Alice Adams

The thing that struck me about is that there isn't really that much here except Katharine Hepburn brilliant performance added by Fred Stone as her father on support for a strong finish. A very hollow experience. Take away Hepburn and what you got? An very empty movie. So all about Hepburn. Reminds a lot of her persona in Morning Glory (1933) babbling on about herself to exhausting and creepy lengths. Hepburn did shine through-out without always having something to deliver.

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

All the points are for an impossibly young Hepburn (Fred MacMurray is almost unregnisable for the same reason). Unlike others I found this one to be very much of its time and thus less then soso

When Hepburn puts on her aristocratic air, it's an iconic moment that people that have never seen the film will recognize. Her performance makes the film memorable, but the plot's exploration of class and wealth left me thinking. Watch for the line, "Did she break any of our things?" and see how it hits you.

Viewed December 6, 2020.

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 naggingfamily atmosphere is nerve-rackingly accurate and funny. The picture is cursed only by a fake happy ending

For its kind, you can hardly make a better movie than this. The dinner sequence is a classic on its own, mixing broad comedy and contemplative sadness, fiercely driven by Mrs. Hepburn at her best.

This is all Hepburn, and she carries the film well. She has her usual energy, with a bit of vulnerability which she frames well. There's a lot of good subtext about success and money and social norms, but the film never quite explores it enough, sticking too closely to the not so great narrative. It drags a little, particularly the dinner scene towards the end feels unnecessarily long, but otherwise it's an enjoyable turn.

Hepburn's performance as the unlikeable but yearning Alice is still so good as to take your breath away. Alice Adams is Midwest America, from a Booth Tarkington novel. Alice wants it all, and she gets little except embarrassment. And there are scenes here - set pieces of mistery - in which we wince for Alice while wanting to see the shit hit her. That is rare in American cinema. Stevens directs it beautifully, but without ever reaching the despair that Welles got at in Ambersons.

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).

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.