Richard Wallace (1934)
Katharine Hepburn is Babbie, a high-spirited and high-born Scottish girl, engaged to be married to her guardian Lord Rintoul. To take her mind off the stultifying life in store for her, Babbie spends a good deal of her time running and singing in the woods outside the little town of Thrums, pretending to be a wild gypsy girl. At one point, one of the locals suggests that she may be ‘one of those Southern gypsies – they have a grand manner when it suits them’. There’s no denying that this is an accurate description of Hepburn. Watching her in this adaptation of J M Barrie’s 1891 novel, which he turned into a stage play a few years later, made me realise why she became ‘box office poison’ during the 1930s. (The Little Minister didn’t recover its production costs.) Hepburn’s unusual athleticism makes her fascinating to watch in motion; her ability to express a character’s feelings through her physical attitude means that she’s magnetic when she comes to rest. But when Babbie is beguiling the amusingly serious-minded Gavin Dishart, the minister of the title, she’s pretty annoying. One of the amazing things about Katharine Hepburn, however, is that, faced with a seemingly impossible challenge, she not only meets it but makes what she’s doing seem natural. Babbie and Gavin are about to declare their love, and explain her identity, to the scandalised community of Thrums when the little minister receives a serious stab wound and spends a night hovering between life and death. Babbie begs God to spare him. Hepburn gives herself over to the prayer so passionately and unselfconsciously that the moment isn’t the melodramatic cliché it ought to be: it is – because the actress also is – transcendent. And in spite of Hepburn’s air of visiting royalty – it never occurs to you that Babbie’s anything other than aristocratic – the romance between her and John Beal’s Gavin works well. The gulf between her flamboyance and his staid conscientiousness is appealing, and Beal has a nice balance of earnest propriety and vulnerability. There’s an especially good bit when Gavin is in the pulpit, inveighing against the temptress Eve.
The opening legends explain that the story we’re about to see takes place in 1840, when life was ‘simple’, but I struggled to understand the plot. Lord Rintoul (Frank Conroy), although he seems dull rather than tyrannical, is trying to keep the workers of Thrums, as well as Babbie, on a leash: Thrums is a weaving community and a dispute about low wages is (I think) the reason why there are soldiers in the town. (Thrums was Barrie’s fictional stand-in for his own home town of Kirriemuir. It is, in its relocation to Hollywood, remarkably spacious.) I wasn’t sure either whether the minister’s littleness referred to his height or his youth. John Beal isn’t tall but few of the locals are: The Little Minister sometimes looks to be set in Munchkinland. (The dour church elder Tammas Whammond (Lumsden Hare) is one of the exceptions; Hepburn of course is another.) Barely five feet tall, J M Barrie knew all about diminished stature. The genuinely surprising turn of events when Gavin Dishart is knifed had me worried for a moment not only that the minister wouldn’t survive but that the Barrie family’s autobiography was going to take over the story. Gavin lives in the manse with his mother, to whom he’s very close. Beryl Mercer plays Mrs Dishart very well but her anguish at her son’s injury makes it hard not to think of the ice-skating accident in Kirriemuir that took the life of Barrie’s elder brother, and his mother’s favourite son, David. The Little Minister needs this eleventh hour jolt, however. It’s never greatly involving and has begun to drag by this point. The film is well acted, though (and the Scottish accents are, for the time, not bad). The supporting players include Donald Crisp as the doctor who saves Gavin, Alan Hale as a drinker with a heart of gold, and Mary Gordon as (I assumed) Babbie’s ex-nanny. Gordon is one of the genuine Scots in the cast. Another, Andy Clyde, plays the local policeman, Wearyworld, who’s more a music hall turn than a character. The music includes jolly arrangements by Max Steiner of ‘Loch Lomond’ ‘Comin’ Thro’ the Rye’ etc.
15 February 2013
