Sister Acts for the Ages

Sisterhood may be powerful, but on the silver screen, sisters have been known to exhibit behavior more fiendish than friendly. They’ve often been portrayed as jealous rivals, pitted against each other professionally (“Georgia”), personally (“sex, lies and videotape”) or sometimes both (“Hilary and Jackie”). It’s gotten pretty ugly at times (“What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”).

“Hanging Up” tries to project a more fully-rounded view of this close family tie. The film, which debuted Feb. 18 and took in an impressive $15.7 million over the Presidents Day long weekend, stars Diane Keaton, Meg Ryan and Lisa Kudrow as three sisters trying to deal with life, each other and their aging, irascible father (Walter Matthau). Many of the goings-on in “Hanging Up” are played for laughs, but it also takes an earnest look at the relationships among the three siblings and, once the dust has settled (literally, in the case of the flour fight at story’s end), comes down squarely on the side of sibling revelry, not rivalry.

“Sisters are the only people who really know the most personal things about you,” claims Delia Ephron, who wrote the 1995 novel “Hanging Up” and co-wrote the film’s screenplay, appropriately enough, with her sister, writer-director Nora Ephron. The two have collaborated before, sharing co-writer credit on “You’ve Got Mail” (1998), “Michael” (1996), “Mixed Nuts” (1994) and “This Is My Life” (1992).

Working together on the “Hanging Up” adaptation had special resonance for Delia, as the novel depicted her fictionalized account of growing up in the Ephron household. “There are three sisters in the story, but in real life there are four of us,” she points out during a recent interview. (Amy and Hallie Ephron also share the family writing gene.)

“This was my version of family life, which goodness knows could have absolutely nothing to do with Nora’s version,” she says. “I think Nora enjoyed working on it, but it was harder for me, because this project was much more personal to me than our other work, and I was more possessive of the story.”

“Hanging Up” is directed by Diane Keaton, who, like the character she portrays in the film, is the oldest of three sisters. This is familiar film turf for the actress, who already has tackled the role of older sister in “Marvin’s Room” (1996), where, in addition to being the much put-upon firstborn, she also was suffering from cancer; “Crimes of the Heart” (1986), in which she tried to carve out a minute to celebrate her birthday while dealing with her attention-grabbing sisters’ assorted crises; and “Interiors” (1978), Woody Allen’s austere homage to Ingmar Bergman’s Swedish sister saga, “Cries and Whispers” (1972). (Allen offered a more lighthearted view of the subject in 1986, allowing “Hannah and Her Sisters” to show an affectionate relationship replete with the film-maker’s signature humor.)

Dozens of films about sisters have been produced over the decades--period pieces and contemporary coming-of-age stories, sentimental musicals and psychological thrillers. A few, like ‘Devotion” (1946), a dramatized view of the literary Bronte sisters, have been based on true stories. And real-life sisters Lillian and Dorothy Gish starred as the plucky “Orphans of the Storm” in D.W. Griffith’s 1921 tale, set against the backdrop of the French Revolution.

If the movies are to be believed, sisters got along better in the 19th century than the 20th. Period pieces such as the Jane Austen classic “Pride and Prejudice” (1940 film and a notable BBC adaptation in 1996) and all three incarnations of Louisa May Alcott’s “Little Women” (1933, 1949, 1994) are sister love fests.

Day-to-day life may not have been simpler then, but apparently getting along with your siblings was. Perhaps the lack of central heating was a bonding experience.

There can be strength in sisterly numbers, and it also helps if you can carry a tune. The four sisters in “Meet Me in St. Louis” (1944), an idyllic view of turn-of-the-20th-century family life, never exchange a cross word and, more often, are in pitch-perfect harmony. Only one of the “Two Sisters From Boston” (1946) sings. But while strait-laced June Allyson is shocked to discover big sister Kathryn Grayson warbling in a New York music hall, her outrage quickly gives way to determination to land Grayson a gig as a legitimate opera singer.

“Young at Heart” (1954) features three sisters, all of whom are in love at one time or another with the same man. But when the voices are raised in this household, it’s only to make beautiful chamber music together. (“Young at Heart” is a tuneful remake of the 1938 film “Four Daughters,” with one of the siblings lost somewhere in the musical transition. Both films are based on “Sister Act”--a Fannie Hurst story for Cosmopolitan, not the 1992 Whoopi Goldberg comedy.)

“White Christmas” (1954) stars Bing Crosby, Danny Kaye and the Irving Berlin title tune, but warrants honorable mention for the song, performed in the film by on-and Vera-Ellen. Baby boomers might be suffering some short-term memory loss these days and forget what they had for breakfast, but there’s not a middle-aged sister out there who can’t recite the lyric from the song “Sisters”: “Lord, help the mister who comes between me and my sister” followed by, “Lord, help the sister who comes between me and my man.”

Bette Davis made at least eight films about sisters over the course of her lengthy career. Some, such as the 1937 melodrama “Marked Woman” and 1938’s “The Sisters,” an archetypal “woman’s picture,” portray Davis as loving and supportive of her siblings. But the actress is more closely associated with characters of the cruel and conniving variety, the most well-known being the title role in the 1962 over-the-top camp classic “What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?”

“When you take the sibling thing and turn it on its head, you end up with that,” Delia Ephron says about “Baby Jane.”

Davis also starred in--not just one but two--variations on the popular evil twin theme, “A Stolen Life” (1946) and “Dead Ringer” (1964). “In This Our Life” (1942) features Davis at her most unrepentantly wicked; engaged to one man, she thinks nothing of stealing good-natured sister Olivia de Havilland’s husband, driving him to suicide, then plotting to get back her erstwhile fiance (who by now is engaged to her sister).

Historically, this philosophy often rang true in films about sisters, but things have changed in recent years. “The Man in the Moon” is a touching 1991 coming-of-age story featuring Reese Witherspoon in her first screen role as the younger of two teenage sisters who are brought closer together after a romantic tragedy. Emma Thompson’s Academy Award-winning adaptation of Jane Austen’s “Sense and Sensibility” (1995) firmly plants the close relationship between Elinor (Thompson) and Marianne Dashwood (Kate Winslet) at the story’s dramatic core, with their parallel romances seeming lukewarm next to the intense bond shared by the two sisters.

“Practical Magic” (1998) stars Nicole Kidman and Sandra Bullock as modern-day witches who will go to any length--natural or supernatural--to look out for one another. The makers of “10 Things I Hate About You,” last year’s teen telling of Shakespeare’s “The Taming of the Shrew,” saw fit to resolve the constant bickering between its contemporary Katarina and Bianca before story’s end.

All of these recent films were written by women, and it’s no accident that any notable shift in the way sisters have been depicted in films has coincided with women becoming more involved in the filmmaking process, especially as screenwriters. And the Ephrons are firmly planted at the head of this parade.

Perhaps only sisters can understand sisters. Observes Delia: “There is some sense, when sisters are close, that they have a destiny together, that they’re just going to be there with each other one way or another.”