In today’s print edition I

review

Sony’s very welcome “Icons of Screwball Comedy,” a pair of four-title sets spotlighting a quartet of actresses — Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell and, most questionably for the genre, Loretta Young. Buffs debate whether Alexander Hall’s “My Sister Eileen” (1942) is actually a screwball comedy and whether the 1955 musical remake with Jack Lemmon, Janet Leigh and Betty Garrett, directed by Richard Quine (who has a supporting role in the ’42 version), is a better movie. But the original is still a funny and fascinating soundstage depiction of pre-World War II (a line of dialogue interpolated by screenwriters Joseph Field and Jerome Chodorov while adapting their play notwithstanding) Greenwich Village. Sisters Russell and Janet Blair move into a basement apartment at 45 Gay Street, and among their many problems is incessant blasting for an adjacent subway tunnel, presumably for the new line replacing the old Sixth Avenue elevated. The Three Stooges even have a cameo at the climax. The original play was based on Ruth McKenney’s autobiographical stories that originally appeared in The New Yorker; Brian Aherne appears as Ruth’s love interest, an editor at “The Manhatter.” I’d be surprised if no one ever tried to write a movie about the sad subsequent lives of the McKenney sisters. The aspiring actress Eileen, 26, died in a car crash in California, along with her husband, novelist/screenwriter Nathaniel West (“The Day of the Locust,” “Five came Back”), a couple of days before the play opened. Ruth published some bestsellers and married another novelist, Richard Bransten, with whom she wrote the original story for “Margie” (1945). They were both blacklisted (they had earlier been expelled from the Communist Party) and moved to London, where Bransten committed suicide on Ruth’s 44th birthday. Ruth stopped writing and returned to New York, where she died in 1972, aged 60. I’d imagine the mourners included legendary Post columnist Earl Wilson, who worked with McKenney on the Ohio State student paper; she helped him get his job at the Post. Ruth’s daughter is State Supreme Court Justice Eileen Bransten, named after her late sister.