|
|
| ALICE ADAMS (1935) |
An RKO Radio Picture
B&W, 99 minutes
|
|
|
|
CAST
Alice Adams: Katharine Hepburn
Arthur Russell: Fred MacMurray
Mr. Adams: Fred Stone
Mildred Palmer: Evelyn Venable
Walter Adams: Frank Albertson
Mrs. Adams: Ann Shoemaker
Mr. Lamb: Charles Grapewin
Frank Dowling: Grady Sutton
Mrs. Palmer: Hedda Hopper
Mr. Palmer: Jonathan Hale
Henrietta Lamb: Janet McLeod
Mrs. Dowling: Virginia Howell
Mrs. Dresser: Zeffie Tilbury
Ella Dowling: Ella McKenzie
Malena: Hattie McDaniel
|
 |
CREDITS
Director: George Stevens
Producer: Pandro S. Berman
Scenarists: Dorothy Yost, Mortimer Offner
Based on the novel by: Booth Tarkington
Adaptation: Jane Murfin
Photographer: Robert De Grasse
Art Director: Van Nest Polglase
Editor: Jane Loring
Sound Recorder: Denzil A. Cutler
Musical Score: Max Steiner
Costumer: Walter Plunkett
Makeup Artist: Mel Burns
Assistant Director: Edward Killy
Song: "I Can't Waltz Alone" by Max Steiner, Dorothy Fields
|
|
|
|
|
SYNOPSIS
Young Alice Adams is ambitious for social recognition, but is merely tolerated by her wealthier girl friends. She longs to be a part of their world and to have them like her. Soon, at a party, she meets visiting Arthur Russell, who takes an interest in her and asks if he may call. Alice's big night comes when Arthur arrives for dinner.
|
|
|
|
|
|
CRITIQUES
"From the beginning it was obvious that Miss Hepburn had conceived the part as a whole; that she was going to allow Alice to tell her story in her own way, and that she was not going to encompass poor Alice in a theatrical design of her own making. The result is that Miss Hepburn shows that there is a good deal more in Alice than mere vanity and man-hunting. Because of her insight into the part and the pathos she gives it it might appear to the superficial that Miss Hepburn has exaggerated the posings; what she really has done is to over-act as Alice over-acted every time she met a man or walked into a room."
- The Times (London), 1935
"Katharine Hepburn's Alice is as striking and sensitive a performance as any she has given...her performance holds that same quality of unexpected excitement which distinguished her first screen appearance in A Bill of Divorcement."
- Andre Sennwald, The New York Times, 1935
"Katharine Hepburn, with her young, beautiful angularity and her faintly absurd Bryn Mawr accent, is superbly cast as Booth Tarkington's eager, desperate, small-town social climber. Her Alice is one of the few authentic American movie heroines. George Stevens directed with such a fine sense of detail and milieu that the small-town nagging-family atmosphere is nerve-rackingly accurate and funny. Alice is cursed with a pushing mother (Ann Shoemaker), an infantile father (Fred Stone), and a vulgar brother (Frank Albertson). The picture is cursed only by a fake happy ending: Alice gets what the movie companies considered a proper Prince Charming for her - Fred MacMurray, as a wealthy young man. Even with this flaw, it's a classic, and Hepburn gives one of her two or three finest performances - rivalled, perhaps, only by her work in Little Women and Long Day's Journey Into Night."
- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
"The scene of social humiliation is peculiarly American in that it reflects the tensions created by social mobility, but no actress ever suffered more beautifully through this trauma than Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams. So beautifully and with so much voluptuous masochism. And Stevens's enormous and sustained close-ups gave Hepburn's fine-boned beauty an expressive intensity such as audiences had never experienced before. It was almost too much of a good thing. Audiences would not long sit still for such camera adulation, any more than they had sat still indefinitely for Sternberg's lens-love-making with Marlene Dietrich in the early thirties."
- Andrew Sarris
"Hepburn is magnificent as the small-town social climber, although the script so softens Booth Tarkington's novel that she emerges throughout as a Persil-white heroine tarnished only by a little adolescent foolishness. With Tarkington's acidly observed social satire on Midwestern mores carefully ironed out by the Hollywood machine, little remains beyond a glowingly nostalgic slice of Americana. But Stevens fills the gap with some brilliant set pieces, including the exemplary scene-setting of the opening sequence, the society ball at which Hepburn is reduced to endless subterfuge to mask her gauche unease, and the ghastly dinner party at which all her social pretensions finally collapse under pressure from a heatwave."
- Tom Milne, Time Out
|
|
|
|
|
|
COMMENTARY TRACK
"That was quite different for her. It was far away from the parts she had been doing to be so purposely romantic and rather simple and sentimental. By nature she was adverse to it, but she fell in with it and loved doing it. She liked the girl that she became when she sat in the swing, and we explored the fact that what she was really becoming in the story was what Kate was herself. At that time she particularly liked to appear very sophisticated, yet she had a very generous heart. She found the whole thing fascinating."
- George Stevens, interview with James Silke, 1964
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
Links are provided for information only, and are not endorsements. Please ensure that your player is compatible with the region or standard before purchase.
Region 1:
Region 2:
NTSC Standard:
|
|
|
|
|
|
Poster
|
Lobby card
|
Katharine Hepburn
|
Katharine Hepburn, Frank Albertson
|
Katharine Hepburn, Grady Sutton
|
On the set: Katharine Hepburn, George Stevens (glasses)
|
|
|
