This is one of Hepburn's greatest early performances. She manages to create a social-climbing young lady who is both tragic and comic: a strange mix of perseverance and fragility, sensitivity and vanity, with a firm foundation of goodness doing its best to hide beneath the pretension. George Stevens' famously slow comic timing has never worked better than in the concluding dinner party sequence--one of the most excruciately humilating--and funniest-- comic sequences ever filmed.

Effective, if unformed performance by young Kate against a winning Fred MacMurray, but the ending seems too neat by half (I don't know the novel). It's difficult to relate to people who were so obsessed with social climbing (at either end of the ladder).

Hepburn brings to life a witty character with pitch-perfect delivery of lines in this highly enjoyable Stevens' film.