Morning Glory
Directed by Lowell Sherman
Written by Howard J. Green from the play by Zoe Atkins
1933/US
RKO Radio Pictures
IMDb page
Repeat viewing/Amazon Prime rental
Eva Lovelace: I hope you’re going to tell me your name. I want you for my first friend in New York. Mine’s Eva Lovelace. It’s partly made up and partly real. It was Ada Love. Love’s my family name. I added the ‘lace.’ Do you like it, or would you prefer something shorter? A shorter name would be more convenient on a sign. Still, ‘Eva Lovelace in Camille,’ for instance, or ‘Eva Lovelace in Romeo and Juliet’ sounds very distinguished, doesn’t it?
Katharine Hepburn knocks it out of the park and wins her first Oscar for only her third film.
Young Eva Lovelace (Hepburn) comes to New York City straight off the little theater stage of her native Vermont and expects to take Broadway by storm. She is naive, a bit gouche, and obsessed with the theater. Though she is loaded with talent, she finds out that it is not that easy to break into it.
She walks straight into the office of Louis Easton, one of the biggest Broadway producers. Easton has his play already cast in his head and only reluctantly gives her a few minutes of his time at the urging of playwright Joseph Sheridan (Douglas Fairbanks Jr.). She meets old trooper Robert Harley Hedges (C. Aubrey Smith) who is amused by her non-stop stage-struck prattle and agrees to give her acting lessons. Eva’s career goes downhill rapidly from here and finally sputters to a complete halt. She is now starving.
She runs into Harley Hedges in a coffee shop where she has ordered only coffee and he takes pity on her and brings her to a cast party hosted by Easton. She proceeds to get really drunk on only two glasses of champagne. She goes from stumbling all over herself to delivering marvelous impromptu renditions of the Hamlet monologue and a speech from Romeo and Juliet to the astonished guests. Eventually she passes out and Easton takes advantage of her. She is now madly in love with him but he views the incident as a gigantic mistake. I will go no further.
For some reason, I didn’t expect to like this one as much as I did when I first saw it and it only improved on my second viewing. I thought the film was great and that Hepburn was fantastic. She captured the foolish over-confidence and fears of the young so perfectly. Recommended.
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I also rewatched “Back Street” (1932) and was once again captivated by Irene Dunne. I reviewed that movie here.
