CATCH A CLASSIC

Sister Stories TCM, Beginning at 7 p.m.

The various aspects of sisterly relationships as depicted on the big screen are the focus of tonight’s four-film lineup on Turner Classic Movies. Up first is 1933’s Best Picture Oscar-nominated Little Women (pictured), which even by that time was already the third adaptation of Louisa May Alcott’s beloved 1868-69 novel but was the first “talkie” version. With an Oscar-winning screenplay by Victor Heerman and Sarah Y. Mason, and helmed by Best Director nominee George Cukor, the film follows the four March sisters (played by Katharine Hepburn, Joan Bennett, Frances Dee and Jean Parker) in Concord, Massachusetts, during and after the Civil War. Next, in the comedy My Sister Eileen (1942), Best Actress Oscar nominee Rosalind Russell and Janet Blair play Ohio sisters who move to New York City looking for success, one as a writer and the other as an actress. Following that is the famed 1944 musical Meet Me in St. Louis, which follows a year in the life of the Midwestern Smith family at the turn of the 20th century, with much of the story specifically focused on the clan’s four daughters, played by Judy Garland, Margaret O’Brien (who won a Juvenile Academy Award as the outstanding child actress of that year), Lucille Bremer and Joan Carroll. Finishing up the evening is What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). Director Robert Aldrich’s darkly humorous and horrific cult classic offers deliciously gothic and campy fun as it follows an aging former child star (Best Actress Oscar nominee Bette Davis) who torments her paraplegic sister (Joan Crawford), a former movie star, in an old Hollywood mansion.