Alice Adams (1935)

Hollywood's ability to conjure up a bittersweet small town (on the studio back lot, to be sure) has rarely been on better display than in Alice Adams, a gentle adaptation of a Booth Tarkington novel. For that matter, Katharine Hepburn rarely had a better chance to radiate her early youthful glow. She plays the title character, a lonely misfit who tries--too hard--to fit in with the snooty debutantes in her class-conscious town. Fred MacMurray is the suitor who miraculously feels comfortable in the front-porch swing of the faded Adams home. In the exquisitely timed comedy of MacMurray's miserable dinner with Alice's family, director George Stevens displays the tools he learned directing Laurel and Hardy two-reelers, and the sequence becomes a funny-painful classic of social embarrassment. Hepburn's performance, whether Alice is chattering pretentiously or briefly lowering her guard and revealing her loneliness, is simply incandescent. --Robert Horton Amazon.com

Classic Hepburn

If you like old black and white movies, you will enjoy watching some of the greatest actors in this classic drama. June 10, 2007

Painful to Watch, for Various Reasons

Hepburn at her youngest and most beautiful, but a film flawed by cliché, casting, and motive. The movie comes from a Tarkington book that had inexplicably won a Pulitzer prize and is a lame expose of small town class systems and social climbing - Tarkington's book became a screenplay with none of the bite or insight of Sinclair Lewis' work. As to the casting, everyone except Hepburn delivers a 2 dimensional 30's-ish performance except the father who falls perilously close to muggery and caricature. He is a cross between the cowardly lion and a Little Rascal's parent.

Hepburn herself plays a young woman who is increasingly hypocritical and a liar in pursuit of a young man. The dinner sequence, justly remembered in Hollywood, shows her as luminous, bright, and brittle. However, it's all like watching Jerry Lewis play the idiot doomed to fail - very, very painful. The final redemption, after Hepburn becomes an honest woman, is less than believable. We had no character development of the Fred MacMurray character, so when he does the right thing, its because it's a Hollywood ending.

Leonard Maltin rated this 3 ½ in his guide - shame on you Leonard! May 25, 2007

Simply Darling!

A delightful movie from 1935 starring the late great Katherine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray. Katherine Hepburn plays a middle class girl trying to fit into an upper class society. Of course, she falls in love with a rich man who's totally smitten with her from the moment he sees her across a crowded room. Throughout the movie Alice tries to hide her embarrassment of her family's inappropriate etiquette and lack of funds. Fred MacMurray was just darling and full of charm and smiles as the smitten rich boy looking for true love. Hepburn and MacMurray provided excellent chemistry for this black and white film that still oozes with romantic feelings. I look forward to watching it again. Reviewed by M. E. Wood April 7, 2007

Sweet and full of feeling

The success of Alice Adams hinges largely on Katharine Hepburn's performance, and she does a fine job bringing life and spirit to the part. Alice admires the beautiful and rich daughters of the wealthier families in her town; she longs for their life of privilege, fashionable clothes, and charming suitors. Her own family lives in a modest house; her father isn't a driven and ambitious type, and her brother doesn't behave respectably. Alice attends a social ball wearing an old dress, and puts on a brave face as hardly anyone looks her way. Then, miraculously, a wealthy and affable young man, Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray), asks her to dance.

From that point, Alice tries to fool Arthur into thinking that her family is well-off. When he visits, she meets him out on the porch. She talks about all the language, dance, and music lessons she was supposedly gifted with as a child, and makes excuses for why her family's home doesn't look all that splendid. And among these rambling made-up stories are the real kernels of truth about Alice's character - her loneliness and naivete, her bold dreams and self-consciousness. While it's true that she's adopted some of the same values as the more genteel families, she's sympathetic in how she stands up for her family in the moments when it truly counts, and how she's kind and soothing to her parents as well, particularly her loving but often unassertive father (played wonderfully by Fred Stone).

Fred MacMurray, as Arthur, isn't given a role with great depth, but he brings to it what he can. His job is to be a dream, an ideal, and he plays Arthur with a certain inscrutability, so when the end of the movie comes, and Alice seems resigned to a life filled with more responsibility and less romance, his continued presence on her porch didn't strike me as particularly unrealistic (no more so than similar events in other romance movies).

As for Hepburn, she made me feel for her character, so that even while Alice was being foolishly pretentious, I felt kindly towards her (and at times embarrassed for her). I was moved towards the end, when - with her grand romance seemingly ended - she pushes aside her pain and stands up for her father. Hepburn renders a character who is naive, full of love and fancy, and refreshingly different in key ways from the more fashionable young ladies in town. December 23, 2006

kate is great & so is most of the rest of the movie

one of katharine hepburns signature performances, and deserevedly so, she stars in this adaptation of a booth tarkington novel about a young working class woman trying to push her way into "high society" (or what passes for that in provincial indiana). the movie sadly has to sidestep on the social satire (if it had been made 2 years earlier, i bet the ending would have been truer to life), but it still manages quite a few stings. and the set piece of the adams family formal dinner is a briiliantly directed stevens tour-de-force, highlighted by a hilarious turn (oh! that not-quite-starched cap, lol) from the sadly under-utilized hattie mcdaniel. still it is hepburns film, and her range of emotions here clearly go beyond "A to B".

December 5, 2006

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