Alice Adams

Alice Adams - George Stevens directed a young Katherine Hepburn in this film made in 1935. Adapting a Booth Tarkington novel, Stevens creates a picture that is almost too dark and grim to watch. There is a happen ending tacked onto the picture but it doesn’t carry the slightest ounce of conviction. Hepburn plays the title character, a witty and pretentious young woman with aspirations of escaping her middle class family. She attends balls at the homes of wealthy people, but doesn’t know how to behave with the proper aplomb and indifference in their presence. She is always trying too hard, too desperately, to be liked. Stevens signals her social status in the first shot – on Main Street, we see an African-American woman with two nattily dressed children emerging from a Five and Dime; Hepburn follows them out onto the street and we immediately understand that Alice Adams is poor and has to shop for necessities at the same store frequented by – what the film calls – “colored people.” (This theme is reiterated in the film on several occasions – Adams brother is gambler who shoots craps with Black buddies; the Black bandleader calls him by name. Later, at a disastrous dinner, Alice attempts to put on airs by hiring a “colored servant” to cater the dinner – the servant is played by Hattie McDaniel whose obvious contempt for the proceedings is central to the scene.) Alice’s father, whom she clearly adores, is ill and unable to earn a wage. Alice and her mother bully the poor fellow into starting a glue factory using a formula arguably proprietary to the father’s employer. This leads to a catastrophe which threatens to destroy the family. The picture demonstrates the way in which family members collude in one another’s unhappiness. The picture also gives the lie to the notion that small-town life in America is egalitarian and without class conflict. Although Stevens saves Hepburn’s character, and her hapless family, from complete misery and failure, it’s the scenes of dismay, disappointment, the lingering perception that the father suffers that he’s a failure and has deprived his family of the life that they should have enjoyed, that stick in the viewer’s memory. Hepburn’s panicked, vain, unhappiness is hard to watch; you cringe as she pretends to fit in with others and, as she hopelessly, seeks acceptance in a social set that despises her. She faces a truth that is very hard to bear – no matter how brilliant, witty, and beautiful you are, your destiny is controlled by your social standing in the small community in which you are trapped. Her final “gee whiz” – although intended as happy ending – has the muted, sorrowful inflection of a final sigh of defeat.