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This is a great movie, one of Katharine Hepburn's best, a movie with great writing of characters, dialogue, several memorable, wrenching scenes, and a great cast. From a Booth Tarkington story, it is about a girl/young woman who tries to fit in with the local "smart set," a group of people with a lot more money than she has, who are not of her class at all. The way this is made painfully clear to her, the way she becomes aware of what these people are and the way life is, is Hepburn at her haunting best.
The writing is so perceptive and the cast so good, that behavior that might have come across as annoyingly complaining, for example, instead is understandable as one of the harsh conditions of life, and the characters are each given their own sympathetic motivations; you don't just dislike them, I think; you know what they were trying to do. This movie features one of the all-time great sequences as far as I'm concerned, when Alice goes to the party of snooty rich peoople and tries, increasingly badly, painfully, to fit in. The others obviously consider her inferior, and a butt of jokes, her clothes are apparently behind the times--a sin--she cannot get anyone to dance with her, (brought there by her brother), and notices they flighty, "fashionable" girls being fought over for dances. Everything she does, fails, makes it worse. Finally, after several incidents that show only how much she does not belong, where nothing goes right, she leaves and goes home. There, deeply hurt, she goes by her Mom's bedroom, and is asked how it went. Instantly, she puts on the behavior everyone who has ever lived knows: feeling miserable, she smiles and pretends everything was just great, just so she can end the conversation. She goes finally into her room, a pause, and gives one of the all-time great crying scenes--subtle, quiet, understated, sad.
There are two plots going on during this movie--one, as Alice starts going around with one of the rich boys from the party, and what the motivation there might be, and, two, the dire economic conditions of the family, the Mom feeling the Dad has been cheated all these years by the boss, and their eventual decision to open a glue factory, using a formula the father helped invent. This then becomes a real disaster as it is discovered, with real threat from the rich boss. There are several scenes that show the class differences between these two families, Alice Adams's and the boyfriend's, but they are so well-written that they all play as drama building up to the climax, which will probably not be good. There is a dinner scene with Hattie McDaniel as a hired maid who appears to have no background at this sort of work, for comic relief, but which also shows the totally uncomfortable relation between these two unbridgeable classes.
The ending is changed form the original Booth Tarkington story, which was very bleak and stuck to the realistic prospects for a lower-middle-class girl, but the movie is a lot more enjoyable, and gives hope that this one rich person, anyway, has broken free. This is just a powerful movie, I think, and is one of my favorite movies.
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