Lowell Sherman (1933)
Katharine Hepburn, playing a young woman set on becoming a major actress, won her first Academy Award for this film. Eva Lovelace – née Ada Love – comes from Franklin, Vermont to New York, determined to succeed on the legitimate Broadway stage. Although she’s relatively naïve among theatrical wheeler dealers, Eva is no fool and she’s well read: she has her own opinions about the playwrights whose parts she wants to play. Waiting for an audition, she meets a distinguished elderly English actor, R H Hedges: he still does small roles on stage but is now primarily a theatre coach. He takes a liking to Eva – as does Joseph Sheridan, a successful dramatist, and Louis Easton, a big-time Broadway producer. Morning Glory was adapted by Howard J Green from an unproduced stage play by Zoe Akins. (It was remade as Stage Struck, directed by Sidney Lumet, in 1958.) The picture runs seventy minutes: the last ten are so frenetic it’s as if someone had rushed onto set and told the cast and crew they were nearly out of time.
Eva has been given a small part in a play written by Sheridan and produced by Easton. In her dressing room, shortly before curtain up, the play’s outrageously egotistical star Rita Vernon demands more money and, when she doesn’t get what she wants, refuses to go on. Eva gets her big chance – she’s not exactly an understudy: it seems she has to learn Rita’s lines in double quick time – and seizes it. She triumphs and, in the course of a single performance, is not only transformed professionally but also toughened personally. Easton tells Eva she now belongs not to him but to the theatre. She receives from Hedges words of both congratulation and warning – of the risks of being a thespian morning glory. He tells Eva that her humble dresser, Nellie Navarre (!), was once a successful stage actress but look at her now. Alone with Nellie, Eva moans that, now that she’s got what she always wanted, she’s terribly lonely. Joseph Sheridan has just told Eva that he loves her; Nellie urges Eva to remember that love, not success, is what matters. But the heroine finally decides that she’s going to opt for stardom. (Her name naturally calls to mind the title character of All About Eve, made seventeen years later.) The film ends with her clutching Nellie (Helen Ware) and repeating, in a paroxysm of febrile self-assertion, ‘I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid, I’m not afraid …!’ In other words, Eva whizzes through the usual dilemmas of a price of fame story that might occupy a full-length feature film in the short time it takes for her to come off stage and change out of her costume.
Katharine Hepburn, appearing a year after this movie was made in a play called The Lake, was on the receiving end of one of the most famous bad review one-liners in theatre history: Dorothy Parker described her as running ‘the gamut of emotions from A to B’. In the last few minutes of Morning Glory, Hepburn has the impossible task of pelting through vertiginous changes of mood and point of view but her high-strung mercuriality just about sees her through. She’s great in the first part of the film, where she manages to be passionate and comic at the same time; the speed of her delivery and of her emotional motor is startling. Just as Eva is utterly different – physically and temperamentally – from the bitchy, heavy-featured Rita and a dipso rival called Gwendoline Hall, so Hepburn’s acting is in bracing contrast to the actresses in these roles (Mary Duncan and Geneva Mitchell respectively), amusing as they are. Occasionally, Hepburn is too electrifying for her own good: when Eva’s had too much to drink, she tries to impress the company with readings of ‘To be or not to be’ and one of Juliet’s soliloquies: the Hamlet is meant to be bad but the Juliet too is pretty mediocre compared with Hepburn’s playing of Eva. Douglas Fairbanks Jr is rather dull as Sheridan but Adolphe Menjou as Easton and the beautifully spoken C Aubrey Smith as Hedges are both good. Smith pronounces Eva’s surname ‘Loveless’: this could be meant to prophesy her isolated, stellar future or it could be just that he talks posh.
14 December 2013
