I have probably too many favourite actors, actresses, and directors to be considered truly discriminating, but there are normally one or more films amongst their output that I can not bring myself to like, regardless how hard I try. For example, John Ford's "Gideon's Day" is the exception that proves the rule in his case (with "Mogambo" running a close second). However, with Katharine Hepburn, I can not think of a single studio film which does not wow me; even most of her later television movies are pretty terrific. And I would include those movies that she made in the late '30s which got her labeled "box office poison" before her comeback with "The Philadelphia Story".
This film was made just before that darkish period in her career and is now an overlooked classic, although at the time it was Oscar-nominated for best picture and best actress (neither of which it won). The young Hepburn is positively radiant as the small-town would-be social-climber who is looked down upon by the local snobs as being from too poor a family to matter. The sight of her attending a dance in her two-year old frock with a handful of dying violets which she purloined from the local park is heartbreaking. She so wants to be popular and tries every ploy to be noticed by anyone but the fat mother's boy who is her only dance partner. But she catches the eye of visiting rich boy Fred MacMurray, then in the heart-throb phase of his very long career -- before becoming a noir anti-hero mid-career and a Disney paterfamilias when older. He sees the sweetness and beauty behind her pretensions and even a disastrous dinner party with her family on the hottest night of the year, with its stodgy menu and comic laid-back hired help (Hattie McDaniel in a magical turn), does not turn him off, nor do the tongue-wagging rumours about her father and ne'er-do-well brother. It's a lovely bit of Americana from a Booth Tarkington novel and really vintage Hepburn.
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