Selected
Filmography
Bringing
Up Baby (1938)
The
Philadelphia Story (1940)
Adam's
Rib (1949)
The
African Queen (1951)
From my
first glimpse of Katherine Hepburn in Bringing up Baby I knew it was
love. That wildly coiffed hair, that drawling cultured voice, those outfits! I
thought she was hilarious, and more importantly, she was strong. Not in the
boxing sense (though all the golf she played probably meant she had a killer
right hook) but in her determination to get what she wanted, in this case Cary
Grant. From start to finish, she is the one moving the story forward; her
actions determine what happens to the characters around her. Admittedly she
does cause rather lot of chaos, but hysterical witty chaos.
Whilst
the Hollywood of Hepburn’s time often produced strong female leads, their
behaviour throughout the film was usually contradicted by the ending (see Gilda, Double Indemnity).
However,
a drippy ending will not erase the hour and a half of entertainment an audience
has sat through, and although Hepburn's films often involve her embarrassing
herself in front of her male lead, she somehow always manages to come out of it
with her dignity intact.
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