George Stevens | Alice Adams / 1935

talking herself into romance

by Douglas Messerli

 

Dorothy Yost, Mortimer Offner, and Jane Murfin (screenplay, based on the novel by Booth Tarkington), George Stevens (director) Alice Adams / 1935

 

When she wasn’t playing a boy (Sylvia Scarlett, 1936), an amazon warrior (in the stage version of The Warrior’s Husband, 1934), a lesbian-like pilot (Christopher Strong, 1933), or a witch (Spitfire, 1934),* and before she became known for playing strong, brilliant, and eccentric women who generally fought equally successfully for her men and against them (Holiday, 1938; Bringing Up Baby, 1938; The Philadelphia Story, 1940; Woman of the Year, 1942; Adam’s Rib, 1949; and Desk Set, 1957), Katharine Hepburn portrayed a vulnerable young woman of the lower class, simply due to lack of financial resources unable to compete with the wealthy girls of the town who had from time-to-time included her in their parties.

     The competition had only one objective: a wealthy young man who would provide love and support for the rest of a woman’s life. The central scene of Dorothy Yost, Mortimer Offner, and Jane Murfin’s rewriting of Booth Tarkington’s dark comedy, is the grand ball celebrated quite early in the film, organized by Mildred Palmer (Evelyn Venable) to which the young Alice Adams (Hepburn) has been almost incidentally invited. Alice must wear a calico dress made over from its appearance at an earlier party; and unable to afford a corsage, she is forced to steal violets from a public park; finally, she has no date, as in Vincente Minnelli’s later small town social dance in Meet Me In St. Louis, forced to go with her shanghaied brother, Walter (Frank Albertson), who would prefer to be out dancing and gambling at a black night club.

      Her brother dances one dance with Alice; but after that she can’t even find a handsome young man to ask her except, in another foretelling of Minelli’s classic, the monstrously bad-dancer and gay mamma’s boy Frank Dowling (Grady Sutton, who performed this role in the same year he had played a character in drag in Wig Wag after playing another such figure in Rough-Necking the year before). As Alice’s spirits wilt, so do her violets. The only joyful moment of the night is when Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray), an out-of-town rich boy rumored to be Mildred’s fiancé, asks her to dance—at the request of Mildred, so Alice imagines.

       When Arthur, with Alice’s bidding, finds her brother tossing dice in a back room with the black orchestra leader, the poor girl, now completely flustered, demands her brother take her home, permitting him to go off wherever he wants while she quietly sits in her room, looking out at the rain, in tears. Unlike Cinderella, she has returned home long before midnight and found no apparent Prince at the ball.

       For me, this ball says everything that the rest of the film merely reiterates: Alice’s father, Virgil (Fred Stone) is, as critic Farran Smith Nehme summarizes, “a mid-level employee who has risen as far in life as he ever will,” while many others of his generation have risen to powerful positions. Alice’s mother (Ann Shoemaker) is convinced that with the glue formula he has developed with another friend—working on time at the optical factory of Mr. Lamb (Charles Grapewin), might have and still could make him rich if only he’d not been so subservient to Lamb.

     Yet, despite an accident—vaguely hinted at in the film—from which Virgil is recovering, Lamb has continued to pay his salary and promises him his job back when he fully recovers.

      And despite her sadness and, to an extent, the loneliness she suffers from the social cruelties of the small town, Alice and her father are still proud and supportive of his past life, despite the constant complaints of unhappiness, mostly out of her love for Alice, expressed by Mrs. Adams.

     Indeed, despite the small town gossip about Arthur Russell and Mildred Palmer, it is to Alice whom Arthur is attracted. And most of the rest of the film is spent with Alice dating the handsome outsider. Unfortunately, the script and the director have convinced Hepburn that she must play an everyday girl pretending to be a patrician, speaking in a manner in which Hepburn might normally speak, but as Alice, exaggerating and giggling over lines that in her best roles Hepburn flawlessly express. At this point in her career, Hepburn had just had a series of flops, particularly with The Lake on Broadway, and her role as Adams temporarily saved her career.

     But frankly, I find this role a difficult one to endure, despite my love of Hepburn’s acting talents. She is great at playing the patrician as in Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, and The Philadelphia Story, but closer to the bad actress in Stage Door in this role. Fortunately, the affectations she insists upon keep slipping and what even she describes as “just me,” the ordinary girl behind the badly learned elocution lessons shows through. As Nehme suggests: “Also lovable are Alice’s flashes of honesty, the yearning and sense of her own daring when she tells Alfred, ‘I decided that I should probably never dare to be myself with you; not if I wanted you to see me again.’”

      Her prediction that at some point Mildred Palmer and her family will reveal her for who she truly is, in fact, comes true, particularly after her father, finally convinced by his harping wife, when he uses up their savings and takes out a loan on their house to bring his glue factory into reality. Lamb claims that the formula is his, and that Virgil has now stolen it from him; Alice’s brother gets into debt and steals from Lamb’s payroll; and Alice’s mother convinces her that it is time to invite Arthur to dinner, a three-strike evening which has the potential of making all of Alice’s nightmares come true.

     Most critics speak of the Adams’ comically disastrous dinner—a multicourse series of basically heavy peasant dishes all served up one after one on the hottest night of the year overseen  by the hilarious gaffs and often seemingly intentional “subversive forms of protest” (Nehme) by the hired maid Malena (Hattie McDaniel)—that truly does end, at least in the novel, their relationship as the best sequence of the film.

      Actually, had the film stayed true to Tarkington’s book, MacMurray, in his fairly dishonest and caddish abandonment of Alice, could have added this role to his later “bad guy” roles such as in Double Indemnity, Caine Mutiny, and The Apartment. Certainly, he might have seemed more credible than as the ever-patient romancer.

      Both director Stevens and Hepburn argued against the producer Pandro S. Berman against changing the original story; indeed Offner had been hired to rewrite the script written by Yost and Murfin, to bring it back closer to Tarkington’s original; but gaining the support of Hepburn’s friend George Cukor, Berman convinced them of the film’s ending wherein Walter’s jail time and Virgil’s financial ruin are corrected by a reunion with Lamb brokered by Alice; when she returns  to her porch she finds Arthur still there, having heard everything and willing to marry Alice nonetheless.

      As Nehme points out, in the original Alice returns to the stairway of Frincke’s Business College where Alice first encountered Arthur after the dance, this time climbing the rest of the stairs, “on her way to a life in office work.” The original book reads: “Half-way up the shadows were heaviest, but after that the place began to seem brighter. There was an open window overhead somewhere, she found, and the steps at the top were gay with sunshine.” That noble ending would have accorded with the Hepburn I love, while the other merely marries her off like all the others girls of her age, dooming her presumably to a boring life of a housewife having to deal with a man with seemingly little of intelligence. Just as throughout most of this film, Alice will have to do nearly all the talking.

      It’s fascinating that even a popular writer such as Booth Tarkington wrote endings for both this film and Orson Welles’ The Magnificent Andersons that studio heads thought far too dark for their audiences, in my estimation ruining both films.

 

*The roles of these early films were particularly those lesbian-oriented Hepburn sought out according to what George Cukor told Scotty Bowers (Full Service, 2012). Cukor continually attempted to steer his friend Hepburn away from such ventures.

 

Los Angeles, August 8, 2023

Reprinted from World Cinema Review (August 2023).