Episode 50 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn starred in a movie with Jason Bateman, which will make every game of Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon you play significantly easier.
This is it. We’ve reached the final year of Katharine Hepburn’s career. Did Kate know that the three films she made in 1994 would be her last? Did she feel herself slowing down and decide that sixty two years in the spotlight were enough? Since she made no official announcement, it’s impossible to know Kate’s reasons for sure. Still, considering this was Kate’s last starring role, This Can’t Be Love feels like a retirement announcement.
Kate’s first final film was This Can’t Be Love, another TV movie starring Katharine Hepburn as Katharine Hepburn. Actually, she plays Marion Bennett, a world-renowned, Academy Award-winning actress who eschews public life and spends a lot of time being loveably grouchy to her chauffeur (an adorable puppydog-ish Jason Bateman). In Bennett’s younger days, she’d had a torrid offscreen affair with her co-star Michael Reyman (Anthony Quinn). Umpteen years later, Reyman has re-entered Marion’s life, but his intentions are more than merely amorous...
It’s a formula we know well by now, so let’s just settle in and enjoy it. Sprinkle the script with references to Kate’s career, add bits of Quinn’s womanizing past, mix in an opposites attract romance that sounds almost-but-not-quite-unlike Tracy & Hepburn, shake vigorously, and let the sophomoric senior squabbling begin. I actually considered making a drinking game out of counting Katharine Hepburn meta-references, but realized I’d get alcohol poisoning in the first hour. The African Queen, her brother Tom, Coco, her childhood nickname “Jimmy,” Song of Love, and even Rooster Cogburn get a shoutout. My favorite comes from Kate directly. It's a bit of dialog meant to echo the statue metaphor from The Philadelphia Story...
He put me on a pedestal. Good view, but awfully lonely up there.”
The major difference between This Can’t Be Love and Kate’s earlier romantic comedies is that whereas before it had always been Kate who was the agent of chaos, whether as dippy Susan Vance or dynamic Tess Harding, in This Can’t Be Love it is Anthony Quinn who spins poor Kate’s world topsy turvy. Quinn’s native acting style is more theatrical than Kate’s, and director Anthony Harvey uses every opportunity to remind the audience of Quinn’s brief romantic “desert sheik” phase. This includes a scene where Quinn jumps on a table, sword in hand, and challenges his book editor to a duel.
The film needs ridiculous scenes like Quinn on the tabletop, because the honest truth is that Kate can’t carry a movie on her own anymore. Her eighty eight years are showing. She’s a little slower, a lot shakier, and maybe not quite as sharp as she’d been even two years before. Still, I admire her sheer stubbornness. Of course the woman who jumped in a hot air balloon, filmed when she got dysentery, and bought her contract out when RKO tried to bury her would keep making movies when her contemporaries had retired. Hepburn’s last two films would be cameo appearances which would pay tribute to her celebrity without overtaxing her. After six decades of stardom, Kate was taking a victory lap.
Previous Week: The Man Upstairs (1992) - In which Katharine Hepburn, octogenarian and award-winning legend, wrestles a convict and wins.
Next Week: Love Affair (1994) - In which Katharine Hepburn gives her blessing to Annette Bening and my inner actressexual weeps with joy. (Available on Amazon Instant Video)