable. A day after watching the film, most people would be hard-pressed to hum a few bars of "Atmosphere," "There's Nothin' Like Love," "As Soon As They See Eileen," "I'm Great," "Conga," or "Give Me a Band and My Baby." Compared to "Singin' in the Rain," which was released several years earlier, the Styne/Robin tunes unfortunately drift away in your consciousness, like numbers in a countdown under anesthesia. There are lyrics like "There's nothin' like love, it's a grand grand feelin', it really is a gift from above" and a long musical number where the sisters and two suitors get toasted and play imaginary instruments and cavort on an empty bandshell that is best watched in fast-forward mode. But the Lemmon song is fun, as is the alley dance number that Fosse does with another actor, and the "Conga" line mayhem near the film's end calls to mind the craziness of madcap comedies and those big production numbers from the wartime years. Unfortunately, there isn't the same kind of energy in the other songs.

"My Sister Eileen" is a musical remake of the 1942 film of the same name, which was based on a play, which in turn was based on stories written by Ruth McKenney about her real-life sister. Garrett plays Ruth in this version, with Leigh her attractive younger sister. They're a couple of hopefuls from Columbus, Ohio who land in the Big Apple with a suitcase full of dreams: Ruth is wanting to make it big as a writer, and Eileen has her sights set on becoming a successful actress. So they end up in Greenwich Village, which looks sanitized and suburbanized in this Eisenhower-era film. Desperate for housing, they end up renting the basement apartment from hell. Explosions underneath them rock the house intermittently (they're blasting for a new subway tunnel), a neighbor insists on the right to use their laundry facilities, and there are glass-less windows with only steel bars (in a cold-weather climate??). There are no drapes, and so drunks peer in at them through those bars, an alley cat jumps through trying to escape an alley mutt, a cop looks in on the nearly-undressed sisters and assumes they're running a prostitution operation (as apparently the last tenant was, hence no curtains), and a street cleaner drives by with its washer-jets spraying into the apartment full-force. But it's a place to sleep, and the offer of money-back if they don't like it after 30 days is just too tempting to pass up, especially when the proposition comes from the fast-talking landlord, "Papa" Appopolous (Kurt Kasznar), who also happens to be an aspiring painter. York plays an ex-jock from Georgia Tech nicknamed "Wreck" who lives in the apartment above with his soon-to-be fiancé. Tommy Rall plays a randy newspaperman who has the hots for Eileen, and Fosse plays his chief rival, a good-guy soda fountain manager from the local Walgreens (which, by the way, is a fun blast-from-the-past for nostalgia-lovers and history buffs). The dance number with hat tricks that Fosse does with Rall is entertaining, and the performances manage to capture the lighthearted tone that's needed to pull this off.