Not as cool as rebel girls

In the second half of the 1930s, Katharine Hepburn famously got the label of "box office poison". Having seen some of the movies she made before heading back to the New York stage for a few years, I think it's not hard to see the self-centered characters she had a tendency to play combined with her mannered nature not working for audiences of the day. She's less self-centered in A Woman Rebels, but then there's the plot....

Hepburn plays Pamela Thistlewaite, a young woman living in Victorian England with her younger sister Flora (Elizabeth Allan) and widower father Byron (Donald Crisp), a judge who frequently travels to London. He's strict and has ideas about women that lead to them having a very narrow place in the world, something that Pamela strongly disagrees with. Dad thinks women should be wives and mothers, and it's past time for the two daughters to be married off.

So when Dad introduces the daughters to the world, it's a relief to him that Flora meets a nice young naval officer, Lt. Freeland (David Manners). Pamela meets a man too, Lord Gaythorne (Van Heflin), but the catch in his case is that he's already married, and there's no way he's going to be able to leave his wife. This is the Victorian era, after all, so the idea of getting a divorce would have been somewhat scandalous, even if the Anglican church had been founded precisely on the idea that the king should be allowed to get his divorce.

So when Lt. Freeland gets a post in Italy as a naval attaché, Pamela eventually follows to spend time with her sister, who is already with child. In fact, Pamela is with child as well, having been knocked up by Gaythorne, so her going off to Italy is convenient so that nobody in England will know of the baby. In Italy, Pamela meets diplomat Thomas Lane (Herbert Marshall), and kinda falls in love with him, despite her complicated personal life. And things suddenly turn as Flora's husband is killed in a shipwreck. The shock causes her to miscarry, and then ultimately die. But this gives Pamela an idea! She'll have her own baby, but pass it off as Flora's, with the idea that Flora died in childbirth and this poor orphan needs an aunt to raise it.

Pamela returns to England, and writes some fiction that she's able to get published in a ladies' magazine, before becoming an editor there when the regular (male) editor is out. This in an era when taking such a job, even if it is at a ladies' journal, is treated as kind of scandalous. Doesn't Pamela know she's supposed to get married?

Pamela's daughter, still thinking she's Pamela's niece and named after Flora, grows up with... Lord Gaythorne's son, things really start to get complicated. Technically, since they're half-siblings, they really shouldn't get married. But Pamela can't tell young Flora the truth for fairly obvious reasons. But Pamela is going to have to meet the elder Gaythorne about all this, and this time their tryst is discovered, so there's going to be scandal anyway....

I suppose the fact that the Production Code was in full effect partly drives what's going on in A Woman Rebels, but boy is the plot here nutty even compared to some of the other movies of the era that had to contort their plots to fit into Production Code strictures. And this I think is one of those places where the casting of Katharine Hepburn doesn't help. Bette Davis might have made the material seem fresh, but Hepburn is as cold and distant as ever here.

Still, there are people who like Katharine Hepburn, so watch this one for yourself.