Tribeca 2005 Review: My Sister Eileen

When you're a festival that's very proudly screening 250 films in ten days, it seems like an exceedingly good idea to set eight of those slots aside for confirmed classics. My spirit slightly broken by several days of uneven festival features, it was a true joy to sink into a puffy chair in front of Pace University's ultrawide screen to watch a restored print of the 1955 Technicolor truffle My Sister Eileen. I couldn't have been the only one in need of some cinematic comfort food - after the first musical number, the film's title song sung by Betty Garrett, the audience exploded into applause.


Eileen - which was only scheduled for one Tribeca screening, but is available in remastered form on DVD - follows Ruth (Garrett) and Eileen Sherwood (Janet Leigh, in pre-Psycho bleach-blonde ingenue mode), two sisters from Ohio who have come to Greenwich Village to Make It - and after pledging not to ask their dad for any more money, they only have a month to do so. Neither has an easy time of it: men are drawn to Eileen like gnats to an open sore, which turns every audition she attends into a moral test. Ruth is trying to be a writer, but her only contact in the city, go-getting magazine man Bob Baker (Jack Lemmon, seemingly having way more fun playing the office whiz kid than he does in The Apartment five years later), thinks her fiction is crap.

But when she submits a story about Eileen, Baxter is suddenly intrigued - even more so when Ruth convinces him that the beguiling mantrap in her story is actually her.  But does Baxter only want to publish Ruth's work because she thinks she's "a...a...a...loose woman"? Will Eileen end up with sweet soda jerk Bob Fosse, or slimy beat reporter Tommy Rall? Will either sister find enough work to keep them both in spaghetti, or will they have to go back to Ohio? And what are all those Brazilian sailors doing dancing the conga in their living room?

My Sister Eileen is more screwball sex-farce than Classical musical (watch out for a lot of double entendres about Violet, who "used to read palms or something"), but the numbers, choreographed by Fosse, are miracles of modern dance. One little creampuff about two-thirds of the way through conciously mimics the Astaire/Rogers partner-dance-as-sex tradition. Fosse knows that if you're gonna steal, you do it from the best and you make it your own - and he's clearly having a ball. 18 years later, he's beating Francis Ford Coppola out of an Oscar. Looking at the smile on his face in this scene, it's like he already knows.