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.

The American Film Theatre

Back in the 1970s, producer Ely Landau tried a bold experiment of taking prominent, mostly modern playwrights, and producing more minimalist versions of their plays as movies. Tickets for these movies would then be sold together, like buying a subscription to a stage theater or the ballet or opera. This project, called the American Film Theatre, only lasted two years and produced about a dozen movies in all. Among them is a version of Edward Albee's play A Delicate Balance.

The leads here are Katharine Hepburn and Paul Scofield. They play a married couple, Agnes and Tobias respectively, who have made it in life and are living an upper middle class life in suburban Connecticut of the generation of American prosperity that followed the second World War (the play was first produced in 1966 and the movie was released in late 1973). The sort of older couple who would stay in on a Friday night and enjoy the fruits of their life of hard work. Or, at least it seems they've made it.

Unfortunately, Agnes has a sister Claire (Kate Reid) who drinks too much and has been in and out of Alcoholics Anonymous and has as been rather less of a success at life. As a result, Claire lives with Agnes and Tobias. I imagine it can't be much fun for Tobias, but then they're at an age where life it more about a pleasant enough routine than fun. They can settle down to a nice dinner before enjoying the weekend.

At least, they can until a couple of neighbors and best friends knock on their door. Harry (Joseph Cotten) and Edna (Betsy Blair) are a married couple who seem to have just as good a life as Agnes and Tobias. But somehow, suddenly, they've both decided they're going to have a midlife crisis at exactly the same time. The two have reached the conclusion that they're terrified of... something that they can't quite figure out what it is. Except that whatever it is, they know they can't live in their current house. So they're just going to knock on Agnes and Tobias' door and move right in. And Agnes and Tobias are willing to let them do this because they're such good friends and have enough spare bedrooms to do so. It's a turn of events that makes no sense in any sort of real life, but there you are.

Things go from bad to worse. Agnes and Tobias have an adult daughter, as well as a son who died some time back. The adult daughter, Julia (Lee Remick), has made an even bigger mess of her life than her aunt Claire, and has just announced she's getting a divorce from her fourth husband. So she's coming back to her parents' place since she needs a place to stay. And dammit, Harry and Edna have her room. So there's a lot now for everybody to bicker about and talk in unnatural stage dialogue.

I suppose that the material in A Delicate Balance is the sort of stuff that might work well on the live stage where you've got a live audience to play off of and play to with communal reactions. And I can certainly see why stage actors would read a script like this and jump at the chance to develop characters. But it's material that's decidedly not going to be to everyone's taste, as well as material that doesn't translate to film as well as other plays do. So definitely some people are going to like it. I'm just not one of those people.

Little Women (1933)

I seem to have copies of a surprising number of movies in Summer Under the Stars this year that I haven't blogged about before. Another one coming up, for Katharine Hepburn's day, is the 1933 version of Little Women, tomorrow (August 18) at 9:30 AM.

Now, I have to admit that before doing this post, I had not read the novel by Louisa May Alcott on which this and the other movie versions is based. Nor had I watched any of the movie versions all the way through, although I had seen parts of at least the 1949 version that has Elizabeth Taylor and Peter Lawford in the cast. But I did know vaguely of the plot, namely that it deals with the struggles of the four March sisters in Massachusetts during the Civil War while their father is off serving the Union Army.

The sisters are Jo (short for Josephine, played by Katharine Hepburn), Meg (Frances Dee), Beth (Jean Parker) and Amy (Joan Bennett). Meg, the eldest, is making some extra money for the family by working as a seamstress. Jo is a bit of a tomboy and dreams of becoming a professional writer. Amy is the youngest and just finishing her education, while Beth is musically inclined. They live with their mother (Spring Byington), while also having an Aunt (Edna May Oliver) who is better off and exerts a bit of control on the family although she's not the villain of the piece by any means. There's really no villain here.

The Marches live next door to Mr. Laurence (Henry Stephenson) but aren't all that close to him. The relationship is about to change, however, when his grandson Laurie (Douglass Montgomery) arrives from Europe and spends some time with grandfather. All the girls are taken by this handsome young man, but obviously, no more than one of the girls can have him. Laurie also has a tutor, John Brooke, which gives another man for the girls to go gaga over.

The war hits home for the family when news reaches them that Dad has been injured and is at an army hospital in Washington; eventually he comes home although he's never a major character. Beth has gotten sick by this time and there's some fear that she's going to die. Jo eventually goes off to New York to try to make it as a writer, where she meets German professor Baer (Paul Lukas), and those two may or may not wind up becoming romantically involved if Jo can't have Laurie.

Little Women is more episodic than having an overriding plot, and this telling of the tale really puts the emphasis on Jo since it's Katharine Hepburn in that part. Hepburn is, unsurprisingly, a force of nature here, and to me that force is not always appropriate. At times it works quite well, but sometimes it's just too much.

The movie has production values that are quite good for 1933, although this sort of period material is stuff that modern productions can do without making it look quite so backlot-bound. Still, for a 1930s literary adaptation, this version of Little Women does quite well.

Northern gothic

Katharine Hepburn has been TCM's Star of the Month this month, which gave me the chance to record one or two of her movies that I hadn't seen before. One of these was the adaptation of Eugene O'Neill's play Long Day's Journey Into Night.

The play deals with the Tyrone family, and one day in their life in the summer of 1912. The story is loosely based on Eugene O'Neill's own family, and set at a time when he would have been in his mid 20s. Here, that character is the younger brother Edmund, played by Dean Stockwell. Edmund has spent his adult life trying to escape the long shadow of his family, mostly doing so by becoming a merchant marine. He's recently returned home to the family's summer place in Connecticut, and there's some worry that his persistent cough is in fact tuberculosis, often referred to in those days as consumption.

Hepburn plays Edmund's mother Mary; she doesn't want to hear of her son having consumption. Understanding this and trying to protect Mary is dad James Sr. (Ralph Richardson). He was a stage actor who's reaching the age where he should retire and try to live off his savings. Not as though an actor can have that much savings, so he's always trying to save a few dollars wherever he can. This is another source of rancor between various pairs of family members, as it also leads to Dad's distrust of doctors that may have consequences for Edmund, and definitely already did for Mary.

Part of Mary's backstory is that she had a difficult pregnancy with Edmund and the postpartum issues nearly killed her; as a result she was prescribed morphine. The only thing is that she got herself addicted to the morphine, and the rest of the family is dancing around that fact trying to keep her off the drug while she thinks (not entirely wrongly) that the rest of the family is spying on her.

And then there's elder brother Jamie (Jason Robards), who is enough older than Edmund that he's had a much more mature look at the breakdown of the family and how each parent's different view of the two sons has also caused all sorts of problems with the brothers' relationships with their parents along with the two brothers' relationship with each other. So there's a lot of pent-up resentment here and opportunity for them finally to get all that resentment off their chests.

And boy do they spend a lot of time getting that resentment off their chests. They talk, and talk and talk some more, and when they're done talking, well, they're never done talking and getting to -- and going past -- the point of no longer caring whether they piss off the rest of the family by revealing uncomfortable truths.

It's that talkiness -- and director Sidney Lumet decidedly felt that the original play should be edited as little as possible for the movie -- that may make the movie a tough slog for many viewers. It goes on for well over two and a half hours, and the characters are, like the ones in Sweetie, not particularly sympathetic. If you know that going in, and you're up for a movie that's more of a master-class in acting, then you'll probably highly enjoy this adaptation of Long Day's Journey Into Night. If that's not your thing, then consider this review a warning.

TCM Star of the Month June 2023: Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn (r.) with Peter O'Toole in The Lion in Winter (June 15, 10:00 PM)

We've reached the start of a new month, and that means that it's time for a new Star of the Month on TCM. This time out, that star is Katharine Hepburn, who was last Star of the Month in conjunction with her 100th birthday in May 2007. That time was a bit different since John Wayne was also born in May 2007; both stars got seven straight days of their movies at different points of the month. This time there's more traditional scheduling, with a night of Hepburn's films every Thursday in prime time. That having said, we get surprisingly few of Hepburn's movies as the nights don't really continue into Friday mornings.

The Lion in Winter, pictured above, earned Hepburn her third Oscar, and all four of her Oscar-winning performances will air in prime time on June 15, although not in order. June 29 is a night of some of her films with Spencer Tracy on June 29, although it's only five of the nine. Woman on the Year will also be airing outside of this, at 3:00 AM on June 9, in addition to Guess Who's Coming to Dinner being used for Hepburn's Oscars night rather than Hepburn with Spencer Tracy.

Doing a search of the blog revealed that I've got only two other photos of Katharine Hepburn that I've used to illustrate posts before, which surprises me a bit, although my posting of images has really tailed off in the past few years. One of the is with Fred MacMurray in Alice Adams, which comes on at 5:00 AM on June 9, or immediately after Woman of the Year. And, wouldn't you know it, but the other of the photos comes from The Philadelphia Story, which just so happens to bookend Woman of the Year, getting an airing at 12:45 AM on June 9. (Note that this will still be late in the evening of June 8 in time zones west of mine.)

Among the Hepburn films not airing are two with Spencer Tracy: State of the Union, which is not that surprising because director Frank Capra regained the rights to it, which eventually wound up with Universal. The other one is more surpising, Sea of Grass, since as far as I know that one wound up in the Turner Library. Also apparently not on the schedule is Rooster Cogburn, Hepburn's pairing with John Wayne.

The Grass Sea

Katharine Hepburn was one of the stars honored in Summer Under the Stars last August. One of the movies they showed that I hadn't blogged about before was The Sea of Grass. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

Hepburn plays Lutie Cameron, a woman of marriageable age living with her family in St. Louis in 1880. Some time back, cattleman Col. Jim Brewton (Spencer Tracy) had visited St. Louis and fallen in love with Lutie, with the intention of marrying her; indeed, the movie opens up on Lutie's wedding day. Except that Lutie gts a telegram from Jim that his work in the New Mexico territory has kept him there, and she's going to have to take the train out to New Mexico to marry him. Not a very auspicious start.

But Lutie must have really loved Jim, since she gets on that train more or less alone for the journey to Salt Fork, NM. She makes a friend on the train, Selina Hall (Ruth Nelson), who is married to a homesteader out in New Mexico. Now, if you know your westerns, you know that one theme that shows up commonly is that of the struggle between the ranchers who feel they need an open range to graze their cattle, and the farmers who are settling on 40-acre plots of land. Those plots will obviously require fencing off, so you can see why the cattlemen are not too pleased about it.

The train gets in early, so Jim isn't at the station. In going through town, Lutie winds up at the hotel, where she meets Brice Chamberlain (Melvyn Douglas), a lawyer who is definitely on the side of the homesteaders in this new land. In fact, he'd eventually like to get a federal court in this district so that the homesteaders will have the law on their side. Unsurprisingly, too, because of the nature of Hollywood movies, Brice falls in love with Lutie so that there's going to be a romantic conflict throughout the movie.

Lutie eventually makes it out to the Brewton ranch, where she's the only woman. It's not long before they can make the marriage official, and not long after that before Lutie gets pregnant with the first of two kids, a daughter and then a son. But Lutie is still good friends with Selina, and has a lot of sympathy towards the farmers. She's particularly irritated with the idea that the ranchers feel OK about resorting to violence to keep the range open.

Jim is single-minded about keeping the range open for his cattle, and since Lutie isn't backing him 110% there's some fairly obvious tension there, to the point that Jim sends Lutie off to Denver, the biggest city around, to do some "shopping", which is really a euphemism for deciding whether or not she wants to stay in New Mexico. She goes back the first time, but then there's a second time when Jim's violence causes Selina to have a miscarriage that ultimately leads to Lutie's leaving. This even though she's not going to be able to get custody of the children.

Lutie goes off to St. Louis but finds out that her father died and wasn't able to leave her much of an inheritance. Worse, she's got kids she hasn't seen in years, who aren't going to remember her. They grow up into good girl Sara Beth (Phyllis Thaxter) and roué Brock (Robert Walker), both of whom are only seen in the last half hour of the movie. Jim has been a bad father to Brock, much like Spencer Tracy's character in the movie Edward, My Son, and it's only when Brock gets himself into trouble he can't get out of that Jim might finally reform. It's also what brings Lutie back to New Mexico....

The Sea of Grass is another of those movies that has a maddening script. Oh boy are these unsympathetic characters, at least among the leads, with Melvyn Douglas playing the only one I didn't want to shake some sense into. Apparently, it was also a troubled shoot, with a lot of it being done on the back lots and MGM's western village out in the Alabama Hills or wherever they had it. There was also apparently some tension between Elia Kazan on the one hand, and Tracy and Hepburn on the other. To be fair to everybody, however, they're all professional, and The Sea of Grass is a studio-era movie in which everybody does the best they can with a subpar script. Certainly competent, but not the first movie I'd think of recommending for people who want to see the work of anybody involved.

The Rainmaker (1956)

Katharine Hepburn had a day in Summer Under the Stars last August, which gave me the chance to record one of her movies I hadn't blogged about before, The Rainmaker. Recently, I finally got around to watching it.

Although Hepburn is one of the stars, it's the other one that we see first. That would be Burt Lancaster, playing "Tornado" Bill. Bill is one of those itinerant carnival con-artist types, going around places in the Great Plains around 1930 selling what he claims is a device that will stop tornadoes from destroying the local small towns where he stops. (The movie doesn't specify when it's set, although Bill has a horse-drawn cart while several characters have cars, with the newest according to IMDb being a 1930 model.) Bill has also developed a fairly obvious reputation as a con artist, and somebody in town recognizes him, forcing him to beat a hasty retreat. (Amazingly, the police don't impound his cart.)

Cut to a town in the west half of the Kansas prairie where the welcome sign has been edited to say it used to be a bustling place until the drought came. They're holding a charity dance to raise money for the farmers affected by the drought; outside the building is the car of one Snookie Maguire (Yvonne Lime), who is apparently from a wealthy family if she can afford such a car. She's pursued by young Jim Curry (Earl Holliman), youngest kid in a family that has a farmhouse just outside of town, with older brother Noah (Lloyd Bridges), father H.C. (Cameron Prud'homme), and much older sister Lizzie (that's Katharine Hepburn, as if you couldn't tell).

Lizzie isn't home when we first meet the family. That's becaue they sent her away to visit relatives. Of course, the real reason was the hope that perhaps one of the cousins, or perhaps somebody in their town, would take a liking to Lizzie and ask her to marry him. She's getting up there in years (Hepburn was 49 when she made the movie, although I don't think Lizzie was supposed to be quite that old), and worried about becoming a spinster. And what is the rest of the family going to do with her if she does become a spinster aunt?

Meanwhile, Dad is also thinking that perhaps Lizzie could be married off to sheriff's deputy File (Wendell Corey), who is at first thought to be a widow although he is in fact a divorcé. It's one of the few times in the movies that Wendell Corey would actually be the right romantic partner for the lead actress, although it does seem clear that this would be a marriage of convenience at first and the two would have to learn to love each other. But Lizzie and File both seem like the sort of people who could ultimately learn that. Noah, however, is nasty enough that he suggests to Dad that nobody would ever marry Lizzie.

Enter Bill, now calling himself Bill Starbuck. Seeing that this town is suffering through a drought, he styles himself as a rainmaker, whose devices can bring rain if only you follow his convoluted method that he really just made up on the spot. For some inexplicable reason, Lizzie falls in love with the excitement that Starbuck brings -- she seems smart enough that she should see right through Starbuck's con-artist bluster. Maybe it's just that she's so desparate. Starbuck doesn't dislike Lizzie at all; in fact he seems to like someone so smart. But he's also one of those people who just can't settle down, and you know Lizzie wouldn't really belong with him. Never mind that the law in other states wants to find and prosecute Starbuck.

I had some big problems with The Rainmaker, and in reading the IMDb reviews, I see that the issues I had are ones I'm not alone in having. One is that Hepburn is miscast, as she's clearly too old to be a sibling to Jim (Hepburn was 21 years older than Holliman and six older than Bridges). Then there's the way Starbuck is written. He's just so obnoxiously over the top in his cons that I wanted to see him get smacked. It works for some other roles, but not here.

The Rainmaker was based on a stage play, and that's extremely obvious from the direction that we get here. It also doesn't help that the outdoor scenes look to have been don on a soundstage. Maybe some of the town square scenes were done on the back lot, but that's about it. The staginess doesn't much help the movie. Perhaps the script would work better on the stage. That having been said, the actors all try their darndest with the material, and the color cinematography is nice for the soundstage.

So some people might like The Rainmaker, but I have to admit that if I were looking to introduce people to any of the actors in the movie, this isn't the film I'd pick.

Heartbreak

I've noticed that I've got a rather higher ratio of more recent movies -- at least if you consider recent as being released after I was born -- on my DVR than older movies. Specifically, I haven't blogged much recently about movies from before 1950. With that in mind, I made a specific point of watching Break of Hearts from Katharine Hepburn's day in Summer Under the Stars to do a post on here.

Hepburn is the female lead, although we don't see her until the second reel or so. The other star is the male lead, orchestra conductor Franz Roberti, played by Charles Boyer. Franz is known to be extremely tough on his musicians, and also for socializing with the sort of high-society woman who atends his concerts. While in New York for a series of concerts, he goes to visit an old friend, Professor Thalma (Jean Hersholt), who teaches music in lives in a rather less glamorous apartment.

Living in the same apartment building is Constance Dane (Katharine Hepburn), who has a love of classical music and has even written a composition for piano that the movie tries to pass off as musical but sounded more contemporary to me. When she stops by to see Thalma, she meets Roberti for the first time.

Constance would love to see one of Roberti's concerts, but when she goes to the box office, she finds that the concerts are all sold out because that's just how popular Roberti is. So she does what any self-respecting lover of classical music would do, which is to sneak in to one of the rehearsals. Roberti is unsurprisingly pissed at first when he discovers Constance in the audience (well, actually, an audience of one). But Constance's explanation is one of those movie tropes that wouldn't work in real life but does in the movies, with Roberti starting a relationship with Constance.

It's a whirlwind romance that leads to the two getting married and going on an extended honeymoon in Europe. They return to New York where Franz will be giving another series of concerts, and the two live happily ever after.

Yeah, right. Constance and a violinist friend, Johnny Lawrence (John Beal) go to have dinner together because Franz is way too busy with rehearsals. Except that he really isn't, as he's seeing another woman, which he was wont to do in his pre-marriage days. Doing it once you've gotten married, however, is much worse, certainly by the standards of 1930s movies.

At this point, the movie really veers into melodrama. Constance obtains a divorce and to support herself, gets a job as an accompanist at one of those Tin Pan Alley publishing companies. Here, she learns that unfortunately she doesn't quite have the talent to be a professional musician. Roberti turns to drink and reaches the point that it's going to derail his conducting career. The only thing that can save him is the love of a good woman like Constance.

It's easy to see from the second half why anybody might have a scathing review of Break of Hearts. Oh my does it become sappy. Boyer and Hepburn both do the best they can with the material they're given, although considering some of the lines Hepburn has, you can be forgiven for thinking the suits at RKO looked at her Oscar-winning performance in Morning Glory and tried to recreate it.

Other people, however, may like this sort of melodrama, in which case they'll probably enjoy Break of Hearts. It's certainly not bad; it just very much fits a certain genre that to me also has the problem of appearing dated. It's definitely not going to be for everybody.

All About Eva

Katharine Hepburn was the Star in TCM's Summer Under the Stars this past Saturday. One of the movies not on the schedule was Morning Glory, the movie that won Hepburn her first Oscar. I had seen it many years ago but never did a blog post on it. Since it was on the schedule not too long ago, I recorded it then, and recently watched it to finally get around to doing that blog post.

The thing I didn't remember from my first time watching the movie is how little there really is going on. Hepburn plays Ada Love, a naïve young woman from Vermont who's come down to New York at the height of the Depression thinking she's going to make it big on the Broadway stage, because she did community theater back in Vermont, don't you know. She shows up unannounced at the office of prominent producer Louis Easton (Adolphe Menjou), but can't get in because like a lot of offices in 1930s movies, there's one of those swinging gates that keep the visitors on one side and the doors leading to the actual private offices on the other side.

Easton is talking to his favorite playwright, Joseph Sheridan (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.) about what to do as their next collaboration together. Meanwhile, waiting outside is an older actor Easton has cast a lot, Hedges (C. Aubrey Smith), who takes a liking to Eva and even offers her acting lessons. Needless to say, Eva is not able to impress Easton, but then a lot of aspiring actresses would have shown up over the years the way Eva did.

Some time later, Eva is in one of those 1930s diners where the hard-luck characters of Hollywood movies go to eat cheaply, or at least just get a cup of coffee if they can't even afford to eat. Who should show up at that diner but Hedges? Hedges has pity on Eva and offers to take her home, but decides to take her to a party that Easton is holding. Perhaps at least she can get some hors d'œuvres in her stomach. Of course, Eva is stupid enough not to eat, but to drink a bunch of champagne instead, get rip-roaringly drunk, and do an impromptu Shakespeare recital before passing out.

Easton, seeing Eva passed out in his lap just wants to pay her off to get rid of her and at least survive for however long it's going to take to find a part in a play somewhere. Eva somehow has the silly idea that perhaps she's actually got a part, and just walks out of the apartment, probably expecting a call or something that isn't going to come, forcing Eva to do vaudeville, the horror.

Sheridan is apparently able to find her, because he gets her as an understudy for the new play that he and Easton are doing, one that has Rita Vernon (Mary Duncan) in the leading role. But Rita is a diva, and decides on opening night that she's going to hold Easton hostage by demanding a much better contract than whatever she signed. Sheridan holds the trump card in Eva, however, and somehow she's actually able to pull the role off, at which point the movie abruptly ends.

Hepburn gives a good performance, although at times she's showing the same self-absorbed blankety blank that she is in a bunch of her other movies, notably Bringing Up Baby and The Philadelphia Story. Perhaps Hedges should have shaken some sense into Eva like at the end of Old Acquaintance instead of offering to take on Eva as a student; it probably would have helped Eva in the long run. Unsurprisingly, all of the men are just fine in their supporting roles although it's Hepburn's picture all the way. The one irritating thing, however, is the ending, as it really feels like the writers didn't know what to do after making Eva a star. The didn't have a boyfriend to reunite her with, or a big musical production as in 42nd Street. It just ends.

If you want to see Katharine Hepburn before she became "box office poison" in the late 1930s, Morning Glory isn't a bad place to start.

Love Song

Some months back I recorded Song of Love when it ran on TCM. It's on DVD courtesy of the Warner Archive, so I recently sat down to watch it and do a post here.

Katharine Hepburn plays Clara Wieck (1819-1896), a pianist and sometime composer who had a long career as a concert pianist. The movie starts off with one of her performances in 1839 (but to be fair to Hepburn, who was about 40 when she made the movie, the movie quickly moves to parts of Wieck's life closer to Hepburn's actual age at the time). Among the people in attendance at the concert are composer Robert Schumann (Paul Henried), who studied music under Clara's father (Leo G. Carroll who only gets the one scene). Indeed, Clara has fallen in love with Robert, 10 years her senior, something which her father really disapproves of.

But Clara, having fallen in love with Robert, marries him against her father's wishes. Cut to ten years later, when Robert and Clara have a whole bunch of kids (I think in real life they had eight in all, although I'm not certain if all of them survived infancy). Clara has become a housewife, managing the home with the help of a housekeeper, while Robert has gone on giving lessons and composing, trying to get an opera written and staged.

Knocking on the door one day is Johannes Brahms (Robert Walker). Now, if you know your music you'll know that Brahms is a fairly famous composer. But back around 1850 he hadn't yet earned the fame he'd have later in life and retains to this day. He had been given a recommendation to see Prof. Schumann. Seeing what a mess the household is in, and not having anywhere else to be, Brahms offers to rent a room, helping with the household management and apparently paying in to keep the place running and the increasingly indebted Schumanns afloat.

As this happens, bad things are happening to Robert. During music performances, we get shots of Clara or Johannes and hear the normal music, cutting to Robert, at which point the soundtrack has a dissonance added. This is the way the filmmakers signified what was some sort of mental illness. Of course, mental illness was not so well understood back in those days, with the condition being called melancholia; the modern-day best guess being bipolar disorder. Whatever the condition, however, it increasingly affected Schumann's life, leading to a suicide attempt and a couple of years in a mental asylum before he died, although this is glossed over in the movie.

Meanwhile, Brahms falls in love with Clara, although she's never going to return the affection. Not because of any dislike of Brahms, but because she could never hurt her husband like that, even though he ultimately realizes that Brahms has difficult feelings of his own to work through. Brahms doesn't want to hurt Robert either, not telling Robert that a publisher has rejected the opera Robert was working on. (In real life, the opera did get performed, but it's not part of the repertoire of commonly-performed operas today.)

Robert Schumann died in 1856 in the mental asylum, and Clara would live another 40 years, giving piano performances and trying to keep the legacy of Robert's music alive, with help from Brahms.

As I understand it, Song of Love gets the broad events of Robert Schumann's life correct, although the movie has a disclaimer at the beginning that it moves events around and dramatizes them for the sake of making a better movie. For example, Brahms did live with the Schumanns, but apparently it was only a couple of months.

Hollywood license aside, Song of Love is a movie that anybody who's a fan of classical music should really enjoy, thanks to all the good music that's pretty well presented, although it would be nice to hear more of Robert's orchestral works. I'm not certain if it will hold as much interest for people who aren't that into classical music, however, as the movie is certainly deeply rooted in the 1940s. But even for those people, Song of Love is definitely worth a watch.

Rooster Cogburn

Over the Thanksgiving free preview of the premium movie channels, StarzEncore Westerns ran Rooster Cogburn, so I DVRed it and recently sat down to watch it.

John Wayne reprises the Rooster Cogburn character he played six years earlier in True Grit. By this time, his violent ways have caught up with him, as the judge in Fort Smith, AR (John McIntire), which serves is the administrative center for the Indian Territory that would become what is now Oklahoma, strips Rooster of his marshal's power. But, of course, you know that he's going to get a chance to make things right, and that comes fairly quickly. The Army is shipping a wagon full of explosives, and that gets waylaid by a gang led by Hawk (Richard Jordan). Rooster gets to go into Indian Territory to find that wagon.

The trail leads quickly to Fort Ruby, which is home to a small number of Indians and a couple of missionaries, Rev. Goodnight and his daughter Eula (Katharine Hepburn). Hawk and his men overrun the place and when Rev. Goodnight tries to stop it, he gets shot for his trouble. So when Rooster shows up, Eula is insistnt that she's going to go along with him to find the men who killed her father. Rooster understandably objects, but when you're dealing with somebody like any of Katharine Hepburn's characters, good luck with that. Also along for the journey is Wolf (Richard Romancito), one of Eula's students.

They eventually get control of the wagon with the explosives, which also has a useful Gatling gun, but Hawk and his men get away. Rooster has to get the explosives back to their rightful owners, while Hawk wants to get the wagon back, and kill Rooster in revenge. Eventually, Rooster transfers the contents of the wagon to a raft for transport by river, but that winds up putting him, Eula, and Wolf more squarely in danger when you consider Hawk can take the high ground.

The fact that Rooster and Eula wind up going down a river, combined with Eula being a missionary played by Katharine Hepburn, lead a lot of people to make comparisons to The African Queen. Those comparisons are obvious, and while The African Queen is the better movie, Rooster Cogburn is by no means a bad movie. Wayne and Hepburn have great chemistry together and it's obvious that despite their differences, they wind up developing a great deal of respect for one another. The script (written by actress Martha Hyer under a pseudonym) breaks no new ground, but serves as amiable entertainment. The scenery is lovely, although there's a caveat. The movie is supposed to take place in Oklahoma, but the film was filmed largely in Oregon. It looks great on screen, but Oklahoma never had mountains like that.

If you're looking for a nice movie for a rainy or snowy day that you can sit back with a bowl of popcorn and be entertained by, Rooster Cogburn fits the bill in spades. And if you wanted to introduce people to westerns or the films of John Wayne, this one isn't a bad place to start, either. Despite the similarities to The African Queen, I can highly recommend it.

Thanksgiving night with Tracy and Hepburn

After you've finished your Thanksgiving turkey, if you don't like football you can always spend the evening with TCM, who are counterprogramming with five of the nine movies to pair Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The night kicks off at 8:00 PM with Desk Set, one that I've never actually blogged about in full and would do so if today weren't Thanksgiving and I didn't have a bunch of other things to do. The movie stars Hepburn as the head of a TV network's research library; into that library comes computer expert (for 1957 computers) Tracy, who's trying to sell the network a computer that will help in research. Unsurprisingly, the research librarians think the computer is going to replace them. Complicating matters is that Tracy and Hepburn's characters fall in love along the way. Pay special attention to the computer. It's the same one that would be recycled by Fox several years later in the Dick Van Dyke section of What a Way to Go! which was just on TCM earlier this week. I suppose that vintage computer could be the subject for a post of its own if I had good screencaps of it.

Coming up at 10:00 PM is Woman of the Year, which I blogged about four years ago. Political columnist Hepburn meets sportswriter Tracy; the two fall in love despite their differences.

At midnight is State of the Union, which has Tracy running for the presidency with his wife Hepburn as support; unfortunately the campaign threatens to take his humanity away from him.

You can catch Pat and Mike at 2:15 AM; here Hepburn plays a female athlete who is discovered by Tracy who becomes her manager; again the two fall in love along the way.

Finally, at 4:00 AM is Adam's Rib, with Tracy and Hepbrn playing married lawyers who wind up on opposite sides of a criminal trial when Hepburn takes the defense of Judy Holliday, who is on trial for shooting her husband.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Out-of-print update for August 7, 2015

First, I should apologize for the satellite outage that prevented me from writing a normal post yesterday. It's particularly distressing in that I would have enjoyed writing a full-length post about Beyond the Poseidon Adventure, which aired this morning at 6:00 AM as part of a day of Michael Caine movies. Unfortunately, it's one of the movies that TCM's schedule lists as not being available from the TCM Shop, which implies that it's not in print.

There are also a couple of movies tomorrow airing as part of Katharine Hepburn's day that are surprisingly not available from the TCM Shp, at least not according to the schedule.

Pat and Mike, which I mentioned briefly very early on in my posting days, can be seen tomorrow afternoon at 1:15 PM. Hepburn plays a female athlete managed by Spencer Tracy

That's followed at 3:00 PM by the much better comedy Adam's Rib. In this one, lawyers Hepburn and Tracy wind up on opposite sides of a case in which a wife shoots her husband.

Finally, at 4:45 PM, is Woman of the Year. Hepburn plays a political columnist who winds up romantically involved with sportswriter Spencer Tracy.

Apparently I haven't blogged about Holiday before

Tonight's TCM lineup is a bunch of heiress comedies, starting at 8:00 PM with Holiday. A search of the blog claims I haven't mentioned this one before, so today would be a good time to do a post on the movie.

Cary Grant plays Johnny Case, a young man of modest birth who isn't quite certain what he wants out of life, but he knows that whatever it is, it's going to be the strenuous life. But it looks like there's going to be happiness in that life. He's recently met a nice young lady named Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) and is going to marry her. He just needs a little advice from his mentor/quasi-foster parents the Potters: Prof. Nick (Edward Everett Horton) and his wife Susan (Jean Dixon) tell him to see Julia's fmily and tell them that he needs to take a sabbatical and that if Julia really loves him, they can get married after the sabbatical.

What Johnny finds shocks him. Julia Seton is a Seton, one of the Setons, as though everybody should know who the Setons are. After all, their father is only Edward (Henry Kolker), one of the wealthiest bankers in all of New York. He's run the family fairly conservatively much like the sort of family that Arthur's parents want him to marry into in that Dudley Moore movie. Julia has taken her father's guidance to heart and, while she's not a bad person, she's just a bit boring. At the house, Johnny meet's Julia's sister Linda (Katharine Hepburn), and finds that Linda is completely different from everybody else in the family. We know that she's going to be the apparent right one for Johnny, not just because we need a plot conflict, but because Katharine Hepburn is billed first and Doris Nolan only third. Rounding out the family is Julia and Linda's brother Ned (Lew Ayres). He too is living the life his father thinks the Setons should live, but you can tell it chafes at in in a way he can't really understand, because he's a dissolute drinker.

You can probably guess more or less what happens in the movie, although there are two possible endings: the You Can't Take It With You ending where the family is changed by the newcomer (the Jean Arthur character being the newcomer, not her family being changed), or the Arthur ending in which the man marries for love and the jilted "proper" family basically gets written out of the story if there were a movie about the couple's life post-marriage. Holiday does what it does pretty well, except that it's got Katharine Hepburn in the cast. I've always had difficulty warming to Hepburn, feeling that in a lot of her movies she's basically playing a spoiled, self-centered bitch of the sort that you want to smack the way Cary Grant does at the beginning of The Philadelphia Story. I've never really been able to get the impression that Hepburn's characters would be compatible with anybody in the long term.

Holiday is based on a stage play that had already been turned into a movie once, back in 1930. That version stars Mary Astor as Julia and Ann Harding as Linda and is a movie I'd be interested to see. Only the 1938 version seems to be on DVD, however, as part of a Cary Grant box set.

Apparently I haven't blogged about Alice Adams before

Katharine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray in Alice Adams

A search of the blog claims I haven't done a post on Alice Adams before. It's airing tomorrow afternoon at 2:00 PM on TCM as part of their look at all of the Best Picture nominees from 1935. So now I think would be a good chance to rectify this oversight and do a full-length post on the movie.

Katharine Hepburn stars as Alice Adams, a young woman in one of those small cities in Anywhere USA that seem to be a staple of Hollywood in the years before World War II. She's from the lower middle class, maybe slightly better off than Joan Crawford's character at the beginning of Possessed, as we see her at the beginning wishing that she could shop at the fine dress store to get a dress for the big society party. Her parents can't help her out because Dad's been ill, and hasn't made that much at his job anyhow, since he didn't have much ambition. At least, not the sort of ambition Alice has. Alice goes to the party with her brother Walter (Frank Albertson), and it's at the party that Alice meets Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray). Arthur is there because the folks giving the party, the Palmers, expect that their daughter Mildred (Evelyn Venable) to get engaged to him.

But things don't quite work out that way, or at least, we're given reason to think they're not going to. Arthur sees Alice, and she's just so charming that he can't help but be taken with her. Alice, for her part, sees her big chance to move up in life. But she's convinced that Arthur wouldn't want her if he knew the real truth about her and her family, which is that they're decidedly common. Soon enough, of course, Arthur is going to want to meet the family, which poses a dilemma for Alice. She comes up with the brilliant plan of having a fancier dinner for Arthur, to make it look as though the family is more well-to-do, even though nobody else in the family wants to have that sort of dinner.

Sure enough, the dinner goes badly. Back in those days there must have been no way that relationships with such a class difference could end positively, at least if you were thinking like Hollywood did. Which is why Possessed becomes more interesting when we find that the boy from Crawford's home town has become successful. Even though the plot of Alice Adams could easily be called trite, the movie is benefited greatly by having a cast that performs so well. I'm not a big fan of Katharine Hepburn, but she does a fine job here. I do kind of wonder how much she was playing herself, or at least the same character type she played in so many movies, that of the self-centered blankety-blank who thinks the world ought to be revolving around her. There's some of that character type here, and in Stage Door and Bringing Up Baby as well, among other of her films. MacMurray is fine, although he isn't given enough to do. Fred Stone is very good too as father Virgil Adams, a man who seems OK with a comfortable enough life, even if the women around him wish he had had more ambition.

Alice Adams did get a DVD release a decade or so ago, but it's out of print, since Amazon claims there's only one ridiculously expensive copy available. So you'll have to watch or record tomorrow's TCM airing.

Where's Katharine?

TCM is airing Stage Door tonight at 8:00 PM ET as part of a night of movies set in boarding houses. In this case, that's the Footlights Club, a New York City boarding house for aspiring stage actresses, with the movie having a wonderful cast, even if you don't like Hepburn that much. There's Ginger Rogers as the other female lead; she plays the "veteran" if you will of the boarding house. Hepburn plays the naïve new girl, fresh off the bus from somewhere in the Midwest or New England.

Lucille Ball plays one of the roomers, and a very young Ann Miller gets to dance a scene with Ginger Rogers. If you've been watching TCM, you'll probably have seen the "Word of Mouth" piece Miller did on wanting to do a dance number with Ginger. Oh, and I can also mention Gail Patrick and Eve Arden in supporting roles. As for the men, the one big male role is Adolphe Menjou as the theatrical producer; Menjou playing well as an elegant-looking man who has the same slimy intentions as Guy Kibbee would have had in 42nd Street.

The film is more of an ensemble movie with a slice-of-life theme than one with a real plot, but that doesn't mean it's not an entertaining film. That having been said, what I'm really wondering about is the DVD availability. TCM's website says it's not available for purchase from the TCM shop. IMDb links to Amazon, and says that there has been a DVD release. Well, two actually. One was back in 2005, so that would unsurprisingly be out of print. The second, however is a TCM Greatest Classic Legends Film Collection box set of four Hepburn films. It very much surprises me that TCM could put a film like this on a box set, and then apparently stop printing the box set. Not only that, but if they've remastered the movie for a DVD release, you'd think they could also make the movie available as a single film in the Warner Archive set. More pricey, but at least still available.

Then again, there's something fishy on the Amazon page. The big bold heading at the top of the page says 2006. To be honest, I don't remember when TCM first started making these four-film box sets that they've been advertising. But 2006 I think was some time before they started the Warner Archive, which might explain why a film like Stage Door might not have gotten a release to the Archive. On the other hand, if you scroll down, you'll see that they list a release date for the collection of March 13, 2012. This has to be an error, since one of the two reviews is dated two months earlier.

I'm not a huge fan of Katharine Hepburn, but the all-star case of Stage Door makes it a great candidate for another DVD release.

Woman of the Year

Apparently I've never blogged about the film Woman of the Year before. It's airing tomorrow morning at 9:00 AM on TCM, so now would be a good time to post on it.

This is the first of nine movies starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. Tracy plays Sam, a newspaper sports columnist. One day while at his favorite bar hanging out with the guys, he hears international political newspaper/radio columnist Tess (Hepburn) making derogatory comments about sports and how can you possibly have sports when there's a war going on out there? Sam is horrified, so he writes a column about how wrong-headed Tess is. The disagreement is good for business but bad for the atmosphere in the office, so the editor brings the two of them together to patch things up. And you can guess what happens next: they fall in love, even though they're complete opposites.

After they fall in love, you can probably guess that they're going to spend the rest of the film trying to make their relationship work once they discover that there's more to a relationship than just the emotions at the beginning, and that life isn't a bed of roses when you've got such polar opposites. In that regard, the movie doesn't really tread any new ground. Still, it's ample opportunity for gentle humor, such as Hepburn's trying to understand baseball, or Tracy's having to deal with a gathering of foreign diplomatic types where nobody seems to understand English.

The thing is, there's really no secondary plot to make this movie work the way there is with Adam's Rib or Desk Set. I think that Woman of the Year has quite a bit to say about relationships and understanding the opposite sex, and what it does say it says fairly well. But a lot of the time it feels a bit one-dimensional. Perhaps that has something to do with it being a Katharine Hepburn movie. She's never been one of my favorite actresses, and I can't help but feel a lot of the time as though she's playing an unsympathetic version of herself. It's up to Spencer Tracy to save this movie. While he does a creditable job of that, he's up against a lot more than he is in some of the other movies he made with Hepburn.

Still, I'd bet that those of you who like Katharine Hepburn will really enjoy Woman of the Year.

Sylvia Scarlett

TCM will be marking the birth anniversary of Cary Grant tomorrow, and kicks off the day with the movie Sylvia Scarlett at 6:30 AM.

Katharine Hepburn plays the title role, the daughter of a widower (Edmund Gwenn) who is living in France. Unfortunately, Dad is a conman, and he's about to be caught, so they have to escape somehow. Dad decides that going to England is best, but certainly everybody's going to recognize his lovely daughter. What to do? Cut off her hair and have her try to pass as a boy! (Yeah, right.) Still, this being a Hollywood movie, you know they're going to get away with it, at least for a while. That while sort of comes to an end when they meet Jimmy (Cary Grant) in England. He's a conman himself, and he suspects something about "Sylvester".

About halfway through the movie, "Sylvester" gets the bright idea that they should go straight, by getting one of those circus-style trailers you see in old movies, and roving around the countryside as itinerant actors. It's here that they meet artist Michael (Brian Ahearn). Sylvia falls in love with him, to the point that she wants to give up the charade. However, Michael has a girlfriend. All is solved, though, when through a twist of fate, Sylvia winds up with Michael, and Jimmy winds up with Michael's old girlfriend.

Or is all solved? The two couples meet again after quite some time has passed.... On the bright side, this is the final twist in a movie that has a lot of plot twists that seem to come out of nowhere. Sylvia Scarlett is a movie that has an interesting idea, but an execution that leaves something to be desired. I'm not the biggest fan of Hepburn, but she isn't terrible here having to do a cross-dressing role. Cary Grant is good, but then, he's always underrated, as is Edmund Gwenn. The film's big problem is that it doesn't seem to know what it wants to do.

That having been said, Sylvia Scarlett is definitely worth seeing at least once. The movie has made it to DVD, but apparently only as part of a box set of Hepburn's films.

Adam's Rib

Six months ago, I wrote that if I were going to recommend a Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn movie, the first one I'd recommend would probably by Adam's Rib. It's airing on TCM overnight tonight at 1:45 AM ET.

Tracy and Hepburn play married lawyers Adam and Amanda Bonner. Their work and marriage is brought into conflict when young Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday) learns that her husband (Tom Ewell) is cheating on her; this leads Doris to try to shoot him. She's naturally arrested, and winds up with Amanda as an attorney. Amanda has decided to take the case for political reasons: as we learned in The Divorcée 20 years earlier, it's OK for the man to sleep around, but not the woman. And Amanda wants to change this attitude. So, she comes up with a novel defense that basically says Doris was justified: if it had been the husband shooting a cheating wife, public opinion would have less of a problem.

So far, so good. Unfortunately, Adam isn't just a lawyer; he's a prosecuting attorney. And he is given the task of prosecuting the Attinger case. (In real life, this likely wouldn't happen, but we're talking Hollywood here. Since when have they cared about reality?) Adam takes the case despite the fact that it will create tension at home. Amanda, meanwhile, decides to make the case as much of a circus as she can. Along the way, though, she gets a bit of attention from their neighbor, composer David Wayne, which leads Adam to think his wife might be cheating....

Adam's Rib is witty, if at times a bit predictable by today's standards. This is thanks in no small part to a script by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. But Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn are also helped enormously by the great supporting cast. Not that they need help, but it can't hurt to have people like Holliday or, as the woman she finds with her husband, Jean Hagen.

Adam's Rib has made it to multiple DVD box sets, so you should have no difficulty finding it.

It's always the cover-up

This afternoon's TCM movie is Keeper of the Flame, airing at 6:00 PM ET.

Spencer Tracy stars as Steven O'Malley, a journalist who is given the job of writing an obituary for a prominent American hero who just died in a car accident. In true Citizen Kane fashion, O'Malley wants to find out more about this great hero and what made him tick, so he goes to meet the man's widow, Christine Forrest (Katharine Hepburn). What O'Malley finds surprises him. Christine seems to be mourning much less than most women whose husbands just dies would be, and the people around her, notably Mr. Forrest's personal secretary Clive (Richard Whorf), seem rather irritated by O'Malley's snooping.

Clive is right to be worried. What he knows is that Forrest, despite having done some heroic deeds earlier in his life, also had a dark side in that he had some secrets that would best not be revealed, lest they tarnish the reputation and memory of Forrest. Christine apparently knew of these secrets, too, and that might just be why she's not that emotional over her husband's death. Still, O'Malley's presence is a threat to her as well as Clive....

Keeper of the Flame is interesting in that it's much darker than anythine else Tracy and Hepburn made together. Sure, they did drama, such as Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, but even that ends up a hopeful note. As for the performances, Tracy is as good as ever as the man who believed in Forrest's ideals, only to find out the real truth about the man. Hepburn frankly doesn't do much here, but then, I've never been that big a fan of her work. The supporting cast is its usual competent self, but that's to be expected by anything MGM was putting out in the 1940s.

Ultimately, if I wanted to recommend the Tracy/Hepburn films to people new to them, I'd pick something else first, such as Adam's Rib or Desk Set: the two actors worked better off of each other when they were doing comedy. But that's not to say Keeper of the Flame isn't worth watching. You don't just have to be a fan of Tracy and/or Hepburn to enjoy this one. Surprisingly, it doesn't seem to have been released to DVD yet.