A Year with Kate: Grace Quigley (1984)

 Episode 46 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn makes a comedy about suicide with Nick Nolte because she's a living legend and she can do whatever she wants.

The truth about a career that spans seven decades, is that for the majority of that career, you'll be what’s traditionally thought of as “old.” Hollywood does not like “old.” The magnificent part of watching Katharine Hepburn age has been watching her flip old age (and Hollywood) the bird. True, her head wobbles, her hair is gray, and her voice is reedy. Still, she leaps after hot air balloons, bicycles, hauls wood, and even wins Academy Awards at an age far past what would traditionally be considered “her prime.” For the past few years, Kate has looked old, sounded old, and even talked about being old, but the stubbornly energetic woman has never felt old. Which is why Grace Quigley is more than a little scary.

Grace Quigley (originally titled The Ultimate Solution of Grace Quigley) is meant to be a black comedy about assisted suicide. Think Arsenic and Old Lace by way of Harold and Maude. Nick Nolte stars as a neurotic hitman with the misfortune of meeting Mrs. Quigley (our own Kate), an octogenarian who blackmails him into starting a business with her: killing people who want to be killed. Homicidal hilarity ensues, or would, except it isn't very funny. Despite a striptease set to Tchaikovsky, a hearse chase, and several attempts at witty banter, the movie vacillates between morbidity and dullness. The problem is threefold: 1) director Anthony Harvey (who’d beautifully directed Kate in The Lion in Winter and The Glass Menagerie) lacks the light touch needed for black comedy. 2) Nick Nolte’s character is about as good at killing people as he is at delivering one-liners (which is to say not good at all). Most importantly, 3) For the first time onscreen, Katharine Hepburn looks so frail that it is uncomfortably easy to believe she wants to die.

Kate's brush with death and life affirmations after the jump.

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A Year with Kate: On Golden Pond (1981)

Episode 45 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn makes Oscars history by asserting that old people are interesting.

I’ll be honest: I’ve been really nervous to write about this movie. For the past few weeks, a storm has been brewing in the comments section regarding Kate’s final Oscar win. I’m not one to (intentionally) court controversy, so I’ve been debating all week how to best give a safe space to the righteous fury of the Oscars experts while also celebrating an important moment in Oscars history. Because whether you believe Kate deserved to win or not, this was a record-breaking win at the Academy Awards, and that shouldn’t go unappreciated.

Here’s my plan: we’ll speculate wildly for a bit on why Kate took home her fourth Academy Award (by “took home” I mean “still refused to accept in person”). Then you tell me who you think should have won. What follows is my list of...

POSSIBLE REASONS WHY KATHARINE HEPBURN WON BEST ACTRESS (in order from least likely to most)

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A Year with Kate: The Corn is Green (1978)

 Episode 44 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn bids farewell to her lifelong friend and director, George Cukor.

Who’s up for another catfight? Way back near the beginning of this series, I manufactured a rivalry between young Kate Hepburn and Miss Bette Davis, both sporting ear-splitting accents in two movies from 1934. This time, I don’t have to fake a competition. Katharine Hepburn’s 1979 TV movie happens to be a remake of a 1945 Bette Davis film.

The Corn Is Green (based on the play by by Emlyn Williams) is the story of Miss Moffat, who gets off her tuffet to teach the Welsh miners to read. The role of a strong-willed woman who changes the lives of her impoverished pupils would be catnip for either of our great actresses, so it’s no surprise that Bette and Kate both played Miss Moffat 34 years apart. What is surprising is how different Bette and Kate’s performances are, because the two films they star in are polar opposites in mood and moral. Just how often do you get to compare your favorite actresses on a scene-by-scene basis like this?

The Eyes vs The Cheekbones after the jump.

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A Year with Kate: Olly Olly Oxen Free (1978)

Episode 43 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn proves she's not afraid of heights or bad scripts.

Look, I’ll be honest with you. There is exactly one reason to see this movie. It happens around the last third of the film. No, it’s not another moth gown. (Remember the moth gown? I miss the moth gown.) Instead, it’s the sight of a sexagenarian, award-winning, legendary actress dangling from a hot air balloon over a cliff. I’m in my 20s, and I wouldn’t do that without at least a net and a shot of whiskey first. Anyway, if you want to know what it looks like, I’ve made a gif that you can skip to at the end of the post. I suggest you stick around for the rest of this article, though, because we have some strange stuff to address (and also some puns).

Really, of all the yet-untried genres Kate could have landed in during the later part of her career, we should have seen a children’s movie coming. Olly, Olly, Oxen Free (aka The Great Balloon Adventure) is a self-consciously sweet flick about a child named Albie with his head in the clouds (sorry) who recruits his friend and his dog to rebuild his grandfather’s hot air balloon. While looking for spare parts in a whimsical junkyard (junkyards in children's movies are required to be whimsical by genre law), Albie and Company meet the grouchy Miss Pudd, our own Kate. Fortunately for the boys, Miss Pudd’s threats turn out to be nothing but hot air (sorry), and she quickly becomes their confidante and benefactor.

Olly, Olly, Oxen Free is part of that genre of children’s fantasy (like Pete’s Dragon, The Goonies, or even Bridge to Terabithia) that sees the world of a child as a vanishing, secret thing. While the “scrappy kids in a magical world” trope is common enough, this inflated (sorry) level of preciousness seems unique to the 1970s. The movie’s tone is almost mournful. The only adults who understand these boys--Miss Pudd and Albie’s grandfather--are insane or dead. The rest are either absent or rude.

"Did I ever tell you about the time Howard Hughes landed a plane on a beach just to meet me?"

More balloon jokes and an impressive stunt after the jump.

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A Year with Kate: Rooster Cogburn (1975)

Episode 42 of 52: In which Katharine Hepburn and John Wayne star in The African Queen 2: This Time it's a Western!

Growing old in Hollywood sucks. To borrow a line from Goldie Hawn, “There are only three ages for women in Hollywood: babe, district attorney, and Driving Miss Daisy.” And while Hollywood’s ageism is well-documented and well-criticized, for some aging actors, an equally tricky problem can arise: the trouble with becoming a Legend in your own time. What happens when the legend eclipses the actor?

In 1975, Hepburn was arguably more popular than she’d ever been. This was due in no small part to her friend Garson Kanin’s unauthorized, best-selling 1972 “tell all” entitled Tracy And Hepburn: An Intimate Memoir. Though shocked by the invasion of her privacy, Kate used the public interest that the book generated to fuel her career, appearing on talk shows and even the 1974 Academy Awards (in pants, of course). As a result, in the 1970s, while Bette Davis was taking guest roles, Joan Crawford had retired, and Barbara Stanwyck "slummed" it in TV, Katharine Hepburn was as prolific as she’d ever been, starring in seven movies total. However, her popularity came at cost. Kate became in effect the curator of her own legacy, more valuable as a symbol of the past than as a well-respected thespian in the present.

Certainly, it was Katharine Hepburn the Legend that director Stuart Millar and producer Hal B. Wallis had in mind when they paired her with John Wayne in Rooster Cogburn. Five years after Wayne won his Academy Award for True Grit, Wallis’s wife Martha Hyer penned a sequel designed to play to its two stars’ greatest strengths: take the American Odyssey outline for True Grit, fill it with details from The African Queen (including more white water rapids), add a few pounds of nitroglycerin and some extra genre cliches about the death of the American West, and voila! Rooster Cogburn is born.

Westerns, Oscars, and a comparison Meryl Streep after the jump.

I have the strangest sense of deja vu.

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