Primo amore

I am NOT a fan of Katharine Hepburn....but I really like her in this film. I don't think she ever looked cuter and was more appealing. One often forgets the fresh face and beauty she had when she was young.

This film starts off wonderfully for 20 minutes, then bogs down a bit for an hour and then rallies brilliantly in the last 20 minutes. That last part is so good that made the film not only worthwhile to view but one to keep and watch every few years.

It bogs down when Hepburn starts her deceiving scheme and nervously yaks and yaks and yaks trying to impress her boyfriend (Fred MacMurray). The deceit involves her trying to hide her social status, something that must have meant a lot more back in the early '30s than it does today.

Critics comment about how the dinner scene is a "classic" and the highlight of the film, but I didn't think it was all that great, although Hattie McDaniel is funny. It's what happened afterward that made it a memorable film to me.

Although Hepburn and Fred MacMurray are the stars of this romance-comedy, Fred Stone almost steals the show. Playing Hepburn's dad in the film, he was both hilarious at times and very sad....and always interesting. He gives an unbelievably powerful speech to his boss near the end of this film.

Another plus for "Alice Adams" is the direction. This is early George Stevens, but just about any film that man directed is top-notch, including this one.

Without giving away what happens in the story, the film does present a nice message of forgiveness and reconciliation and sports one of the stronger feel-good endings I've ever seen on film. Hepburn's last words in the movie are "Gee Whiz!!" That bygone innocent reaction to MacMurray's comment that he loved her says a lot about how movies and times have changed.

When I first watched this film, despite the fact that George Steven's excellent direction makes a rather mundane plot into a very involving film, I was a bit thrown off by the actor who plays Katherine Hepburn's ailing father. About midway through the film I thought: "this guy's not much of an actor...".

However, by the time the film was over, I was completely captivated by the man, mostly due to his big confrontation scene with his boss near the end--in fact, I think I re-played that scene five times to really appreciate it's emotional power. And it is because of Mr. Fred Stone's performance in that scene that "Alice Adams" remains one of my very favorite films.

And who was the man? Well, anyone viewing "Alice Adams" is watching a rare document of American theatrical history. Fred Stone was born in 1873, actually traveled west with his family in a covered wagon, became a circus performer, acrobat, dancer, clown and expert "eccentric dancer." He knew Will Rogers and Annie Oakley, and became a MAJOR musical theater star in the early 20th-century. His most famous role was that of the ORIGINAL SCARECROW in the very first (1902) stage version of the WIZARD of OZ. As a young man Ray Bolger saw the production in Boston, and began to pursue his own "eccentric dancing" career, becoming immortalized himself as the Scarecrow in the 1939 MGM film.

In "Alice Adams", Fred Stone gives a remarkably sympathetic and honest performance, a simple, rather shy and utterly unpretentious Everyman, who, though convalescing from some undisclosed illness, must constantly endure the brow-beatings and guilt trips laid upon him by his nagging wife. By the end of the film, having become entangled in a business venture for which he seems totally unqualified and outraged by his son's thievery, he confronts his own boss in his living room for his big emotional scene. I remember reading in Mr. Stone's autobiography that George Stevens and Katherine Hepburn were so impressed by his performance in this scene that they actually EXPANDED his part in it to give him more screen time.

After Katherine Hepburn steps in to smooth things over with the boss, she has a final tender scene with Mr. Stone, one of those achingly beautiful scenes (with a lovely background score) that brings tears to the eye because of its sincerity and simplicity. You won't find anything like it in any film of the last 40 years--many imitations, yes---but not the REAL thing.

Oh yes, there's Katherine Hepburn too, in a role that requires her to act flighty and charming in an annoyingly overwrought way---a little of it goes a VERY long way. Still, she's lovely. Other stand-outs include Alice's smart-aleck brother, played by Frank Albertson, an appealing light comedy/musical theater guy BEST KNOWN for 2 roles: as Sam "hee-haw" Wainwright in "It's a Wonderful Life" and as the lecherous businessman who gives Janet Leigh the $40,000 in the second scene of "Psycho" (he really had aged a lot by 1959). Also, Charley Grapewin, best-known as Uncle Henry in the 1939 "Wizard of OZ" has a chance to shine as Mr. Stone's slightly cantankerous but generous and warm-hearted boss, Mr. Lamb.

"Alice Adams" is not for everyone; it's a low-key, genteel film about the problems of small-town people who are moving up in the social world and the one family that gets left behind. But thanks to George Steven's sensitive and compelling direction, the film transcends it very earthbound plot and becomes, at least for some of us, a very involving cinematic treasure.

I suppose that no one ever gave Alice Adams the sage advice that when one goes on a date with somebody, you should just "be yourself." But in the 1935 film "Alice Adams," Katharine Hepburn's title character is too busy trying to hide her humble background and put on hoity-toity airs, whenever she goes out shopping, to a party and especially when being courted, to EVER really be herself, and this desire to climb that social ladder only leads to embarrassing predicaments. This is actually a very charming film, and Hepburn, 28 here, looks extremely pretty, especially when given any number of beautiful close-ups by director George Stevens. The film boasts two wonderful and heartbreaking scenes: an early sequence at a ritzy dance, where wallflower Alice hugs the sidelines while pretending to no one in particular that everything is fine, and a late scene, in which the well-to-do young courter who has taken a fancy to her (nicely played by Fred MacMurray) suffers through a formal dinner with Alice's family in the middle of a heat wave. Hattie McDaniel (listed here as "McDaniels") almost steals this dinner scene as a slovenly, gum-chewing maid. Alice, despite her tendency to put on airs, is at heart a sweet girl (we see that in her relationships with her parents and brother), and the viewer is grateful that a young man is able to see beyond her B.S. and discern her finer qualities. But will upper-class Fred accept Alice, once he learns of her background? That, my IMDb'er friend, I urge you to find out for yourself...

Showing her versatility Katharine Hepburn gets her best part since her Oscar winning Morning Glory in the title role of Alice Adams. Alice and Eva Lovelace are worlds apart. Eva leaves her small town in search of fame and fortune in the theater. But poor Alice just wants to compete with the rest of the girls in her midwest Indiana small town that Booth Tarkington wrote about and land a real Prince Charming of a fellow.

The Prince shows up at a dance she goes to in the person of Fred MacMurray. She's taken with him, but she's ashamed of her family's rather humble living condition. When MacMurray does come calling they have a family dinner that turns into a real disaster.

Kate got one of her Oscar nominations for her role and MacMurray also gets one of his best early film parts as well. Kate's family is also nicely cast with Ann Shoemaker, Frank Albertson, and especially Fred Stone filling out the roles of mother, brother, and father. I do kind of feel sorry for Stone, he's really put upon by his family. In today's world Ann Shoemaker would have gone out and gotten a second job for another income, back then that would have been unthinkable.

Alice Adams is a nice nostalgic trip by Booth Tarkington into the lives and mores of small town Indiana. This film was also George Stevens's first major film and he'd work with Kate again in Woman of the Year.

I had heard of the famous Tarkington novel (but not read it) and had known that Katherine Hepburn won the Best Actress Oscar for this. So, I rented it.

It's just so moving. What I think some of the negative reviewers forget is just how much a girl's prospects in a small town in the 1920s are determined by whom she marries. For the intelligent, lively, vibrant, charming, warm-hearted Alice Adams - with a pitifully weak (but very sympathetic) and rather poor father, Alice's chance to "make anything" of her life is determined socially.

My heart ached with the snubs Alice receives - the routine unthinking cuts she receives at the hands of those from "better" families. Wearing a two year old dress with a corsage of violets illegally picked from the park, her loutish brother in his old beaten-up borrowed car as her date, she tries SO HARD to fit in - and doesn't because no one will let her. It's the most opaque of glass ceilings.

If you've ever felt (at a job, a party, a family gathering) that there was nothing you could do - no matter how hard you tried - to fit in - yet it was important that you did, you'll feel so much for this charming girl.

I do agree with others that the Arthur Russell part is underwritten.

But the movie boring? Not on your life. The painful moments are more difficult to watch than most war movies in which the protagonist is killed - because it is so well-done -

-- the pains of humiliation borne within, the disability one cannot hide, the old dress, the rude and outrageous relation, the thwarted eagerness - these are far more likely to be the painful moments in one's life (that one does not wish to remember) than any actual bullet wounds.

I love how the movie does not show a saintly Alice - she would love to snub others (e.g., the chubby boy at the dance), would love to parade before others in finery. yet her warmth toward her family - her essential sweetness, her strong frustrated yearning - are completely captivating.

We love this girl - and because of that, we love the movie.