disinterested_spectator The title character of "Alice Adams," played by Katherine Hepburn, is a young woman who lives in a small town named South Renford. At first, it appears to be the strangest small town you ever saw, because everyone seems to be rich except the Adams family. Alice gets invited to dances and parties by rich women, but she cannot afford to dress the way they do. The rich men never ask her out, so she has to coerce her brother Virgil to escort her. At the dance, the rich men prefer to dance with rich women, and as her brother deserts her, she is left alone and comes across as a wallflower. In other words, we never see other young women of working class background for her to be friends with, and we never see working class men ask her out for a date. What an odd town.Of course, we know that this cannot be. No town is like that. In fact, there are bound to be far more working class families than rich ones: young women of her own class to be friends with; young men of her own class to date. Moreover, it is clear that her brother does stick to his own class. He even enjoys shooting craps with black servants, and at the dance, he greets the black bandleader, who in turn is happy to see him. They obviously know each other from nightclubs where working class people go to have fun. But not Alice. In fact, she is mortified when her brother says "Hi" to the bandleader.To put it bluntly, Alice is a big phony. And yet, we know we are supposed to feel sorry for her. To a certain extent we do. We all know how young people desperately want things that really don't matter, and it is painful to watch her suffer so from pretending to be something she is not, especially when we also know that she could be happy, if she just let all that go. In fact, that is why we never see young women of her own class inviting her to parties or young men of her own class asking her out. If we did, and she snubbed them, we would despise her. But by making it look as though she lives in a town where everyone is rich but her and her family, absurd as that is, we are more forgiving, because we are led to believe that she has no such opportunities.At the dance, Alice meets Arthur (Fred MacMurray), who seems to be quite taken with her, but she is just as much of a phony with him as with everyone else. It is hard to understand what he sees in her.But while we are trying to overlook Alice's affectations as the folly of youth, we discover that her mother, apparently in her fifties, is just as foolish as Alice in such matters. Instead of encouraging Alice to stay within her class, she berates her husband for not making more money so that Alice can continue to socialize with the town's upper crust. So much for the wisdom that supposedly comes with age.Alice's father is recovering from a long illness. His boss, Mr. Lamb, continues to pay him a salary and holds his job open for him, and her father wants to go back to work there when he gets better. But Alice's mother pushes him to go into business by starting a glue factory, based on a formula that actually seems to belong to his boss, inasmuch as Alice's father discovered it on company time.What we are hoping for is that Alice will realize how foolish she has been. Instead, the movie justifies her. Virgil gets into a jam and steals $150 from Mr. Lamb, whom he also works for, probably to pay off a gambling debt. In other words, we can no longer admire Virgil for being content to fraternize with those in his class, thereby making it seem right for Alice to avoid such people as unworthy.Anyway, with Alice's father stealing the glue formula and Alice's brother stealing the money, Mr. Lamb shows up at the Adams house to let them have a piece of his mind. It all looks pretty grim. But Alice tells him that it is all her and her mother's fault for pushing her father to make more money. Mr. Lamb is magnanimous, willing to let Alice's father have his job back when he gets well, willing to give them time to pay back the $150, and willing to let Alice's father share in the profits from the glue formula.But we should note that while Alice takes responsibility for her and her mother pushing her father to start a glue factory, she gives no indication that her desire to hobnob with rich society was an unworthy goal, only that she and her mother should not have pushed her father to make more money.Ultimately, she has learned nothing. We had hoped that she would quit being a phony, make friends with women in her own class, and fall in love with a man who is also from a working class background. But no. The movie rewards her phoniness by having Arthur fall in love with her and want to marry her. Because he is one of the elite, and presumably has plenty of money, she will get what she always wanted, inclusion in the upper class of South Renford. Now she can be the real thing.

JohnHowardReid Producer: Pandro S. Berman. Copyright 15 August 1935 by RKO Radio Pictures. New York opening at the Radio City Music Hall: 17 August 1935. 11 reels. 99 minutes.SYNOPSIS: Alice Adams and her family don't quite have what it takes to rise in the social scale. NOTES: Nominated for prestigious Hollywood awards for Best Picture (won by Mutiny on the Bounty) and Best Actress, in which category Katharine Hepburn was out-voted by furious members of the Academy who were outraged that Bette Davis had been passed over in favor of Claudette Colbert in 1934. In fact, Bette had not even been nominated for her performance in "Of Human Bondage". So they rallied to her side and voted for her second-rate performance in "Dangerous" instead).The National Board of Review chose "Alice Adams" as the second best American film of the year. Only "The Informer" received more votes. COMMENT: The accent here is firmly on dialogue. In fact, the film resembles a stage play rather than a screenplay (or indeed a novel), in both its construction as well as in the obvious theatricality of its dialogue and principal characters.Nonetheless, the players seize their opportunities with relish. True, Fred Stone tends to overact and director Stevens seems a bit overawed. In fact, Stevens reveals his basic training in low comedy by using a far-too-long reaction shot of Stone's efforts to eat a caviar sandwich. Aside from this slip, however, the film is beautifully composed with loving close-ups and striking long shots such as the high angle showing the party dancers in the bottom half of the screen and Miss Hepburn, a lonely figure in white, isolated at the top.Evelyn Venable has only a tiny role, but Albertson, Shoemaker and, to a lesser degree (as they have much smaller parts), Grapewin and Sutton are outstanding. As said, Stevens uses lots of close-ups. Fortunately, de Grasse has lit Hepburn charmingly. In fact so attractive does she look, it's hard to comprehend why she is so ignored at the Palmer party. I, for one, would have run to her side and thrown my arms around her immediately.Aided by one or two ventures out-of-doors (a tracking shot in front of a process screen), Stevens puts the story across at a brisk pace and is further aided by some superlative work from other behind-the- camera talents such as photographer de Grasse and art director Polglase who designed the sets himself rather than farming them out to one of his assistants. These sets impressively range from the vast and spacious Palmer mansion to the dingy, furniture-cluttered, putting-a-brave-face-on-poverty, shabby genteel interiors of the Adams' home.Film editing is deft and smooth. Stevens employs cuts from medium shot to close-up to striking effect as in his later films, although there are none of the dissolves (either ordinary or lingering) that became his trademark, as in "A Place in the Sun". Music and costumes are right in period. The sound recording, however, has a few rough edges (which is actually another Stevens trademark)!All told, emotion and atmosphere are brought home most effectively in this beautifully photographed and absolutely entrancing movie.

richard-1787 This is really a wonderful movie in a lot of ways.To begin with, the script is great. It's intelligent, and develops the characters, showing different aspects of their personalities. They aren't always admirable personalities. Alice's mother has a lot of very superficial values, values she has transferred to her daughter.The direction is also first rate. The interest never flags.Where I have a real problem, however, is with Hepburn's performance. It is SOOOO mannered. If you know some of her later, much better performances, like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, you can see that early on she developed a whole repertory of acting mannerisms. By the time she got to GWCTD, she knew how to use them sparingly and effectively. Here they sometimes overwhelm her performance. Her character, Alice Adams, is already superficial and despicable in a lot of ways. The mannerisms, as during the dinner fiasco, sometimes make her downright maniacal.Definitely watch this movie. The script and directing are great. But get ready to deal with a LOT of mannered acting from the female lead.

lugonian ALICE ADAMS (RKO Radio, 1935), directed by George Stevens, from the 1922 novel by Booth Tarkington, is a charming story about a middle-class family of a quaint little town: Virgil Adams and his wife; son, Walter, and most of all, their daughter, Alice. Previously filmed during the silent movie era in 1923 starring Florence Vidor, this new edition with Katharine Hepburn offers her a role unlike anything she's done before, a sensitive portrayal of a girl longing to be accepted by others, but going about it the wrong way. Set in South Renford, "a town with a future," Alice Adams (Katharine Hepburn) starts off the story entering a flower shop to buy a corsage for a social function she's planning to attend. Unable to afford it, she goes about picking withering violets in the park instead. Without having a new dress to wear and no young man to take her, she has her brother, Walter (Frank Albertson), a compulsive gambler, to act as her escort. Mrs. Adams (Ann Shoemaker) who wants the best for her children, particularly Alice, places the blame for her daughter's setback on her husband, Virgil (Fred Stone). Virgil, a career clerk for Mr. Lamb's (Charley Grapewin) company, taking extended sick leave from his job, is loved and understood by Alice, while he's constantly nagged by his wife, and for good reason. Mrs. Adams feels the glue formula he and another partner (now deceased) had invented years ago, rightfully belongs to Virgil and not to his employer. As for the party at the Palmer household, Alice meets Arthur Russell (Fred MacMurray), a young man who takes an special interest in her in spite of he being "practically engaged" to hostess and socialite, Mildred Palmer (Evelyn Venable). During their courtship, Alice does her best to make a good impression, but her pretense reveals the fact how ashamed she is of her family and background. Through the suggestion from her mother, Alice reluctantly agrees to invite Arthur over for dinner, hiring their neighbor, Melena Burns (Hattie McDaniel), to pose as their maid, with disastrous results.For its simple-minded story and excellent character study, there's no question that ALICE ADAMS earned great success with critics and audiences alike. For her performance, Hepburn earned a second Academy Award nomination, whose character is observed to be childish, talkative and with a wild imagination. In spite of these qualities, she's determined to succeed professionally as well as socially. In order to make good in her accomplishment, Alice needs to accept herself for whom she is rather than pretending to be someone she isn't. George Stevens, in his first important directorial assignment, brings forth several situations providing the effectiveness of the story as well as its characters. For the Palmer party sequence, for example, Alice sits alone, pretending to be enjoying herself while the guests are gathered amongst themselves, making Alice feel and realizing how much of a social outcast she is. Stevens allows the camera to show off her inner thoughts through facial expressions and numerous close-ups, especially while dancing with the clumsy Momma's boy, Frank Dowling (Grady Sutton). Quite touching is Alice's returning home from the party as she walks upstairs, enters her bedroom, giving out her inner frustration through crying while standing with her face touching the window with the rain outside pouring down as the expression of her tears. Another scene worth noting is the dinner sequence. Set on the hottest day where Alice, her parents and their guest, Arthur, with sweaty foreheads, struggling to act comfortable in their proper dinner clothes while Melana (McDaniel), enacting her part as their gun chewing maid, getting most of the attention more for her mannerisms than for her speaking. Though much of the film offers a recurring score that could relatively be classified as "The Alice Adams Theme Song," this ten minute dinner sequence alone contains no underscoring, yet, quite effective as it is leisurely paced. Fred MacMurray, on loan-out assignment from his home studio of Paramount, enacts his Arthur Russell in a good-natured manner. He accepts Alice for what she is, but is only too polite to be blunt and honest about how she's really hurting herself. Fred Stone, a veteran stage actor with limited screen roles to his credit, plays the role as the homespun father to near perfection. He brings forth the best of his portrayal in a realistic manner during his confrontation with his employer, Mr. Lamb, after learning how his son embarrassed him by stealing $150 from the company. Stone's performance might have earned him a supporting actor's award had that category existed with the academy in 1935. Others in the cast are equally good, including Jonathan Hale and Hedda Hopper as Mildred's parents; Virginia Howell as Mrs. Dowling; and Ella McKenzie as Ella Dowling, all in smaller roles.Distributed to home video by Nostalgia Merchant or the Turner Company back in the 1980s, and later on DVD, ALICE ADAMS, formerly presented on American Movie Classics prior to 1998, can be seen whenever shown on Turner Classic Movies. (****)