MORNING GLORY

US, 1933, 74 minutes, Black and white.
Katharine Hepburn, Douglas Fairbanks Jr, Adolphe Menjou, C. Aubrey Smith.
Directed by Lowell Sherman.

The main reason for seeing Morning Glory is Katharine Hepburn’s performance in her third film. She won her first Oscar for this performance (later winning for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter and On Golden Pond). She was directed by actor Lowell Gilmore who moved from acting to directing including Mae West’s She Done Him Wrong and began work on Becky Sharp but died before it was completed. Douglas Fairbanks is a dashing playwright. Adolphe Menjou a manipulating producer. C. Aubrey Smith a fading British actor.

The film has the conventions of the theatre story, the would-be actress, her chatter and mannerisms, eccentricities – and reciting Hamlet’s Soliloquy and the Romeo and Juliet balcony scene at a party – and the main actress giving up because of money demands and the understudy taking her place and moving to success. The question is whether this early success would simply be a morning glory and fade.

1. What is the major impression of this film now? Is it easy to gauge its impact in the thirties?

2. The film as a product of the early thirties: the early years of talking pictures, as based on a play, studio sets,
styles of acting and dialogue?

3. The impact of the young Katharine Hepburn in her first Oscar winning role? The qualities of her performance, their impact?

4. The importance of the title for the film's themes? The later version was called Stage Struck. How appropriate? The main lines of interest? its theatrical background? How well could the audience identify with Eva Lovelace?

5. What kind of girl was Eva? The truth about her background? The contrast of the stories about herself? Her pushiness and her naivety? Her ambitions and her ingenuousness? Her success and worship of the theatre? Was she real?

7. Audience sympathy and interest in her? her push with Eastern? Her encounter with Hedges, her English lessons?

8. Her sense of pride, her inbred snobbery? Her suffering poverty, her learning?

9. How interestingly developed were the characters of Eastern, Sheridan? Types of the theatre world? Hedges and his humanity? Wheater and the picture of the successful arrogant actress ?

10. How central was the party? Types of people there, the set piece for a theatrical film? Her being invited, her dress, her making herself at home, her talk and chatter, her drinking? The importance of the performance and the drama? The impact of her acting? Audience response to her success?

11. The personal, repercussions for her, emotional, her selling herself, the dangers open to her with her relations with the producer?

12. Her final triumph and its impact? The beginning of her life?

13. How interesting a film about the theatre world? Themes of truth and appearances, ambitions, selfishness, ruthlessness? American values?