Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #17419 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-01-07
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Black & White, Closed-captioned, DVD-Video, Subtitled, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Subtitled in: English, French, Spanish
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 99 minutes

Amazon.com
Hollywood's ability to conjure up a bittersweet small town (on the studio back lot, to be sure) has rarely been on better display than in Alice Adams, a gentle adaptation of a Booth Tarkington novel. For that matter, Katharine Hepburn rarely had a better chance to radiate her early youthful glow. She plays the title character, a lonely misfit who tries--too hard--to fit in with the snooty debutantes in her class-conscious town. Fred MacMurray is the suitor who miraculously feels comfortable in the front-porch swing of the faded Adams home. In the exquisitely timed comedy of MacMurray's miserable dinner with Alice's family, director George Stevens displays the tools he learned directing Laurel and Hardy two-reelers, and the sequence becomes a funny-painful classic of social embarrassment. Hepburn's performance, whether Alice is chattering pretentiously or briefly lowering her guard and revealing her loneliness, is simply incandescent. --Robert Horton

From the Back Cover
Katharine Hepburn is Alice Adams, a naive young woman who aspires to greater social status. Wanting to escape the confines of her middle-class upbringing, she presents herself to friends as a member of high-society. Then, one night as an elegant party where she really doesn't belong, she falls in love with Fred MacMurray--a veritable Prince Charming who believes Alice's fabricated stories of family wealth. But, when he's invited to meet the Adams, the ruse becomes painfully obvious. Yet, in the end, love conquers all.

This film was a smash success in the 1930s, winning Katharine Hepburn an Oscar nomination. It's still fresh and funny today with its message that it isn't the position you're born to that matters, it's the person you choose to become.

Customer Reviews

Classic Hepburn
If you like old black and white movies, you will enjoy watching some of the greatest actors in this classic drama.

Painful to Watch, for Various Reasons
Hepburn at her youngest and most beautiful, but a film flawed by cliché, casting, and motive. The movie comes from a Tarkington book that had inexplicably won a Pulitzer prize and is a lame expose of small town class systems and social climbing - Tarkington's book became a screenplay with none of the bite or insight of Sinclair Lewis' work. As to the casting, everyone except Hepburn delivers a 2 dimensional 30's-ish performance except the father who falls perilously close to muggery and caricature. He is a cross between the cowardly lion and a Little Rascal's parent.

Hepburn herself plays a young woman who is increasingly hypocritical and a liar in pursuit of a young man. The dinner sequence, justly remembered in Hollywood, shows her as luminous, bright, and brittle. However, it's all like watching Jerry Lewis play the idiot doomed to fail - very, very painful. The final redemption, after Hepburn becomes an honest woman, is less than believable. We had no character development of the Fred MacMurray character, so when he does the right thing, its because it's a Hollywood ending.

Leonard Maltin rated this 3 ½ in his guide - shame on you Leonard!

Simply Darling!
A delightful movie from 1935 starring the late great Katherine Hepburn and Fred MacMurray. Katherine Hepburn plays a middle class girl trying to fit into an upper class society. Of course, she falls in love with a rich man who's totally smitten with her from the moment he sees her across a crowded room. Throughout the movie Alice tries to hide her embarrassment of her family's inappropriate etiquette and lack of funds. Fred MacMurray was just darling and full of charm and smiles as the smitten rich boy looking for true love. Hepburn and MacMurray provided excellent chemistry for this black and white film that still oozes with romantic feelings. I look forward to watching it again. Reviewed by M. E. Wood