Alice Adams Has Lost its Charm

 

 

 

 

Alice Adams (1935)

Directed by George Stevens

RKO Pictures, 99 minutes, Not-rated

★★

 

In her lifetime (1919-2001) critic Pauline Kael had the power to make or break a film. She hailed Katharine Hepburn’s lead in Alice Adams as one of her two or three greatest performances. Just goes to show you that even a known hardboiled cynic like Kael could be hopelessly sentimental and champion a film and role that were antiques even by the standards of their day.

 

It was based on a novel by Booth Tarkington that had a downbeat ending far more realistic than the sugary ending RKO forced director George Stevens to substitute. Alice (Hepburn) is a working-class daughter who dreams above her station. Her father, Virgil, (Fred Stone) is a near invalid who has long been on medical leave from Mr. Lamb’s drugstore, though he magnanimously keeps Virgil on payroll. Alice’s mother (Ann Shoemaker) is a scoldwife who thinks Virgil is lazy and that Lamb cheated her family out of a fortune for a glue formula. She encourages Alice’s magazine-induced fantasies, though Alice finds herself humiliated every time she tries to fit in with a crowd whose money and lifestyle the Adams’s can’t begin to duplicate. To make matters worse, her brother Walter (Frank Albertson) is a classic n’er-do-well who tries to rise via gambling. At a fancy ball hosted by the Palmers, local elites, Alice motor mouths her way into the affections of dashing Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray). He’s loaded, but he’s also rather bored with society and Mildred Palmer’s relentless efforts to ensnare him as a love match for one of her daughters.

 

The more Arthur sits with Alice on her front porch, the more he finds her refreshing and the more Alice ups the charade that her family also has wealth. She makes certain that Arthur never enters the home to see its modest furnishings. In essence, Alice is a Cinderella wannabe who heaps lie upon lie, though Arthur shows little interest in speaking of money. The crisis arrives when it’s time to invite Arthur and his family to dine Chez Adams. Welcome to the screwball comedy portion of the film, if you can keep it down. Alice frets over everything and tries to cover worn parts of the sofa with strategic swaths of fabric. (Walter humorously spoils that dodge.)

 

Alice also attempts to put forth an “elegant” dinner after claiming that her family eats caviar every night. Naturally, it’s one the menu, though no one in her family has the slightest idea how to eat it. She hires a fake maid (Hatie McDaniel), who has even less idea how to prepare the food. The dinner is held on the hottest day of the year, but Alice insists on a soup course, a fish course, a meat course, and bananas Foster for dessert with hot coffee. In particularly painful bits of minstrelsy, McDaniel sweats her way through the evening looking like a soggy Aunt Jemima with the manners of a barn owl. Can it get worse? Yes. Arthur quit his job and “told off” old man Lamb as his wife insisted, just in time for the revelation that the Adams family are social outcasts because Arthur stole money from Lamb to cover gambling debts.

The hopes of becoming a glue baron fail to stick because good-natured Virgil intends to sell everything to make things right. Yet, as noted, the producers forced Stevens to jettison Tarkington’s ending in which  Alice gave up her big shot dreams to go to secretarial school and become a typist. In the movie, Arthur laughs off Alice’s follies and Cinderella is back in the prince’s good graces. 

 

If all of this sounds painful and labored, that’s because it is. Hepburn often played a ditz, but I’ve never bought her as a hopeless and stupid one. Some have called Alice Adams a screwball comedy, but it’s too broad even to fit within that expansive genre. Put another way, it’s more akin to an out-of-control I Love Lucy sketch than anything resembling Bringing Up Baby or Adam’s Rib.

 

Hepburn and the film actually garnered Oscar nominations, but sometimes so-called “classic films” are rusted and irreparable Model T’s best left to molder.

 

Rob Weir