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Cinderella and the glue factory. George Stevens' introduction of the provincial main street reflected on storefront windows is a Hal Roach gag that goes into The Magnificent Ambersons: The camera pans right across boutique marquees, tilts down to catch Alice (Katharine Hepburn) leaving a thrift store, then pans left to follow her as she slips into a corsage shop too pricey for her. (Dissolve to her furtively picking a bouquet of violets at the park.) Money is family, an ailing father (Fred Stone) and a needling mother (Ann Shoemaker) embody the middle-class the prattling heroine seeks to shed, her older brother (Frank Albertson) takes her to the upper-crust ball in a wheezing jalopy. The party sequence, with Alice getting her feet crushed on the dance floor by a wistful momma's boy, suggests Austen's "rotary motion attributed to giddiness and false steps," or Visconti by way of Charley Chase. It builds to a sweltering family dinner with the town's well-heeled bachelor (Fred MacMurray), a sustained bit of comic excruciation. (Look at Hattie McDaniel's eyes and find not shuffling servility, but undisguised scorn for the characters' pretenses.) All women are aspiring actresses, says the old clerk, though Stevens' deadpan-humane approach dilutes Booth Tarkington's critique: The camera picks up the mortified smiles and anxious guffaws of the wannabe bourgeois, yet in Hepburn's close-ups her vulnerability and intelligence glow. That "sadly happy" feeling on the margins of the social whirl, a fable of "a pushing sort of girl" seeking emotional acceptance while remaining true to her disruptive contradictions. "What kind of woman are you?" "I'm just me." A Place in the Sun continues and darkens the thematic exploration. With Evelyn Venable, Charley Grapewin, Hedda Hopper, Jonathan Hale, and Grady Sutton. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |