A Year with Kate: State of the Union (1948)

Episode 25 of 52: In which Kate confronts Angela Lansbury onscreen and the Blacklist offscreen and manages to beat both.

 Early on, I stated that sometimes Kate’s career seems charmed. I’d venture 1948 is one of those charmed years. As we saw last week, Song of Love failed--Kate’s first failure at MGM.  Yet some strange circumstances and good luck landed Kate in State of the Union, based on a Pulitzer Prize-winning play. I say “good luck” because in the fall of 1947, the storm that would become the Hollywood Blacklist was brewing, and Kate nearly got caught in the center of it.

Though not as cloyingly obvious as Mr. Smith Goes to Washington - no light from the Lincoln Memorial in this film - State of the Union nevertheless delivers the classic Capra Corn package: nostalgia, patriotism, and a happy ending snatched from the jaws of tragedy at the last second.  Spencer Tracy plays Grant Matthews, a self-made businessman who abandons his political and marital morals in order to run for president. Matthews is Mr. Smith if he’d met a lobbyist on his way to Washington: an idealist and a patriot, but also an egotist with political aspirations. In a word: corruptible.

Despite this refreshingly layered central character (played with well balanced self-awareness by Spencer Tracy), Capra fills the rest of the cast with his favorite stereotypes: the amoral politician (Adolphe Menjou), the conniving vamp (Angela Lansbury), the wise-cracking journalist (Van Johnson in top form), and most importantly the long-suffering matron, in this case Matthews’s wife, Mary (our own Kate).  When Mary arrives (30 minutes in) she acts as Grant’s conscience, arguing loudly for him to practice honesty over chicanery. Kate shines in the comedy but can’t deliver the patronizing Capra monologues well--they come off as shrill and rushed. Unfortunately, she’s one shrill voice among many: the agriculture lobbyist, the labor lobbyist, the judge, the newspaper syndicate owner, etc. The theme of Capra’s State of the Union seems to be, “Every time a cash register rings, a lobbyist gets his wings.” That is, until a True American Patriot can stand up to the corruption.

Protesting HUAC

The idea of a righteous man standing up to a corrupt oppressor is part of the American identity, but it was also what so many of the actors, directors, and writers who were blacklisted in the 1940s and 1950s had attempted to do. When the Hollywood Ten stood in front of the House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) in Fall of 1947 and refused to testify about their political beliefs, they were not only criminally charged, but also shunned by the terrified studios. Among those Kate worked with who would face HUAC and the blacklist were Ring Lardner Jr. (Oscar-winning writer of Woman of the Year), Donald Ogden Stiers (The Philadelphia Story and Without Love), and Dalton Trumbo.

Kate herself would face her biggest backlash that fall. In the November 1947, just days before the Hollywood Ten and the Waldorf Statement, Kate’s name was popping up with alarming regularity as a possible Commie next to names like Charlie Chaplin and Paul Robeson. Always one to stand by her convictions, Kate had made an unpopular political speech in May (wearing a red dress), and now insisted on joining the Committee for the First Amendment to protest HUAC. By the time Song of Love opened, Hedda Hopper was gleefully reporting that Kate’s image on movie screens was being stoned by patriotic patrons. Fortunately, Kate was already shooting State of the Union, a movie where she declares twice that she is a Republican, and stands--however woodenly--as the nationalistic moral conscience of a film made by a decorated hero. 

This is what I mean by luck. HUAC didn’t go after A-List stars (too risky), but if Kate had starred in a few more flops, or if Claudette Colbert hadn’t gotten sick and had to drop out of State of the Union, or if Kate socked Adolphe Menjou on set for being a Friendly Witness to HUAC instead of being WASP-y and polite, Hepburn may not have stepped into Capra’s flagwaving film in October 1947. As it was, State of the Union was a success when it opened in 1948. Kate was (at least affiliated with) a patriot, so she stayed an A-List celebrity, and the Communist rumors slowly faded. It was like getting a seal of approval from a bald eagle. It’s a pity though. I’d have loved to see Kate smack Adolphe Menjou.

Previous Weeks: A Bill of Divorcement, Christopher Strong, Morning Glory, Little Women, Spitfire, The Little Minister, Break of Hearts, Alice Adams, Sylvia Scarlett, Mary of Scotland, A Woman Rebels, Quality Street, Stage Door, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday,The Philadelphia Story, Woman of the Year, Keeper Of The Flame, Stage Door Canteen,Dragon Seed, Without Love, Undercurrent, The Sea Of Grass, Song of Love 

Next Week: Adam's Rib (1949) - In which Tracy and Hepburn's best comedy shows that love, life, and law are a circus.

A Year with Kate: Song Of Love (1947)

Episode 24 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn shows off her talented fingers.

I have the strangest sense of deja vu.  Kate’s stuck in another melodrama about a young artist in love with a tortured composer. The composer is played by another foreign leading man. And I’ve created another set of box office graphs to answer KHep career questions through science. It’s like we never left RKO! I know you have a lot of questions--one being ”are you really going to start calling her KHep?” (Answer: Yes.) But first, let’s talk about the movie.

Song of Love is the highly inaccurate but very sweet story of Clara Wieck Schumann, a piano prodigy who marries tortured genius Robert Schumann (Paul Heinreid). Clara Wieck Schumann really was a piano prodigy, and she really did marry Robert Schumann and pop out babies like a human Pez dispenser. However, basically everything else about the movie is Hollywood fiction, including a second almost-romance with Brahms, played charmingly by Robert Walker (who’d just finished charmingly playing Kate’s son in The Sea of Grass. Accidental incest is awkward). It’s a pity the film glosses over her story, because Clara Wieck was actually incredible.

Channeling her inner Clara, Kate successfully learned to play piano for the role. (The music is dubbed.) When not tickling the ivories, Kate spends a lot of time looking very pretty sitting next to Paul Heinreid, or crying by him, or kissing him. Honestly, Katharine Hepburn and Paul Heinreid have about as much chemistry together as do my rug and my lamp; they look very nice next to each other and they spruce the place up, but barring any faulty wiring, I don’t expect a fire. 

 Still, the music is good and the acting is sweet. Plus, after three movies of men scowling at Kate it’s a relief to watch a guy smile at her again, even if (century-and-a-half-old spoiler alert) it’s before he goes insane and dies in an asylum. Enough about the movie, though. Let’s get to the real drama: the box office.

Click to read more ...

A Year with Kate: The Sea of Grass (1947)

Episode 23 of 52: In which Tracy and Hepburn make a Western because why not?

A lone figure looks out over a vast, unending prairie. A wagon traverses rocky desert trails. Virgin land, a justice-seeking posse, a citified lawyer who brings civilization riding on his pinstriped coat tails. The Western dominated American film for over half a century with images like these. It stands to reason that two American stars and a director on his way to becoming a (controversial) American legend himself would take aim at the genre. The Sea of Grass, the resulting collaboration between Elia Kazan and the Tracy/Hepburn team, is an epic story covering multiple generations in the New Mexico Territory. It’s a Western, but not struck from the same heroic mould that John Ford was making them in Monument Valley. The Sea of Grass is meaner, more melodramatic, and ultimately a maverick mess of a movie.

The Sea of Grass comes so close to being a great film.  Spencer Tracy plays Col. Jim Brewton, a rancher who’s spent his life herding cattle on the millions of acres of untouched prairie that spread across New Mexico. He marries a St. Louis girl named Lutie (Kate Hepburn), who loves him but can’t love his untamed wildlands (not a euphemism). She tries to bring the people to the prairie, or her husband home to bed, but she can’t tame nature or the Colonel. These are familiar archetypes to anyone who’s watched more than two Westerns: the Lone Hero and the Prairie Wife. He is the champion of the settlers, she is his pure-hearted moral compass. Right? Well sure, up until the part where Jim causes the death of a few farmers, and Lutie runs away to sleep with the Judge (Melvyn Douglas) and bear his illegitimate son. And that’s just in the first hour. Suffice it to say, John Ford would not approve.

Cowboys and cynics after the jump...

Click to read more ...

A Year with Kate: Undercurrent (1946)

Episode 22 of 52 of Anne Marie's chronological look at Katharine Hepburn's career.

In which Katharine Hepburn’s terrible fashion sense almost kills her.

I'll admit my bias up front: this movie is a sore spot for me. For probably understandable reasons, I'm not big on movies about tomboys named Ann who are accused of being frumpy. Undercurrent is a noir-esque melodrama directed by Vincente Minnelli, a director best known for the Technicolor musicals starring his sometime wife Judy Garland and/or Gene Kelly. Minnelli did spread out in genre on occasion, with great films The Bad And The Beautiful and not-so-great films, like Undercurrent. Our heroine in Undercurrent is a plain woman named Ann (Kate) who is unexpectedly wooed by a tall dark and handsome scientist (Robert Taylor). After a whirlwind romance ending in marriage, Ann begins searching into her husband’s troubled past. She uncovers an empty house, a paranoid ex-lover, and a brother (Robert Mitchum) who should dead--and who may end up being her soul mate.

But before Ann is drawn into the mystery, she spends the first act of the movie stomping around her father's laboratory wearing this:

HIDEOUS. I know. I can almost hear the fashion bloggers crying for justice and tearing at their vintage blouses in despair. Honestly, it's not a terrible look. It's very Kate. Really the only things I take issue with are the socks with sandals (fortunately spared in this publicity photo), but that's because it’s an Embarrassing Dad-level fashion faux pas. (That's Marjorie Main with her, by the way, in a criminally small role.) Anyway, while this ensemble is not the worst thing Kate’s worn, it is nonetheless a Big Problem, or so the film tells us. It isn't until Kate, as Ann, gets swept into the mysterious, glamorous life of her husband that she is shamed into dressing the part of a worldly, wealthy wife and a beautiful MGM star.

Click to read more ...

A Year with Kate: Without Love (1945)

Episode 21 of 52 of Anne Marie's chronological look at Katharine Hepburn's career.

When a star’s career is as long-lasting and iconic as Katharine Hepburn’s was, there are going to be dramatic highs and lows in terms of quality. Mapped out on a timeline, it would resemble a mountain range. The glittering Mount Holiday would stand tall on the horizon, dwarfed on either side by Bringing Up Baby Peak and The Philadelphia Story Summit. Behind it would be the dark valleys and caves of RKO. However, the most treacherous topographical feature on our Atlas Hepburnica would be the Seven Year Desert, stretching seemingly endlessly from Woman of the Year Peak to Adam’s Rib Ridge. The Seven Year Desert is a vast sea of grass that barrages a traveler with its unending, monotonous mediocrity. Woe to the weary wanderer who gives up, rather than trudge through another undistinguished Hepburn vehicle.

Faithful readers, you and I are currently in the middle of the Seven Year Desert, so forgive my heavy-handed metaphors as I attempt to mine our next few movies for something, anything to talk about. Currently, we’re stuck in Without Love, a serviceable comedy reteaming Kate with Spencer Tracy. Tracy plays an engineer designing a new helmet for the US Air Force. Kate is a widowed heiress who volunteers to be his assistant. They marry out of convenience with the agreement that they absolutely will not fall in love. Three guesses how that turns out. Your first two don’t count.

Click to read more ...