General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20267 min read

My Sister Eileen

My Sister Eileen is a 1955 American musical comedy from Columbia Pictures directed by Richard Quine, in which two sisters from Columbus, Ohio, Ruth and Eileen Sherwood, move to a basement apartment in Greenwich Village, New York, where aspiring writer Ruth turns her beautiful sister's romantic misadventures into magazine stories. It stars Betty Garrett as Ruth, Janet Leigh as Eileen, and Jack Lemmon as magazine editor Bob Baker, with Bob Fosse in a supporting role and as choreographer.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	New York opening 22 September 1955; general release October 1955; running time 106 to 108 minutes¹
Director and writers	Richard Quine; screenplay by Blake Edwards and Richard Quine; producer Fred Kohlmar¹
Source	The 1940 Broadway play My Sister Eileen by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, adapted from Ruth McKenney's New Yorker stories¹
Score	Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Leo Robin; six songs including "It's Bigger than Both of Us" and "There's Nothing Like Love"¹
Format	Technicolor, CinemaScope, RCA Sound System¹
Fosse milestone	First onscreen choreography credit for Bob Fosse, and the only time he is billed as "Robert Fosse"¹
Reception	83% on the Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer (6 reviews); 62% audience score³

Spoilers

Plot

Ruth and Eileen Sherwood arrive in New York's Greenwich Village from Columbus, Ohio, Ruth hoping to succeed as a writer and the beautiful Eileen as an actress. The crafty but kind landlord "Papa" Appopolous talks them into renting a shabby basement studio where the doorknob keeps falling off and subway construction blasts shake the walls. Their neighbor is Ted "Wreck" Loomis, a part-time athlete engaged to Helen, whom he rarely sees because they work opposite schedules.¹

Ruth carries a letter of introduction to Bob Baker, editor of Mad Hatter magazine, but finds him leaving on vacation; he advises her to write what she knows rather than the phony-sounding stories she has submitted. Eileen, meanwhile, meets a producer more interested in her looks than her acting, and finds a sympathetic ally in soda-fountain manager Frank Lippencott, who feeds her free lunches at Walgreen's. Reporter Chick Clark courts Eileen with false promises of auditions. When Ruth finally covers the arrival of the Brazilian Navy, the cadets chase her home, a conga party engulfs the block, and the police make arrests. In the end Bob confesses he loves Ruth and wants to publish her stories, and the sisters decide to stay in New York.¹

The comic engine, as in every version of the story, is that Ruth passes off Eileen's man-chased life as her own: editor Bob falls for the writer rather than the beauty, and Ruth's published stories are titled "My Sister Eileen."³^•⁴

Adaptation history

The film sits late in a long chain of adaptations. In the late 1930s The New Yorker published Ruth McKenney's stories about her own and her sister Eileen's experiences settling in Greenwich Village; they became a 1940 Broadway comedy, My Sister Eileen, by Joseph Fields and Jerome Chodorov, produced by Max Gordon.²^•¹ Columbia filmed the play in 1942 with Rosalind Russell and Janet Blair, directed by Alexander Hall, and Russell was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress.⁵ In 1953 the play became the Broadway musical Wonderful Town, with music by Leonard Bernstein and lyrics by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, again starring Russell.²

Why a new score. Columbia owned the screen rights to the original comedy but could not reach an agreement with the producers of Wonderful Town, so the studio commissioned its own musical version with songs by Jule Styne and Leo Robin.² Because the new film could bear no resemblance to the stage show, a studio attorney stayed on the set to look for similarities; per Martin Gottfried's Fosse biography All His Jazz, the conga number with Brazilian sailors, the only musical number in the original play, was the only song in the movie that resembled anything in the stage show, and the attorney would not even allow musical numbers in the same spots as in Wonderful Town.²

Richard Quine, who directed the 1955 film, had played Frank Lippencott in the 1942 film, giving him firsthand knowledge of the material.¹

Casting and production

Judy Holliday was under consideration for Ruth in early 1954, but a contract dispute removed her, and the role went to Betty Garrett, who had been effectively off the screen for six years because of the blacklisting of her husband, Larry Parks, over his Communist Party past.¹^•⁶^•⁷ Aldo Ray turned down the role of Ted "Wreck" Loomis as too small, and it went to Columbia contract player Dick York, billed as Richard York.⁶^•¹

Production ran from early September to 28 December 1954 under the working title The Gay Girls, with location shooting in Greenwich Village and Times Square in Manhattan and studio work at the Columbia/Warner Bros. Ranch in Burbank, California.¹^•⁸ Charles Lawton shot the film in Technicolor and CinemaScope, with costumes by Jean Louis.¹

Bob Fosse and the choreography

The film marks a milestone in Bob Fosse's career: it was his first onscreen choreography credit, and the only time he is billed as "Robert Fosse."¹ He had already won a 1954 Tony Award for choreographing The Pajama Game on Broadway, and My Sister Eileen was the first time he both performed in and choreographed a film.² As Frank Lippencott he sings and dances "There's Nothing Like Love" with Janet Leigh, and his rivalry dance with Tommy Rall, who plays Chick Clark, is frequently singled out as the film's standout number.⁹^•³ Fosse rehearsed Garrett and Leigh relentlessly; biographer Gottfried records that Garrett nicknamed his tight, thigh-rubbing choreography "shaving your hairs."² It was Janet Leigh's first musical, and she worked with Fosse for several weeks before filming began on her singing and dancing.²

Lawsuits

The film's departure from the stage versions produced litigation. In October 1955 the playwrights Fields and Chodorov sued Columbia for six million dollars, arguing that the 1941 contract under which the studio bought the film rights stipulated the studio "shall not have the right to produce any 'sequels,'" and that because the 1955 film was a musical with altered characters and new situations, it was a sequel rather than a legitimate remake. A May 1958 item in The Hollywood Reporter indicates the suit was settled out of court just before trial.¹ In December 1955 Ruth McKenney also sued Columbia, claiming sole and exclusive ownership of the book and magazine articles on which the film was based and demanding an accounting of profits; the final outcome of that suit is not known.¹

Reception and later versions

Contemporary response was mixed but warm toward the leads. Bosley Crowther of The New York Times wrote that Jack Lemmon "generates the most amusement and upholds the tarnished dignity of males," calling his mad-seduction duet with Garrett on "It's Bigger Than You and Me" the high point of the comedy.¹⁰ On Rotten Tomatoes the film holds an 83% Tomatometer from six critics and a 62% audience score from more than 1,000 ratings; IMDb lists 6.8/10.³^•⁶ The Harvard Film Archive has called it "arguably Richard Quine's most delightful film," noting a charm and intimacy of scale that sets it apart from the more formal MGM musicals of the period.¹¹ Critics have also noted the film's 1950s gender politics: one survey of film criticism observes that Betty Garrett's intellectual Ruth retains little dignity and is overshadowed, and shamed, by the popularity of Janet Leigh's Eileen, a shift in emphasis from the 1942 version.¹²

The story continued after the film: CBS broadcast a half-hour television series titled My Sister Eileen from 5 October 1960 to 12 April 1961, starring Elaine Stritch and Shirley Bonne.¹ Sony Pictures keeps the 1955 film in circulation on digital and DVD, and the copyright was renewed in 1983.¹³

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Musical and music films (individual works) › Musical films of the 1930s to 1960s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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