Hello, Sister! (1933) - film review

Millie, Peggy and Mona are three friends who live in a cheap New York apartment.  Each dreams of hooking the perfect man, but their experiences with men to date have left them disillusioned.  One evening, Millie, the older and less attractive spinster, persuades Peggy to join her in a night out on the town.  They meet two good-looking men, Mac and Jimmy, who waste no time in plying them with their charms.  Peggy takes an instant dislike to the flash Mac and instead falls for the more sensitive Jimmy, and even invites him back to her room.  A few months later, Peggy discovers that she is pregnant.  Knowing that Jimmy is the father, she persuades him to marry her.  But on the day they agree to tie the knot, Jimmy has second thoughts.  Is Peggy taking him for a ride...?

It is almost a tragedy of Greek proportions that Erich von Stroheim, one of the great pioneers of cinema, should end his filmmaking career by working on such low grade offal as this.  Hello Sister! is a soppy melodrama based on a mediocre stage play, whose only redeeming feature is its likeable cast.  To add insult to injury, Stroheim’s employers, his bosses at Fox Studios, were unimpressed with his work and hired another director, Alan Crosland, to re-shoot several scenes.  One of the scenes which was excised is believed to have hinted at a lesbian relationship between the two leading female characters, which would at least have given the film some pep.

As his original cut was destroyed, we will never know if Von Stroheim’s concept for the film would have made Hello, Sister! any better than the lacklustre version that exists today.  There are one or two sequences which are recognisably the work of Von Stroheim, but overall the direction of the film is as patchy and uninspired as the screenplay.  The plot is about as absurd as it can be, culminating in a deus ex machina that will have any self-respecting cinéphile burying his face in his hands in abject despair.  Also, thanks to some ill-conceived comic inserts (some of which look as if they were supplied by Mack Sennett), it is hard to know whether the film is intended to be vaudeville or a melodrama – and, in the end, you hardly care.  Alas, poor Erich...

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