My Sister Eileen (1942), directed by some hack named Alexander Hall. YouTube at home, Friday, May 12.

I guess I saw a Facebook post about a Film Forum series which is centered around movies that portray New York City. One of these was the original My Sister Eileen, from 1942 (there’s a musical remake from the 50s). This flick was never on DVD, not even one from Europe for sale on eBay, and not streaming except in a horribly pixilated version on the Tube of You. But I watched it because Rosalind Russell made some good comedies.

My Sister Eileen is at once fascinating, horrifying, and very, very stupid. Eileen (Janet Blair, a terrible actress) wants to break into theater, so she abandons her hometown of Columbus, Ohio with her sister, Ruth (Rosalind Russell, brilliant as usual), a reporter, to make it in Gotham. Their grandma helps them with this dream, triumphing over their father, who thinks it’s ridiculous. In New York, they move into a run-down lower-level apartment, and they meet any number of freaky men and hijinks ensue. I mean, that’s it for the plot, it’s all in that basement apartment that reverberates with loud explosions from the subways being built below them.

This was a popular play in its time, and it looks like the type of thing that had 1940s audiences rolling in the aisles–two fresh-faced girls in an apartment, and a bunch of lunatics that come running through for no apparent reason. You can see it functioning on a stage of any kind. Eileen and Ruth are both successful, of course, or this would be truly unpleasant. Janet Blair, as Eileen, doesn’t help, she seems to shout all of her lines.

What makes this film weird is how abysmal all the men are, to such a degree I wondered if this were a deliberate effort on the filmmakers to genuinely show how grinding it was for a woman to function in society at the time. All of the men, including their father, are truly awful people, at best dismal failures seeking to enforce what little power they have over these women, at worst outright dangerous creeps. At one point, a man just shows up in the apartment and refuses to leave, and it’s strongly suggested he was the prior tenant’s pimp. For the rest, they’re sex fiends, near-rapists, brain-damaged football players, vicious drunks. In the final moment, the Three Stooges, those violently unfunny morons, appear. More than any other movie, My Sister Eileen reminded me of Mulholland Dr.–these are girls from a small(er) town trying to make it and maybe failing, and in their defeat they end up abused, both physically and spiritually. Maybe this would be endurable if it weren’t such an inartistic picture, with only Russell offering up much of interest.