Twilight glory

Christopher Plummer was honored last year in TCM's Summer Under the Stars, with several of his pictures that I hadn't seen before. One of those was Stage Struck, which came early in Plummer's career.

Plummer isn't really the star here; that honor goes to Susan Strasberg, also early in her career. She plays Eva Lovelace, a young woman originally from Vermont who goes to New York City because she just knows she can make it on the stage. Indeed, she basically shows up unannounced at the office of theatrical producer Lewis Easton (Henry Fonda). Why not start out at the top, after all? Also waiting to see Easton are an actor on the glide path to the end of his career, Robert Hedges (Herbert Marshall), and an up-and-coming playwright, Joe Sheridan (Christopher Plummer). Nice people to meet if you're trying to make it on Broadway, I suppose.

Eva is so obnoxiously pushy that Easton, just to get her out of his hair, has Joe tell her to come for an audition for a suppoting role in Joe's new play where an aging diva of an actress is starring. Eva has her own ideas about how the role should be played which conflct with what the producer and playwright want, so of course the audition goes badly. Eva's pushiness causes even more problems when she runs into Joe outside the premiere of that new play and gets him to invite her to the afterparty at Easton's swanky apartment. She has too much to drink and, when she's stonking drunk, starts doing impromptu Shakespeare readings in front of the embarrassed guests!

Worse, she passes out drunk in the guest room and tells Lewis she loves him. Now, if all of this sounds familiar, that's because it's a remake of Morning Glory from 25 years earlier, in which Katharine Hepburn played the aspiring young actress. So you may know where the story is going. Eva has to suffer for her art before triumphing on the stage. Lewis is of two minds about her as she's really not right for such an older man. So he has his secretaries lie to her about his being out of town, and tries to get Joe to send her away from New York. But events conspire to bring us to the final act where Eva gets the leading role and makes a success of it.

I'm not the biggest fan of Katharine Hepburn, so Morning Glory isn't exactly a favorite of mine. Amazingly, Susan Strasberg takes the role and runs with it in what feels like a desperate attempt to be even more obnoxious than Katharine Hepburn ever was. Stage Struck feels artificial, like somebody who knows nothing about the Broadway stage writing about it, and Strasberg is so unlikeable here that it makes the rest of the movie hard to watch. Everybody else tries and is professional in their roles, so I suppose it's a good thing that this didn't sink Christopher Plummer. The movie does have some nice period photography, in color, of the way Broadway was in the late 1950s, but that's about the only thing good about this movie.