"My Sister Eileen" (1955)

The sets of New York buildlings and sidewalks were terrible.

You do realize that it was also a remake from an earlier version with Rosalind Russell as the older sister & (I think) Janet Blair as the pretty Eileen ? I mention that because some of the OP' points can't be directed then specifically at the 1955 version.

trivia: I recall that the real Eileen on whom the tale is based died relatively young in an automobile accident; I believe she died along with her husband in that accident.

I love it, particularly when the dancing sailors come on at the end, and Jack Lemmon is more bearable than usual. Janet is adorable and Fosse and that fabulous Tommy Rall dance up a storm. Its a perfectly 50s New York fantasty.

[quote]trivia: I recall that the real Eileen on whom the tale is based died relatively young in an automobile accident; I believe she died along with her husband in that accident.

More trivia -- her husband was writer Nathaniel West, author of "Day of the Locusts" and "Miss Lonelyhearts."

This story has always been fantasy. They move into an apartment in Greenwich Village and are bothered by the blasting for the new subway. What year is this supposed to be? It looks like the 1950s, but the subway was already in place by then.

It's based on stories that take place in the 30s That's when Ruth and Eileen McKenney moved to NYC.

It's interesting that Rosalind Russell did the non-musical 1942 film, then the stage musical version [italic]Wonderful Town[/italic], but not this one.

Why did they create two completely separate musicals out of this story so close together? The only other case I can think of is that the Disney and Mary Martin versions of [italic]Peter Pan[/italic] opened within a year of each other, but that's a story that has had dozens of adaptations.

It's also weird that is seems somewhat "traditional" to cast Ruth with a VERY OLD actress!

It was bad enough that Rosalind Russell was already thirty-five when she did the movie, but was already forty-five when she played the same role in "Wonderful Town" on Broadway! This gave some producers the chutzpah to let Lauren Bacall play Ruth on the road when she was fifty-three! Donna Murphy was a mere child of forty-four when she starred in the 2003 revival. It's pretty silly really. Oh, well...

Columbia could not get the rights to WONDERFUL TOWN, the Bernstein Comden and Green Broadway musical so they went with their own version with a different score.

There are two musical versions of "The Shop Around the Corner"

A 1949 Judy Garland movie called "In the Good Old Summertime", and a Broadway version called "She Loves Me".

Similarly, Eugene O'Neill's "Ah, Wilderness!" was musicalized for the screen as "Summer Holiday" in 1948, and about a decade later as the Jackie Gleason-starrer "Take Me Along", which was a pretty big hit.

The brilliant 1960s comedy "Buona Sera, Mrs. Campbell" with Gina Lollobrigida has been musicalized on Broadway twice. Once as the Alan Jay Lerner & Burton Lane flop "Carmelina", and again as the ABBA juke box hit "Mamma Mia!" Neither improved on the original film, apparently.

R7, The creators of Wonderful Town bought the stage rights to My Sister Eileen but Columbia Pictures still owned the film rights which they had purchased when they made the non-singing film with Roz Russell. It was cheaper for Columbia to commission a new score than to buy the rights to a show based on a property they already owned. The owners of Wonderful Town ended up selling their version of the show to CBS which aired two live versions with Russell, truncated for television.

Roz may have been too old to play Ruth Sherwood, but it was triumph for her nonetheless. She was one of the first film stars to discover the built-in market on Broadway for movie names. Getting yourself a Broadway hit was a chic alternative to idleness for aging stars in the waning days of the studio system. Lucille Ball was following Russell's lead when she did Wildcat. A worse trend started by Russell than the age issue was the casting of non-singers in musicals. Her success and Rex Harrison's in My Fair Lady spawned dozens of bad performances by non-singing stars in musicals (including Roz herself in Gypsy), based on the hopeful but faulty notion that star power could overcome lack of musical ability even in roles that required it.

Ever the sharpie, Roz Russell used to send her young son out into the audience of Wonderful Town, and later Auntie Mame, to count the standees (lest the producers try not to include them in her cut of the gate) and to gauge audience reaction. The opening night of Wonderful Town, his spy mission in the lobby at intermission sent the boy back to Russell's dressing room in tears. It wasn't that the audience didn't like the show. But all anyone had to say about the forty-five-year-old star was, "how old IS she, anyway?"

Dick York suffered his debilitating back injury filming a western, not My Sister Eileen. He is handsome but oddly cast as a star football player.

Also ON THE TOWN. I love the Roz My Sister Eileen. Also her numbers from the televised WONDERFUL TOWN. Couldn't believe how they throw her around in the Conga number. She did that 8 shows a week?!

Both of the movies called My Sister Eileen are based on a play without music of the same name (1940), which starred Shirley Booth as Ruth. Two years later, Columbia Pictures made a movie version, also without music, with Rosalind Russell (and the studio's top moneymaker, The Three Stooges, in a cameo appearance at the end). It became her biggest hit until the movie version of Auntie Mame, and she received her first Oscar nomination for it. Like most movie actresses of her age, Russell saw her audiences disappear in the late forties. In an effort to resuscitate her career, her husband, the notoriously repugnant producer Frederick Brisson (known in theater circle as "the Lizard of Roz"), bought the rights to the original play to turn it into a Broadway musical for her. He asked Bernstein, Comden, and Green, who hadn't worked together since On the Town a decade earlier, to write the score, which, after auditioning Russell, they tailored to her vocal limitations. Called Wonderful Town, the show got raves from all nine (!) newspaper critics, won Tonys for best musical and best actress, and ran almost two years. Columbia, which still owned the rights to the movie, tried to buy the score, but wouldn't pay what Brisson and company wanted. Besides that, they didn't want Russell, who came with the package but at 46 was too old to play Ruth credibly on screen. Instead, the studio hired equally distinguished songwriters, Jule Styne and Leo Robin, to write a new score (which, unfortunately, wasn't as distinguished as they were). They also hired Betty Garrett, a zesty comedienne who had something Russell didn't have: musical talent. This was her first movie after being gray listed by MGM following the blacklisting of her husband, the actor Larry Parks, who first wouldn't testify and then, after a period of unemployment, decided to name names. He found himself on the shitlist from both the Right and the Left, so neither studios nor the creative people wanted much to do with him. In 1958, following the success of Auntie Mame, Wonderful Town was made, on a shoestring, into a TV movie starring Rosalind Russell. Years ago I saw a kinescope at the old Museum of Broadcasting, and it was pretty dismal.

TY, Bird. Great synopsis.

[quote]He asked Bernstein, Comden, and Green, who hadn't worked together since On the Town a decade earlier, to write the score

Didn't they write that score really quickly? Something like a few days?

Oops. Sorry. Here I was babbling away when R11 had already posted a terrific answer that covered pretty much the same ground I did. Serves me right: I should be paying more attention to my job, less to showbiz trumpery.

I am glad you put up a more informative post, R16. Thank you for taking the time to do it. They made a vinyl record of the TV version of Wonderful Town but it's not as good as the Original B'way Cast album.

Fun Fact: June Havoc has a small part in the 1942 Roz Russell non-musical version of MY SISTER EILEEN, in which she plays a fortune teller who used to reside in Ruth and Eileen's apartment. Exactly twenty years later, Roz Russell played June's mother in the movie version of GYPSY.

For that person who was wondering, the original 1940 Broadway play MY SISTER EILEEN (with Shirley Booth & Jo Ann Sayers), the 1942 film version (with Rosalind Russell & Janet Blair), the 1953 Broadway musical WONDERFUL TOWN (with Rosalind Russell & Edith Adams), and the 1955 film musical MY SISTER EILEEN (with Betty Garrett & Janet Leigh) all take place in the 1930s. It's just that Hollywood used to be terrible about period clothes/hairstyles, which is why Leigh and Garrett look like contemporary 1950s gals instead of Depression-era.

There was also a tv series based on the story which ran for one season in 1960-61. Elaine Stritch played the sister Ruth in that one.

[quote]trivia: I recall that the real Eileen on whom the tale is based died relatively young in an automobile accident; I believe she died along with her husband in that accident.

Not only that, but she and her husband, novelist/screenwriter Nathaniel West, died in an car accident (December 22, 1940) four days before the premiere of the Broadway play (December 26, 1940), so she never got to see it.

(And) to believe that Rose Marie (still with us at near 92 !!) is only 36,37 in this clip. Jesus !! She looks 53-57 years old.

Not to get too off topic, but here's a clip of 6 year old Rose Marie singing from 1929.

To answer a couple more of OP's questions, Fosse's acting career was short and limited to roles where he could dance (co-star Tommy Rall on the other hand, was more comfortable with acting). Fosse's awkward acting is more than compensated by the terrific dance duo with Rall, which is a highlight of the film. And yes Janet Leigh does her own singing here, as she did later in the movie of BYE, BYE BIRDIE. Her voice was limited, but she's practically Streisand compared to the painful vocalizing of Jack Lemmon in this film. Her dancing is a bit better.

The score is disappointing given that Styne wrote the music. I couldn't agree more with Bird about Garrett vs. Russell.

You can watch the 1958 CBS TV live broadcast special with Roz Russell & Jacquelyn McKeever in the link below. Those commercial breaks are a hoot!

Ruth McKenney who was the original author and model for the heroine of "My Sister Eileen" actually had a sad life with many obstacles and difficulties which included losing her sister Eileen at a young age: (NY Times article linked below)

[quote]Both of the movies called My Sister Eileen are based on a play without music of the same name (1940), which starred Shirley Booth as Ruth.

Hey, they're turning all my big roles into musicals! Dolly! Ruth! Hazel!

When are we gonna see "Come Back, Little Sheba-The Musical?" That'll be a doozy for sure!

Here is another article about a tragic fire that occurred in the basement apartment at 14 Gay Street in the Village where the real Ruth and Eileen lived in the 1930s - the fire killed a gay activist and may have been caused by moving papers to the floor by a faulty electrical cord:

Was Laverne & Shirley's basement apartment (complete with the street window) based on Ruth & Eileen's?

Here is an image of the real Eileen McKenney West

More on David Ryan and that apartment - the apartment seems to be cursed - many who lived there had tragic things happen to them including the McKenney sisters and Mr. Ryan and another tenant went mad:

Shirl/R27, there have been musical versions of Come Back, Little Sheba. Well, maybe one that was later revised. Anyway, they never made it to Broadway so you must have missed them. Kaye Ballard did one in the 70s, then Donna McKechnie did another (A revised version of the original?) regionally about 15 years ago. No understudying Chita Rivera for Donna on that one (Or, to bring things around full circle but still off-topic, no replacing Rose Marie on tour for Kaye Ballard like she did in Top Banana!).

Hey r15, I think that Brisson and George Abbott originally hired another songwriting team, and six weeks before their first out-of-town preview decided the score was no good, and Abbott begged Bernstein, Comden & Green to come up with a better one. So, I do think the whole score was written again in about three weeks.

I have no idea who the first songwriters were. I recall reading abut it once, but can't find the link now.

I saw Lauren Bacall and George Hearn in a late 70's tour of WONDERFUL TOWN that played the St. Louis Muny.

"Wonderful Town" only works if Ruth is played by an old bag. The same year that Bacall did it, there was also a tour with Nanette Fabray.

In the mid '70s, it was revived at the LA Civic Light Opera with No-Nose Nanette Fabray as Ruth and Marti Rolph, young Sally from "Follies" as Eileen. It was easy to see even then why it's not often revived. The highlight was the Danny Daniels tap for "Swing" which was so hilarious it came out of nowhere but it was better than almost everything else in the show.

R35 why does Ruth only work with an old bag? She's supposed to be plain and in her mid to late 20s, on the verge of becoming an old maid.

[quote] She's supposed to be plain and in her mid to late 20s, on the verge of becoming an old maid.

Because age has a different meaning now than it did back then. In order to get the "old maid" aspect, they have to cast older.

Threads like this are why I still come to DL.

June Haver was originally tapped to play Eileen, but she had married Fred MacMurray the previous year and had officially retired.

Janet Leigh wears the most startling torpedo bras under her tight sweaters.

Amazing dance number with Bob Fosse and Tommy Rall:

Ruth McKinney adopted Eileen's son after his parents were killed. She also changed his name, which was kind of a cunty thing to do.

R42. That may have been a tradition of the times. I have a friend whose mother died when he was about three (his father was only occasionally on the scene). His maternal grandmother and step-grandfather legally adopted him. The step-grandfather made it a condition that the boy's last name be changed to HIS! My friend later changed his name back legally to his birth name after his grandmother (whom he referred to as his mom) died. He also had step-siblings he has only reconnected with recently; last time he had contact with them was 35 years ago. Life can be a struggle, that's for sure.

R42 why cunty? And why did she change it?

If anybody had the right to wear a torpedo bra it was Leigh.

"Interesting people, living on Christopher Street!"

In the stage musical, the sisters live on Christopher St., not Gay St., and everyone sings about it. And they're constantly terrorized by the rumble of a fully working subway, not one that's being built.

Never seen it, OP. Where can we watch it?

Eileen's son from her first marriage was Thomas W. Jacobs, whom Ruth adopted and renamed Patrick Bransten.

This is from a 2010 joint biography of Eileen and Nathanael West.

There was an older version.

Carol Channing replaced Roz Russell in Wonderful Town on Broadway and the next year starred in the national tour.