Birthday Girls: Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn, Summertime
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
(lost the 1955 Best Actress Oscar to Anna Magnani for The Rose Tattoo)

Why I Went Back: Happy birthday, Kate! And, as will be obvious, I'm forever resolving my thoughts about this film and this performance—even, increasingly, about this actress.

The Performance: In my lifetime of commitment to Katharine Hepburn, her starring role in Summertime remains the great riddle: I can't decide how I feel about it, and it has the odd double-effect of seeming incongruous to her star narrative, maybe even resistant to her abilities, while also illuminating more about Hepburn as actor and woman than anything else she's done, possibly excepting Little Women. A key story element involves a goblet of vermilion-colored glass that is never fully resolved as a magnificent artifact or a dispiriting fake, propped up on its admirers' desire for truth and beauty, even in their absence. Summertime probably intends us to see the goblet as a metaphor for its American spinster's sad, sentimental, but nonetheless stirring trip to Venice, which plays convincingly as a climax of this woman's experience and as a somewhat pitiful self-delusion, and most richly as a blend of the two. In pulling his camera so close to the goblet, David Lean has the confidence and grace to invite speculation as to whether his own film duplicates the worrying riddles of that goblet. Summertime's lush but self-commodifying colorism sometimes seems dubious, though its emotional through-lines prove more delicate by the finish than the first hour leads me to expect, revealing a genuine distillation of poignant, autumnal feeling beneath a summer sun, rather than just an exuberantly lacquered miming of the same.

But what about Hepburn herself? Is she also the goblet—a rare beauty, but also a heartbreaking myth? As with many of our most wondrous actresses, directors' desires to use her and viewers' craving to see her invited several occasions of strained casting, sometimes to her insuperable disadvantage (The Rainmaker) but often to her resourceful glory (Long Day's Journey into Night). Summertime entails an affront to plausibility right from the get-go. Hepburn's Jane wields a home-movie camera with such elated, confident vigor during the opening arrival to Venice that she's utterly believable as a hungry, first-time visitor to this particular city. But who could ever countenance Kate Hepburn as someone who'd never been anywhere? The piece depends, hugely, on our sense of the character's horizons expanding decisively, with a looming expiration date, but everything about Hepburn's gait and figure and mien connote a long life of open doors, knowledge absorbed, invitations rarely denied her even when she denied them. Scenes where she has to dog-paddle around with insulated American foibles, ostentatiously fumbling simple Italian words or proving too timid to solicit a waiter for her bill, cannot help but play as unconvincing pantomime for Hepburn, and also against the more elegant passages of the movie. I'm sometimes tempted to believe that Jane requires projections of bashfulness or naïveté that Hepburn simply cannot manage, but then the material clearly parses psychology into finer categories than just innocence and experience. Lean surely knew what he wanted when he cast this barnstorming New Englander in a role where the easier, reductive choice would have been a frump or a Jane Wyman type, though at the same time, Wyman might have found more to exploit than Hepburn is willing in scenes like the famous spill into the canal, where Kate is so sporting about her own stuntwork that she's weirdly unembarrassed by the public mishap.

In any event, Summertime works as a challenge to Jane's coping mechanisms, whatever those have been: she needn't be played as a delicate bloom, or as utterly uninitiated to the ways in which a wider world works, the ways in which people prevaricate in pursuit of sex or companionship or experience. So it's only for a while, then, that the cultivated Hepburnness of Hepburn, in all her disarming shrewdness and haughty charisma, seems to interfere with her ability to conjure as tremulous a figure as Jane initially presents, and also to serve as appealing but arbitrary compensation for a film that gawks so often and so centrally at the beauty of Venice that Jane herself feels like a generically mandated convenience on which to hang the spectacles and the formal compositions in which Lean is more fully interested. If the main character is a basically arbitrary surrogate for the camera, why not the Hepburn we know and love, rather than the paler, more vulnerable woman the script seems to solicit? But then, as Summertime confronts Jane with the truth of her desires and with the ambiguous effects of gratifying them, Hepburn's odd or erratic offering of herself in place of the scripted character becomes fascinating and rich. It isn't just that her driftless hurt and solitude—communicated with real delicacy and sadness in shots like the one where she sits on a set of low steps by the side of a canal, or where she hides out of view of a younger couple who are abruptly reconsidering whether to invite her along on a dinner date—feel more moving to the extent that we associate them with Hepburn herself. After so many years of standing next to Tracy, not just contentedly but strangely pushing his cold stolidity to curb or eclipse her impetuousness, the woman we find once we get her alone is not any sidelined spitfire, yearning for independence, but a much more bruised and incapacitated figure, an inveterate codependent forced to languish by herself.

More immediate plot concerns, like Jane's initial outrage and then her soft-spoken pursuit of love with a married man, only intensify the conditions for seeing Jane as a window not into Venice, about which Summertime has little to say, but into Hepburn, even though Lean is too tactful and Hepburn still too fundamentally guarded and canny to imply a total unveiling, much less an exploitative one. She's still stuck saying lots of stuff that sounds like the kind of dialogue that Hepburn would sneer at from her patio at Fenwick: "Let me go, I must catch that train! Oh, Renato!" There are at least a handful of moments one wants to rewrite, redirect, or excise. But she's breathtaking, ecstatic and sad, when she's all dolled up for her night out with Rossano Brazzi: unprecedentedly eligible for chic strapless gowns, but also self-conscious about her age, her reserve, the tomboyish and undeniable eccentricity of her freckled beauty. She puts real heart into Jane's ardor as well as her disappointment. As brittlely mannered as Hepburn usually was, it's affecting to see how simply and directly she assumes Jane's elation and her mounting grief through the second half of Summertime, unmistakably connecting at some personal level with the material and thereby elevating the film above the risks of hollow melodrama or unanchored pictorialism. She plays from the heart, but not only from the heart: she knows that Jane's problems, her dramas, and her enigmas are finally in her head. Note that in her early, lying speech to the manager of her pensione about the "friend" who is really herself, traveling to Italy so as to connect with "something hidden way in the back of her mind," Hepburn reads the line not as a moist paean to the ineffable "something" but with a kind of pleased, reverential respect for the mysteries of the mind.

In this and other ways, we come to perceive a whole host of stories that Jane/Hepburn performs for herself, as herself, as well as what it looks like when she punctures or admits her own illusions: sometimes with tears, sometimes with angry swats at the furniture, sometimes with a kind of serenity unusual for the hardworking Hepburn. In some sense, all of this derives from overcoming an erratically written role, and from enforcing more of her own persona upon the part than she probably ought, even when it could stand a little saving. The more interesting and sobering coefficent for what Hepburn finally achieves, though, in all the peaks and revelations of her work in Summertime is a portrait of desperate neediness that is so credible that the lustrous carapace of Hepburn's independence in so many other films and press appearances is never again so believable—a heavy toll to pay, if Hepburn has ever served, as she long did for me, as an exemplar of how to proudly and publicly know your own mind. Even more than Garbo's beauty or Bogart's sangfroid, Hepburn's headstrong, proudly intellectual spirit of autonomy is for me one of the paragon creations of the movies, onscreen or off. It's also, to no small extent, a willful and self-serving mirage for a woman who clearly fetishized paternal surrogates and made herself subservient to men and to myths that don't seem worthy of the brilliant persona she forged and sustained.

Any adult reader of Me: Stories of My Life can perceive the measures of masochism and denial in Hepburn, but one need not relinquish passion and gratitude for everything Hepburn achieved and represented, even if her image is built on shakier premises than one loves to admit. Summertime contains the one performance where Hepburn discloses these dynamics of heart and mind; maybe that's why it's the performance that seems most to combine moments of her unique, incandescent best with flashes of her limitations and failures of nerve. It's hard to look at Hepburn and acknowledge that some of what you're seeing is fake, but it's well worth it when so much else, so much more is beautiful, and when the sum of the fake and the beautiful feel so much like the truth.

She Gave Him Class. She Gave Him Sex.

Wait, isn't he supposed to give her something? In fairness, he did. I'd call it venerability. To say nothing of companionship. Such as it was, though. Got all her best years, the old drunk. But then, she seemed to like it that way. Whatever. None of my biz.

All I'm saying is, I love Adam's Rib, and I hope you do, too. And I hope you love this picture. Love the black & white. Soak it up. Because I'm afraid you won't be seeing much more of it as the countdown continues...

What's the Story (Morning Glory)?

While we've got our 1933 momentum going from yesterday, I'm offering a more conspicuous plug for my 1932-33 Best Actress page, where you can read about Katharine Hepburn's first, divisive Oscar win, for Morning Glory; May Robson's late-late career flowering into stardom; even more about poor Diana Wynyard in Cavalcade; and why I think this field adds up to even less than the sum of its parts. The nomination for Robson—the earliest-born woman ever nominated for this award, having joined the world in 1858—was inevitable, given the shape of the role and the scale of Lady for a Day's financial success, but the other two nods are disheartening even by the Academy's standards: Hepburn was so much better in Little Women, which scored lots of other major nods, and the unusually long 17-month eligibility window encompassed an unusual number of top-drawer female performances. So many, in fact, that I've already proposed what I think is a delicious alternate field, I already hate having to leave out my two runners-up, and I have a bevy of highly lauded performances, some of them outright legendary, that I haven't even caught up with... which is where you come in, to tell me whose work out of 10 luscious possibilities I simply must see next. (Link fixed! Thanks, Nathaniel.)

As for the Best Picture lineup for 1932-33, for me the clear choice is 42nd Street, a watershed in the history not just of musicals and on-screen choreography but of coordinated movement more generally and of the tension between conventional pathos and formal exactitude. I love that the movie demonstrates such affinity for the geometric aesthetics of experimental and late-silent cinema, even as it carries sound pictures into new territory, and I love how it draws out the ominous aspect of mass coordination, in the figure of Warner Baxter's autocratic director, alongside the exuberance of artistry and the gratifications of emotion and pleasure. Complicated and dazzling. Second choice for me is Mervyn LeRoy's tough and good-looking I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, whose narrative twists and visual motifs only get more interesting as it finishes, and the easy pick for third place is George Cukor's mostly lovely screen version of Little Women. My enthusiasm dips notably for my fourth and fifth choices, which have opposite virtues: She Done Him Wrong yields a doozy of a star persona in Mae West's "Lou," and I appreciate how the film (by the same director as Morning Glory!) opens up the screen as a space for new kinds of saucy escape and identification...but the story and the visuals could really use a hand. Frank Capra's Lady for a Day moves along very comfortably and pulls some smart moments from actors like Warren William and Glenda Farrell, but there's little sense of taking risks or pushing boundaries, and as I've said a few times, the film doesn't invest what it could or should in Robson's ostensible lead.

He Done Them Wrong, aka The Private Life of Henry VIII, doesn't break much new ground, either. The whole thing is bitty and skimmy, with a final scene that makes the whole seem even more inconsequential, but Laughton plumbs quite a lot from the role, at least or especially given these circumstances, and Binnie Barnes and Elsa Lanchester do some good work. Plus, a film that offs Merle Oberon this early can't be all bad. Nearing the bottom of this list, Smilin' Through is fanciful and has an engaging fairy-tale look, though I doubt even the filmmakers themselves thought they had made something very consequential. Same for State Fair, which has the well-judged production design one expects from Henry King, but aside from a memorable Best Pickles competition, I couldn't think of any reason to commemorate its remarkable refusal to say anything or amount to much. Cavalcade, the winner, brings up the rear of the list for reasons that have been well-covered, and if I'm skipping over Frank Borzage's A Farewell to Arms, it's because I haven't seen it in entirely too long. In my dim memory, it looked good enough and moved well, and Helen Hayes was affecting enough to land this somewhere at or above She Done Him Wrong/Lady for a Day territory, but I really don't trust myself to know. Any thoughts?

Goddesses, Pianos, Princes, and a Book You Should Must Buy

After being on quite the roll there for a minute, I haven't posted in over two weeks, so I may as well pack a lot into this entry. Yesterday was, after all, a High Holy Day: the birthday of my grandfather, but also of the late, impossibly great Katharine Hepburn, who would have turned 101 if she hadn't died five years ago. (Has it really already been five years?) I believe I have already made clear my semi-religious feelings about Katharine Hepburn here. May 12 is always a delicious day for me, but then Nathaniel came along to make it even sweeter, even as I sat languishing in bed with an illness so bad I had to cancel my classes and stay home from work. Telepathically aware that I needed as much restorative bliss as I could get, Nathaniel offered this sterling tribute to Jane Campion's The Piano, and though I still don't understand how or why Nathaniel loves eight movies even more than this one, I of course thrilled to his evocative, beautifully illustrated ode to the film—especially since it sounds as though he might like it even more now than he once did! Nathaniel's subsequent blog posting is about princes, but he is obviously a prince himself to be this publicly and appropriately worshipful of the most important movie in my life, and surely one of the best ever made.

I've shown even less restraint on my own list of the 100 greatest movies (a feature that needs a qualitative as well as a formatting overhaul), where The Piano still reigns at #1. Yes, I grant that its crucial arrival at the absolute, most poignant onset of my movie-loving life has a great deal to do with this unusually robust claim on the film's behalf, and I've never gotten around to writing the public defense of this position that I obviously owe. I'm getting there; I always mean well. Happily, another prince of the blogosphere, Tim R. of MainlyMovies—who keeps even more mum on his blog lately than I do on mine—furnished me with a brilliant occasion to celebrate The Piano in print. That occasion was a book he co-edited called The DVD Stack, now in its 2nd Edition, and not to put too fine a point on it, YOU HAVE TO BUY THIS BOOK. Within, you'll find succinct but searching reviews of over 350 movies that are either masterworks in themselves, or the welcome recipients of brilliant presentations on DVD, or both. The writers are mostly staffers of major British publications like the Daily Telegraph, Time Out London, the Sunday Times, and Sight and Sound, but they found room for me in that august group. I got to wax awestruck about 16 of my favorite movies, from Persona to The Cell to Daughters of the Dust to Singin' in the Rain to Harlan County, U.S.A.. If that small sampler doesn't sufficiently convince you that The DVD Stack breaks significantly from the usual All-Time Best roll call—but without petulantly avoiding some objects of universal and deserved adoration—then you haven't experienced the back-to-back tributes to DodgeBall: A True Underdog Story (a surreally inspired DVD, apparently) and La Dolce vita. I would absolutely buy and treasure this book even if Tim hadn't edited it, and I would absolutely shill it even if I weren't in it. As an appetizer course, and as a reciprocal gesture to Nathaniel's lovely tribute, here's what I have to say about The Piano ... and yes, we are absolutely talking about that spectacular and affordably priced R2/PAL edition that completely wipes the floor with the despicable and un-extra'd U.S. print. I was limited to 400 words (a first time for everything!), but I hope you get the drift:

The film: Ada McGrath (Holly Hunter) is a 19th-century Scotswoman who has refused to speak since she was six years old. She arrives in New Zealand as the purchased bride of a taciturn colonist, but neither she nor her fatherless daughter (Anna Paquin) make any easy concessions to domestic custom. Ada's proud resolve is shared by the film, which forges ahead into tense, exotic circumstances and allows us, indeed forces us, to fend for ourselves within its fertile landscape of desire, violence, envy, and enigma. The piano in Jane Campion's magisterial film is an instrument, a voicebox, a prize, a symbol, a concept, a thing-in-itself, a means of communication, and a bulky rampart against it. Campion's ingenuity is to read all the same paradoxes into human personality and sexuality. Her film looks askance at daily life, brimming with unexpected angles and an almost subconscious language of images and tones, and yet it stares forthrightly into extraordinary conflicts: the worst of what people do to each other, and the remarkable, ambiguous ways in which we save each other. None of this, of course, would be possible without the flawless cast, the superb locations, the eccentrically beautiful score, and the utterly persuasive production design.

The DVD: Heretofore available only in an undistinguished and feature-free version, The Piano finally attains a proper showcase, with an impressive gallery of key creative personnel gathered for the occasion. Campion and producer Jan Chapman provide a chummy but detailed commentary track, but even more illuminating are the generous interviews with both women as well as composer Michael Nyman, all furnished on the second disc. Campion speaks for a full, congenial hour about her creative process (including glimpses at her sketchbooks), her casting decisions and varying methods with different actors, her close collaboration with her cinematographer, and her charmingly ambivalent response to the film's Oscar successes. Chapman elucidates with passion the role of an independent film producer, specifically when securing international funds for a risky screenplay, and Nyman, without winning any trophies for modesty, sheds valuable light on how and why the film was tailored to the score, rather than the more customary reverse. A shorter making-of featurette from the time of the film's production expands to include the lead actors' perspectives. Best of all, the print transfer exquisitely captures the rolling waves, the plashy mud, the burnished glow of the interiors, and the eerie, aqueous light of the New Zealand bush.

Thanks, Nathaniel; thanks, Tim; thanks, Jane; thanks, Holly, Harvey, Anna, Sam, Jan, Stuart, Veronika, Michael, Janet, Andrew, Tungia, Kerry, Genevieve...; thanks, Katharine; thanks, Opa; overwork and underpay and all-nighters be damned, all is full of love today on Nick's Flick Picks.

Photos © 1993 Miramax Films/Ciby2000; and © 2007 Canongate Ltd.

Picked Flick #54: Suddenly, Last Summer

Sometimes even the major, personality-shaping fixations in our lives recede for a while, but then forcefully reassert themselves at unexpected moments. Literally, in this one week, I am experiencing a mini-revival of my Tennessee Williams fandom, on three wholly different fronts. Professionally, as my students pass in their senior thesis projects, I have pulled my own undergraduate thesis out of the mothballs: a structurally daffy, theoretically promiscuous, but mercifully unhumiliating argument about Williams' plays as pre-Foucauldian parables of panoptical social regulation, taking Not About Nightingales as the central text. In a public context, Warner Bros. has just released a seven-disc box-set of films adapted from Williams plays: Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Night of the Iguana, The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone, Baby Doll (which is actually an original Williams screenplay), Sweet Bird of Youth (a slightly neutered version of one of my favorite plays), and two DVDs devoted to A Streetcar Named Desire, which figured further down on this list. Theologically, today is May 19, which was not Katharine Hepburn's birthday, but it was the day she often cited as her birthday—May 19, 1909, rather than May, 12, 1907—in order to shave two years off of her age.

Suddenly, Last Summer features one of Hepburn's best and steeliest performances, and certainly her most gleamingly villainous. She literally enters the movie from a great height, soaring down in a rococo elevator, spouting redolent mythologies about herself and her dead son Sebastian—the ghostly, depraved Rosebud of this particular mystery. Now get ready for this plot: Hepburn's fabulously venal Violet Venable has called one Dr. Cukrowicz (Montgomery Clift) to her eerie palace in order to persuade him to lobotomize her niece Catharine (Elizabeth Taylor), whose first-hand account of Sebastian's outlandish death has landed her straight in the booby-hatch. Catharine's story is quite a whopper, pivoting on details like pedophilia, prostitution, homosexuality, and cannibalism: it would seem that Sebastian has been gobbled by a ravenous band of young Spanish street-hustlers. Being a Williams play, this Guignol tale is, of course, a benchmark of truth. Instead, it is high society and social institutions that are unmasked as killing lies: the deceptive, carnivorous will of old-money aristocracy, embodied by Hepburn's Violet and her garden of Venus flytraps, and the buyable ethics of modern corporate medicine, represented by the endowment-hungry trustees of Monty's hospital. Granted, political content is not the first thing one might look for in Gore Vidal's mad adaptation of Williams' play, itself as purple as a low-hanging cluster of grapes. The script needlessly and distractingly pads the sensational atmosphere with predictably googly-eyed sanatorium scenes. Clift, recklessly sunk into this maelstrom of insanity, crosses his arms and darts his pupils in several scenes as though he is barely, quietly holding himself together, while his famous pal Liz Taylor sallies forth with her lurid monologues without quite adding much to them. Still, Suddenly, Last Summer fascinates almost as much as it entertains, which is tremendously. Director Mankiewicz, having helmed some of the greatest Hollywood movies about dubious, contested tales (All About Eve, A Letter to Three Wives), cleverly whets our appetite for the naked, bleeding truth, even as his direction of the actors and his gamely bold production design make clear that he is most interested in the nervy climate of repression and panic that surrounds the breech-birth of a horrible family secret. When Mercedes McCambridge, the most proudly perverse of 1950s character actresses, shows up as a fluttering flibbertigibbet, the movie's fruity compote gets even more aromatic and flavorful. It simmers enticingly, and sometimes, gloriously, it boils right over.

In short, if it's camp you want, it's camp you'll get, as when Monty gives a blond male nurse a visible once-over, or when Liz starts struggling with a locked door in the wrong place at the wrong time, triply imprisoned by an iron-barred causeway, an expressionist camera angle, and a triangulated bra. The movie makes it so easy for conservative culture vultures to tear away at it, like the flesh-eating birds that feast on baby sea turtles in one of Hepburn's centerpiece monologues. Tear they did: Suddenly, Last Summer sparked a bonfire of disgusted protest in 1959, but the movie, even more than the play, belongs in that beastly menagerie with Faulkner's Sanctuary, Pasolini's Salò, and Mary Harron's film of American Psycho, aggressively vulgar works in which a hard, proud skeleton of social critique and complex implication is nonetheless palpable, even to viewers as green as I was at age 15, when I first saw the movie. Floating between its scenes of family terrorism, pulsing beneath the shiny enamel of Williams' lyrical prose ("Most people's lives—what are they but long trails of debris, with nothing to clean it up but, finally, death"), triumphing over the drag-revue flourishes like Hepburn's emu-feather hat and Liz's perpetually breathy delivery ("We! pro! cured! for! him!"), there is something remarkably formidable about Suddenly, Last Summer. It makes you chuckle, sometimes against its own interests, but it also lingers like few "better" films ever do, and in that way at least, it's a better Williams film than those bashfully catered affairs that Richard Brooks whipped up out of Cat and Sweet Bird. Just you try flossing it from your mind. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Image © 1959 Columbia Pictures.

Picked Flick #76: The Lion in Winter

I am tempted to say that The Lion in Winter works better than it should. Its dual lineage in royal history and soap operatics doesn't seem like the recipe for anything but a feathered fish, remote to popular audiences and unrecognizable to more studious ones. The apoplectic performance style of Peter O'Toole whenever he's sprung from the Arabian desert seems like an odd match with Katharine Hepburn's Connecticut vowels and her dry-gin flirts with the camera. For purposes of drama, but also for those of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine themsleves, there are too many sons running about. As in Zeffirelli's Romeo and Juliet, released the same year, the sets and costumes are pretty but also too...clean. The palace is aspoil with mongrels, hens, and fugitive vegetables, but not a thing has streaked Hepburn's ivory caftan or O'Toole's clabber-colored face, still as white as empire beneath that well-tended beard. Past the edge of every frame, around every palatial corner, you can sense the playhouse audience so clearly intended by these barbs and bon mots.

The Lion in Winter shouldn't work, but then, adding up all of its giddy affronts to seriousness and proper concert, the movie shouldn't do anything but work, and that's exactly my experience of the movie: it works and keeps on working, so succulent that it's no longer absurd, pumping so much pure voltage into its bickery version of history made at night that there's no means of resisting, and no reason to. The Lion in Winter practically reels with its own sense of fun, even as John Barry's timpani and trumpets keep fastening the movie to some form of gravitas, even as Douglas Slocombe's photography, much more interesting than I remembered, casts a fine, sooty dust over these transparently modern personalities. James Goldman's adaptation of his own play is a robust and roustabout chronicle, Holinshed in the age of Peyton Place. Better, having devised this unique blend of annal and sitcom, dotted here and there with unsheathed daggers, he keeps it going ingeniously. I've never been much sold on the work of his more famous brothers. Oldest brother Bo farmed thin conceits in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and Melvin and Howard, winning Oscars for both that were more rightly due the directors who placed so much trust in them. Superstar screenwriter and raconteur William, well-seasoned with experience but annoyingly arch all the same, has even more overrated titles to his credit, like the thin wisp of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and the preening whimsy of The Princess Bride. The Lion in Winter has what none of these films have—though, giving credit where it's due, William's ace distillation of All the President's Men has it, too: a braced and solid structure, a gallery of finely etched characters, a huckster's gift for streamlining and popularizing the arcane, a beating heart of popcorn appeal that still allows the film to go about its business, aggressively selling its strengths but never just shilling them.

Certainly I've never liked O'Toole nearly so much in his other films as I do here. His Henry is livelier as well as more serious than his counterpart performance in Becket, though it helps that Anthony Harvey is a much better judge of camera distance and emotional beats than Becket's Peter Glenville was. Katharine Hepburn bursts forth with by far the best performance of her life after Spence. The standard meme in biographies, including her own, is that she tore into the role with the admittedly displaced energy of massive grief, but it's worth noting that it's as sexy a turn as the one in The Philadelphia Story. Hepburn writhes on her bed, tinders an incestuous spark in the eyes of all her boys, contemplates her own image in a mirror shaped like a dragon's tear, and lures a leading man 25 years her junior into a vivacious, erotic battle of wills that goes off like a charm. Maybe she was just turned on by all those great lines she gets to recite and react to. "She smiled to excess but she chewed with real distinction," Eleanor offers in perfect dismissal of a rival who, let's not forget, is already long dead.

"I marvel at you after all these years," mutters her nonplussed husband, "still like a democratic drawbridge going down for everybody."

Shooting back at Henry's autumnal dreams of having more and different children, Eleanor asks, "What kind of spindly, rickety, milky, wizened, dim-eyed, gammy-handed, limpy line of things will you beget? And when you die, which is regrettable but necessary, what will happen to fair Alais and her pruny prince?" Give Katharine Hepburn that many consonants to bite down on, sit back, and luxuriate. That Eleanor of Aquitaine can hardly be entertained to have said any such thing hardly matters; that Pauline Kael spat vituperatively on the whole ship matters just as little. A slim skiff, maybe. Its last act is utterly at sixes and sevens, and the actual finale slips right off the screen. But it's a proud pageant up to that point, punchy and uproarious, a royal flag unfurled for the cause of popular delight. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Picked Flick #92: Alice Adams

Among Katharine Hepburn's most famous and auspicious screen collaborators—including, in my own order of preference, George Cukor, Cary Grant, and Spencer Tracy—director George Stevens is the least fêted member, but his achievements with Hepburn should not be undervalued. Once an established star, she never looked more radiant than she did in 1942's Woman of the Year, where Stevens' generous showcasing of her look and her performance beautifully counteracts the script's rather mean imbalance against her. (Well, maybe until that cooking scene, anyway.) Earlier than that, Stevens gamely ushered her through a spritely and underseen J.M. Barrie adaptation called Quality Street (1937), where Hepburn's comic dual-performance paves the way as none of her previous roles had done for the screwball delights of Howard Hawks' Bringing Up Baby (1938) and the aristocratic wit of Cukor's The Philadelphia Story (1940). But moving back still earlier, it's not clear that any of Hepburn's once and future heights would have been reached without the pretext of her first truly great performance in Alice Adams, which finds her amidst a glorious, once-in-a-lifetime metamorphosis from the queer, coltish ingénue of 1933 (Little Women, Morning Glory, Christopher Strong) into the rounded sophistication of her later work, somehow softer and more confident all at the same time. Alice Adams is the moment where Hepburn becomes a star, and also the moment where she becomes truly lovable.

Adapted from a novel by Booth Tarkington—the writer, too, of The Magnificent Ambersons—Alice Adams tells the story of a lower-middle-class girl, not far past her schooling years, who positively quivers with longing to join the coterie of her more fashionable peers and to find the kind of domestic bliss that presumably once united her parents (the excellent Fred Stone and Ann Shoemaker), whose tacit bond of affection is now sorely tested by illness, monetary need, and other trials of late middle-age. Alice Adams is the kind of girl who would adore Pride and Prejudice, even though in real life she might well have settled for Mr. Collins. One of the major ambitions of the screenplay and, I'm guessing, the novel is to keep Alice so dotingly loyal to her family even as she dreams of something bigger or other than what they have, which often compels a shame of her circumstances and a coy dishonesty about who she is and who they are. That the emblematically patrician Hepburn is so convincing within both this cast and this caste is a complete revelation, even more so in hindsight than it must have been in 1935, but her empathetic connection to this girl's gossamer aspirations couldn't be clearer. Her body and voice are much more relaxed than we're used to seeing and hearing them, and even though she takes center stage in a way she wouldn't truly do again until David Lean's Summertime in 1955, she holds the movie, as she does the character, with graceful, unpugnacious care, as though cupping her hand around the spores of a dandelion, keeping them from blowing away.

Stevens, so intuitive and judicious in realizing his best films, cuts to Hepburn at unexpected moments, lingering on her face longer than other directors would—possibly because, as in Woman of the Year, he's found the right angles and lighting concepts to make Hepburn's proudly intellectual face stay remarkably open and emotive. But more than that, his gift falls in knowing when to cut to Alice, when to understand the debates and dramatic actions surrounding her as essentially her story, rather than that of the bumptious family unit or the town at large. The two centerpiece sequences of the movie, when the guileless and ill-dressed but optimistic Alice takes her Cagneyish brother Walter to a local-society ball, and later when suitor Fred MacMurray arrives chez Adams for an uncomfortably hot and subtly humiliating evening of dinner and conversation, rank among the greatest passages of narrative filmmaking in the American cinema of that decade. The style is elegant and holistic, even as it magically embraces such different elements—MacMurray's somewhat lumpen appeal, the adroit conveyance of stifling temperature, the wholly unexpected elegance of Walter's dancing, a tart cameo from Hattie McDaniel, a romantic proclivity for fades and dissolves on Alice when her spirits flag, and the almost neo-realist shot where she kicks her wilting, homemade bouquet of hand-picked violets under a chair. There is also, of course, the justly famous and encapsulating shot of Hepburn weeping in her bedroom after the ball, filmed through the rivulets of rain running down her window. Moment by moment by moment, Alice Adams reverberates with humble but sure-handed technique and a credible reverence for modesty as a virtue. The last line of the movie is "Gee whiz!", and as dramatically precipitous as it is—the one major miscalculation in the script, I think—the sentiment is fully shared by the audience. (Click here for the full list of Nick's Picked Flicks.)

Katharine Hepburn's Brownies

My favorite actress of all time, Katharine Hepburn, would have turned 98 today if she hadn't died in the summer of 2003, at the impressive age of 96. I caught onto Hepburn's career in my very early teens, right around the time her magnificent, funny, and slightly cantankerous memoir was published. I have admired her forever and seen almost all of her movies, barring the soft made-for-TV stuff she started taking in the 80s and 90s. The still above is from her greatest dramatic performance, as Mary Tyrone in Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey into Night, available on DVD for ridiculously low prices. For your initial Hepburn primer, I'd also include her terrific 1938 double-header of Holiday and Bringing Up Baby, her slithery Southern gothic in Suddenly, Last Summer, her heartbreaking misfit in Alice Adams, and her witty but biting Eleanor of Aquitaine in The Lion in Winter. If you're hooked by then, watch her in absolutely everything else, even shit like Rooster Cogburn. If you're not hooked, I can't help you.

Unless I can, with her delicious brownie recipe. I wasn't kidding about having been obsessed with her. When other 14-year-olds on the army base at Hanau, Germany, were playing soccer or whatever, I was rocking the microfiche in the public library, excavating this recipe from some back issue of Ladies Home Journal. These brownies are scary delicious, because there's proportionally so little flour that they are gooier and feel more chocolatey than your average morsel. So, in her own words (and really, what better way to celebrate her birthday?)...

2 squares unsweetened chocolate
¼ lb. sweet butter (i.e., one stick)
1 C. sugar
2 eggs
½ tsp. vanilla
¼ C flour
¼ tsp. salt
1 C. chopped walnuts

First, melt chocolate and butter in heavy saucepan. Remove from heat and stir in sugar. Add eggs along with vanilla and beat like mad. Stir in flour, salt, and the chopped walnuts—not smashed up, you know, just chopped up into fairly good-sized pieces.

Now mix all that up. Then you butter a square tin (8 x 8 in.) and dump the whole thing quickly into the pan. Stuff this pan into a preheated 325°F oven for 40 minutes. After that, take out the pan and let it cool for a while. THen cut into 1½ x 1 squares and dive right in.

Photo © 1962 Republic Entertainment, Inc.