George Stevens (1935)

Booth Tarkington’s novel Alice Adams isn’t an easy read, for two reasons.  First, it tells a story which, although full of clever, entertaining episodes, is an unhappy one:  set in a smallish town in the American Midwest shortly after the end of the Great War, Alice Adams explores the perils of punching above one’s financial and social weight – and confirms that doing so is counterproductive.  Second, the paternalism and racism – even though neither may have raised eyebrows when the book was first published (and won the Pulitzer Prize) in 1921 – stick in your craw.   As Tarkington presents it, the young heroine Alice’s father, Virgil, who has spent his working life as a clerk in the offices of the local magnate J A Lamb, is worse than misguided when he gives in to the urgings of his anxious, disappointed wife to go it alone in business:  in doing so, Virgil betrays the trust of a benevolent employer – who eventually steps in to save the Adams’s bacon.

The racism is much more offensive.  The white principals – Virgil Adams and his wife, Alice and her brother Walter, her wealthy beau Arthur Russell, and Mr Lamb – are all penetrating and, to a greater or lesser degree, sympathetic characterisations:  Tarkington’s eye and ear for telling details of behaviour and speech are very acute.  The non-white characters, all of them minor, are mostly disreputable – sometimes but not always comically so.   Walter Adams consorts with the members of a band – ‘Jazz Louie and his half-breed bunch’ – at a posh party and plays cards with the black lackeys there.  At first, this seems meant to suggest wilful but humorous eccentricity on Walter’s part.  It turns out to be the slippery slope to more serious and distressing bad behaviour.   When Virgil Adams launches his ill-fated glue factory, he’s plagued by guilt at appropriating the glue recipe on which Mr Lamb had him and another man work, many years ago, but which technically belongs to Lamb.  Virgil’s guilt is expressed in the smell of the glue that, when he returns home in the evening, he’s convinced is sticking to him.  Not so the blacks who live near the glue works and whom Booth Tarkington sees as fortunately simple-minded:

‘The terrible smells came out of the sheds and went writhing like snakes all through that quarter of the town.  A smiling man, strolling and breathing the air with satisfaction, would turn a corner and smile no more, but hurry on.  However, coloured people had almost all the dwellings of this old section to themselves; and although even they were troubled, there was recompense for them.  Being philosophic about what appeared to them as in the order of nature, they sought neither escape nor redress, and soon learned to bear what the wind brought them.   They even made use of it to enrich those figures of speech with which the native impulses of coloured people decorate their communications:  they flavoured metaphor, simile, and invective with it; and thus may be said to have enjoyed it.  But the man who produced it took a hot bath as soon as he reached his home the evening of that first day when his manufacturing began.  Then he put on fresh clothes; but after dinner he seemed to be haunted, and asked his wife if she “noticed anything”.’

George Stevens’s film of Alice Adams is, in almost all respects, more enjoyable than the novel on which it’s based.  You can take issue with the much happier ending as a piece of Hollywood wishful (and commercial) thinking but the screenplay by Dorothy Yost, Mortimer Offner and Jane Murfin is mostly admirable and faithful to Tarkington.  The background to Virgil’s glue-manufacturing venture is sensibly pared down although this makes for a too abrupt transition to a sequence in which he and his wife visit the newly-acquired site.  There is no mention of Arthur Russell’s war service (not that there’s much in the book).  While Alice’s conversations with Arthur, and her social-climbing inventions, are more complicated in the novel, the film is nevertheless a sustained illustration of the class and money imperatives that govern romantic pairings in the time and place in which the story is set.  This is thanks chiefly to Stevens’s skilful direction and Katharine Hepburn’s portrait of Alice.

That this is one of Hepburn’s finest performances may seem an irony:  an actress whose patrician hauteur and cut-glass vowels have got on the nerves of generations of filmgoers triumphs as a young woman trying desperately, resourcefully but sometimes ludicrously to disguise her family’s lack of means and standing.  But the Hepburn persona has in common with Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams a high-strung vibrancy and a passionate, ingenious determination; and Hepburn herself said that she felt a kinship with Alice because she knew what it was like to be seen as socially different:

‘It reminded me of the way small-minded people treated my mother, shunning her and us children, not because they thought we weren’t good enough, but because they thought we thought that we were too good.  Well, maybe we did, now that I look back[1].’

It’s possible of course that a British audience misses the social nuances in the voices in Alice Adams but Hepburn’s Alice is wonderfully effective and affecting.  The contrasts between her excessively upbeat, smiling tension – her usual manner – and her mood in crucial conversations tête à tête with Arthur Russell are brilliant.  In the latter, Alice seems to relax, as if in the knowledge that her pretence will be eventually fruitless, and Hepburn’s dazzling extroversion is correspondingly replaced in these sequences by a more effortless magnetism – instead of imposing herself, she lets the camera come to her.  Katharine Hepburn’s exuberance powerfully expresses the force of Alice’s ambitions and of her joie de vivre and makes the suppression of both truly saddening.

George Stevens achieves a real traction between social comedy and increasingly wrenching drama.  Alice takes great care to ensure that, when Arthur Russell visits her on summer evenings, they sit on the porch so that he never sees inside the Adams’s shabby home.  (Hepburn always makes you feel that while Alice is ashamed of the furniture and decoration of the house, she wants to protect her parents from being looked down upon.)  The disastrous supper for Arthur that Mrs Adams insists upon is the film’s high point:  he finally sets foot inside the house for a heavyweight dinner, served on the hottest night the town’s known in years, and for a startling exposé of family tensions and gaucherie.  This classic episode is, on screen, as funny as it is harrowing.  (In the book, the dinner is predominantly gruesome.)  The dance at which Alice first meets Arthur (and which follows the novel very closely) is beautifully observed by Stevens.  It’s also remarkably extended:  the director never hurries things – he creates a subtler kind of momentum.

Because Hepburn is so good, there’s a risk of overlooking the quality of the supporting actors.  Fred MacMurray was rarely up to much but he does well enough as Arthur Russell, particularly in capturing his subdued discomfort during the dinner party.   Fred Stone is memorable as Virgil Adams.  (I use the word advisedly:  this was the second time I’d seen Alice Adams after an interval of approaching ten years.  Stone was very familiar and I don’t think I know any of the other eighteen films that appear in his IMDB entry.)  He achieves a perfect balance between humour and pathos.  He conveys eloquently Virgil Adams’s frustration and irritability; his reception of, and attempts to eat, a caviar sandwich – an appetiser to the many courses to follow – are exquisite.  Anne Shoemaker is excellent, and touching, as Virgil’s worrywart wife and Frank Albertson’s playing of Walter Adams is well judged:  the polar opposite of his sister in his reaction to the family’s lack of funds, Walter is no less oppressed by it than Alice is.  Charles Grapewin is Mr Lamb, Evelyn Venable Alice’s ‘friend’ Millie Palmer, and Hedda Hopper Millie’s mother.

In the novel, two ‘coloured’ women are hired for the dinner party:  the cook Malena Burns (who barely registers in the narrative) and her truculent sidekick, Gertrude Collamus, who waits at table.  The adaptors’ merging these two into a single character – Malena – is highly successful.  The film, even if it doesn’t quite dispel the troublesome racism of the source material, reinterprets it interestingly:  it makes sense for the impecunious Adams family to have to hire one woman to double up as cook and waitress and Malena’s palpable resentment of what she’s required to do at least succeeds in expressing a black point of view.  Hattie McDaniel delivers a superb comic performance.  Malena’s belligerence is both intensified and enervated by having to roast, boil and bake during the sudden heatwave.  McDaniel makes her supremely graceless as she shoves the plate of caviar sandwiches into Virgil’s midriff, effortfully opens partition doors to announce that dinner is served, repeatedly adjusts her limp, slipping waitress’s headdress.

10 February 2015

[1]  I Know Where I’m Going: Katharine Hepburn, A Personal Biography by Charlotte Chandler (2010) – an excerpt from this appeared in the programme note for BFI’s February 2015 screening of Alice Adams.