Director: Gregory La Cava
USA 1937
92 min
Starring: Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, Gail Patrick, Lucille Ball, Andrea Leeds, Eve Arden and Ann Miller, among others.
Wow! What a film!
Stage Door is a fast-moving drama/comedy about a boardinghouse full of women waiting for their big break as actresses. The dialogue is quick and snappy, so this is probably one of those movies that only gets better with every time you see it!
They say that Gregory La Cava was a "woman director", and I bet you have to be really gifted to handle this crowd of big and promising actresses go, not making the film confusing. And it really manages not to be - the fact that all cthe haracters are interesting and take almost equal amount of space in the film is brilliant. You feel the cat claws in the air when Linda (Patrick) and Jean (Rogers) snap cleverly at each other, the clashing personality differences between the roommates Jean and Terry (Hepburn), and the dejected cynicism among the rest of the girls, with a stunningly beautiful Lucille Ball in the lead. The fact that Ann Miller managed to fake a birth certificate to get the role (she was only 14 here!) and pull off the dancing scenes with Rogers as an equal is simply admirable.
Scene: 14 year old Ann Miller and Ginger Rogers doing their dance routine. A slimy Adolphe Menjou keeps his eyes on the blonde one.
Hepburn, Ball and Rogers.
Scene: 14 year old Ann Miller and Ginger Rogers doing their dance routine. A slimy Adolphe Menjou keeps his eyes on the blonde one.
Hepburn, Ball and Rogers.And after C. K. Dexter Haven's constant lovestruck babbling about Gail Patrick [see here and here], I have come to aknowledge her too - so cool, down-to-earth and charmingly insulting. (I have to admit that I think she manages to steal every scene from the melodramatic Carole Lombard in My Man Godfrey, 1936, and that is something to admire!)
And Adolphe Menjou! I always thought he was such a gentleman, but what an unsympathizing upstart he was as the producer Anthony Powell! I felt sick when seeing how he did "his routine" on the hopeful actresses - inviting them to his flat, giving them champagne, turning off the light, talking about how their names are going to be written in lights... Aweful! And amusing.
Gregory La Cava was nominated for an Oscar for Best Director and Best Picture, and the screenplay got a nomination too. I can't really see why they didn't win. (I can't believe Hepburn wasn't nominated for her "The calla lilies are in bloom again" rehearsals! It can't be easy for a good actress to play a bad one.)
Quotes:
Terry: I see that, in addition to your other charms, you have that insolence generated by an inferior upbringing.
Jean: Hmm! Fancy clothes, fancy language and everything!
Terry: Unfortunately, I learned to speak English correctly.
Jean: That won't be of much use to you here. We all talk pig latin.
Jean: Do you mind if I ask a personal question?
Terry: Another one?
Jean: Are these trunks full of bodies?
Terry: Just those, but I don't intend to unpack them.
Eve: [after a dinner where Terry Randall has evidently spoken very eloquently about Shakespeare] Well, I don't like to gossip, but that new gal seems to have an awful crush on Shakespeare!
Susan: [jokingly] I wouldn't be surprised if they get married!
Mary Lou: [with genuine naiveté] Oh, you're foolin'! Shakespeare's dead!
Susan: [Feigning surprise, playing along to entertain the others] No!
Mary Lou: Well, if he's the same one that wrote "Hamlet", he is!
Eve: [playing along, too] Never heard of it.
Mary Lou: Well, certainly you must have heard of "Hamlet"!
Eve: Well, I meet so many people.
Eve: A pleasant little foursome. I predict a hatchet murder before the night's over.
The character that probably fascinated me most was Kay Hamilton, played by the Olivia De Havilland-lookalike Andrea Leeds. (Two years later she read for the part of Melanie in Gone With the Wind, a part that went to De Havilland.)
Kay plays an actress, who already had her success and is now forgotten. She has gotten her eyes on a part in a new play and puts all her energy in getting the part (at one point leading her to faint of exhaustion and malnutrition), but that part goes to Hepburn's Terry Randall.
Andrea Leeds received an Academy Award nomination for her performance as Kay, well deserved.
When I saw her in Stage Door I was so fascinated with her acting, that I simply couldn't understand why I hadn't heard of her before. She was obviously a pretty popular actress in the late 1930's, but she left her film career in 1940 to become a housewife. I think the motion picture industry really lost something there.
Andrea Leeds - the one that got away:
