Hello, Sister! 1933. Directed by Edwin Burke and Alfred Werker (and Erich von Stroheim and Raoul Walsh, uncredited.)

(8/20/01)

Hello, Sister!, on the surface of it, has the look of an unpretentious, low-budget production. Yet, it is both intense and startling. It is certainly startling for its candor which is totally unexpected in a Hollywood movie of 1933.

Two young women decide to go for a stroll on Broadway one evening in hopes of meeting some nice young men. They get picked up and one is sexually aggressive in a way that is uncomfortable to watch. When they take the girls home he bluntly offers her a supposedly expensive ring for her favors. Upon being rebuffed he turns his attentions on a neighbor who is happy to oblige. But the ring turns out to be a fake.

The woman who did the rebuffing takes up with the other of the two men. They begin seeing each other. But then she goes to a doctor who tells her that she is expecting.

All of this is quite startling to find in an American film of the 1930s. But it is all very Erich von Stroheim and this is another film that was taken away from Stroheim and reworked by others.

A dog is hit by a car. As the couple walk over planks Zasu Pitts falls into an open sewer. Very von Stroheim. And the situation between the young man and the young woman (having been lied to by others, he has come to distrust her) is resolved by a building catching on fire, which recalls the climax of Foolish Wives.

It is all very adult fare and it is gripping. This film certainly has something to say about how loneliness in the big city makes women vulnerable. In fact, the whole picture struck me as a savage criticism of modern urban society.

Zasu Pitts is the only name in the cast that I'm familiar with. She plays the part of a spinsterish woman with a lot of repressed anger that comes out in one fabulous scene. She asserts that she has had lots of boyfriends and then lies about her friend Peggy's behavior towards her boyfriend which leads to him temporarily backing out of the marriage. (And Peggy is pregnant.) That scene is true, real, and painfully human.

Hello, Sister! stands up, in its present form, as a fine little film. I suppose one can wonder what it was like at the first preview before it was virtually remade, but I don't.