My Sister Eileen

You could be forgiven if you find yourself just a little confused. Is Twilight Time's new Blu-ray edition of "My Sister Eileen" the Rosalind Russell film from 1942? Is Twilight Time venturing into the world of TV and releasing the short-lived CBS sitcom that ran during the 1960-61 season?

Nope, and nope. This is the 1955 musical version starring Janet Leigh, Betty Garrett, Bob Fosse (yes that Bob Fosse, both an actor and a choreographer for this production) and Jack Lemmon, working from a script by Blake Edwards and director Richard Quine. Garrett plays Ruth, a smart writer looking to get her career jump-started in New York; Leigh plays Ruth's younger sister Eileen, the naive and gorgeous actress men fall all over themselves flocking toward.

Men just don't seem to notice Ruth when Eileen is around - this is a recurring comic trope - but Ruth also struggles to capture the attention of Bob Baker (Lemmon), the editor-in-chief at a prestigious magazine. Scoffing at Ruth's stories of hopeless romance - in which, Baker notes, the heroine always seems to end up "setting fire to her hope chest" - the editor zeroes in on a light, zippy story about Eileen and her madcap adventures, which also involve the sister's larcenous landlord, Mr. Appopolous (Kurt Kasznar) and unmarried upstairs neighbors Wreck (Dick York), an unemployed pro athlete, and Helen (Lucy Marlow), who works nights... thus making their living arrangement presumably sexless and, therefore, non-scandalous.

While Ruth despairs of receiving any mate attention, Eileen picks up two suitors in short order: The sweet and smitten Frank (Fosse), a Walgreens lunch counter manager, and a reporter named Chick (Tommy Rall), a player who maintains Eileen's attention by insinuating that he can help Ruth's career along. The resulting film is wry, zippy, inventive, and happily ludicrous even when it contrives to get all of Greenwich village and a shipload of Brazilian sailors mixed up in a riotous conga line. This flick's a hoot!

What it's not - and note this well, just to clear up any lingering confusion - is an adaptation of the Broadway musical "Wonderful Town," though all the projects mentioned (including "Wonderful Town") are based on the book by Ruth McKenney - the book, in turn, springing from McKenney's collection of "New Yorker" pieces.

Twilight Time's in-house essayist and film scholar Julie Kirgo recounts much of this in her liner notes for this new Blu-ray release, which - like all Twilight Time releases - is carefully sourced to provide a flawless transfer. There are no featurettes explaining the film's origins (or its uneasy co-existence alongside "Wonderful Town"), which is sort of a shame. It would have been nice to learn more about Ruth McKenney and her sister, who provided the material for all those varied productions. (Tragically, the real-life Eileen was killed in 1940 along with her husband, the screenwriter Nathaniel West, in an automobile accident.)

If this isn't one of the great musicals, it comes close enough. Buy, savor, cherish!

"My Sister Eileen"
Blu-ray
$29.95
http://www.screenarchives.com/title_detail.cfm/ID/35561/MY-SISTER-EILEEN-1955/