Poll: What's your favorite Katharine Hepburn/Spencer Tracy film?

5 Films that Changed the Way We View Sexuality

This post is written in conjunction with the second annual Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Garbo Laughs and Pussy Goes Grrr!

As we continue to look more closely at lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender themes in films this week, it only seems fitting to list those seminal movies which tackled these topics head-on. These are my personal favorites, films that drastically changed the way I view gender and sexuality in our society. I will note that there are some movies that I haven't seen that may be on your own list, like Brian Gilbert's bio-pic WILDE (1997) (starring the greatest wonderfullest Steven Fry!) or Rouben Mamoulian's ever-popular QUEEN CHRISTINA (1933). I would also like to give an honorable mention to Geoffrey Sax's TV-miniseries Tipping the Velvet (2002), which is one of the very few portrayals of female homosexuality on screen.

NOTE: these films are listed in no particular order.

1. Jack Gold's  THE NAKED CIVIL SERVANT (1975) is a coming-of-age story about flamboyant gay icon Quentin Crisp (1908-1999). This film is both poignant and very amusing. The English Crisp is played by John Hurt who won a BAFTA for his amazing performance of the famous writer and wit.

2. Edouard Molinaro's  LA CAGE AUX FOLLES (1978) or Mike Nichols' THE BIRDCAGE (1996) are both about two gay cabaret owners who must pretend to be straight for the sake of their son who wishes to marry a girl with two conservative parents. The original French play was written in 1973 and represents the first truly positive portrayal of homosexuals. The popularity of the 1978 film vastly contributed to the transformative power of this film in altering the public's thought about homosexuality.  I especially love the performances of Robin Williams and Nathan Lane as the two gay dads in the 1996 version. Both actors have that special knack for combining humor and tenderness and that really comes across in this movie.

3. Blake Edwards' VICTOR/VICTORIA (1982) is one of my favorite movies of all time, probably because I adore both Julie Andrews and James Garner. This is one of those films that uses comedy to try to break down stereotypes about gender by displaying the complete confusion that arises when one tries to define gender and sexuality. Great song and dance numbers too!

4. Julian Jarrold's KINKY BOOTS (2005): When Charles Price inherits his father's shoe factory, he soon learns that the business is failing. A chance encounter with Lola, a cabaret drag queen, gives him the idea to start a new line of footwear for men who dress as women. Lola and Charles must struggle with gender stereotypes in order for their working relationship, and their business venture, to thrive. Another very funny movie with a lot of heart.

5.  George Cukor's SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935) stars Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Hepburn's character is dressed as a boy for most of the movie because she and her father are trying to evade the authorities. Although this movie was an epic failure at the time, it has become a LGBT cult classic in recent years. For a full analysis of this film's queer themes, visit this post!

What do you think defines a queer classic? Does a film need to directly address gender and sexuality issues or can those themes be more latent? I'd be very interested to hear what films you would put on your list and how they compare with the movies listed here!

And the winners are...

Over the past month or so I've posted four polls about Katharine Hepburn movies and co-stars. Although you can continue to cast your votes on those polls, I thought I'd give all those who have already voted a run-down on the scores.

What's your favorite Katharine Hepburn classic? has 20 votes so far and they are pretty evening distributed across the board. BRINGING UP BABY (1938) is in the lead with five votes, followed by LITTLE WOMEN (1934) with four votes. THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940) and AFRICAN QUEEN (1951) are both tied for last place with three votes each. The remaining five votes selected "other" and that list includes to votes for THE LION IN WINTER (1968), and one each for HOLIDAY (1938), ON GOLDEN POND (1982), and CHRISTOPHER STRONG (1933).

15 people have voted on What's your favorite Katharine Hepburn Oscar win? GUESS WHO'S COMING TO DINNER (1967) and THE LION IN WINTER (1968), for which Katharine Hepburn won back-to-back Oscars, are tied for the lead with six votes each. MORNING GLORY (1933), Hepburn's first ever Oscar nomination and win, is trailing with only two votes and Hepburn's final Oscar win, ON GOLDEN POND (1982) brings up the rear with a single vote.

Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn made four films together and you can vote for your favorite in What's your favorite Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn movie? Nine of the fourteen votes went to the ever-popular BRINGING UP BABY (1938). THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940) has only three votes and HOLIDAY (1938) only two. Unfortunately, SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935) brings up the rear without a solitary vote.

The most recent poll Who's your favorite of Hepburn's leading men? gives several options, but so far people have only voted on two: six votes have gone to Cary Grant and five to Spencer Tracy. John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, Henry Fonda, and Peter O'Toole are also listed, but no one seems overly impressed with their performances, apparently!

These are all running polls, so feel free to cast your vote at any time. If you don't see the answer you would like, you can always enter your own in the "other" option. Let me know if you have an idea for a poll question and I will post it for you. You can see all the existing polls under the "Polls" tab at the top of the blog, and there is also a link to each individual poll in the Table of Contents. Thanks for voting!

Queer Film Blogathon 2012: SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935)

This post is written in conjunction with the second annual Queer Film Blogathon hosted by Garbo Laughs and Pussy Goes Grrrr! The first film that came to mind for me when I signed up to participate in this blogathon (my first, as it happens!) was George Cukor's SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935), the first film of four to pair the great acting talents of Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant.

The idea to make a film of SYLVIA SCARLETT was entirely the brainchild of Katharine Hepburn and her director friend George Cukor (who was himself, by all accounts, homosexual). He called it "our love child" and she called it "our flopperoo." Hepburn invested some of her own money into the project:

"I sank some of my own money into SYLVIA SCARLETT. 'Sank' is the right word. I could have dropped it into the ocean with bricks tied to it and had a better chance of seeing it again" (Chandler 93).

"I always kept a little foolish money on the side. Foolish money is money I thought I could afford to be foolish with. It wasn't the money that was foolish. It was I" (Ibid., 94).

The preview showing of SYLVIA SCARLETT was a legendary catastrophe. Hepburn sat next to costar Natalie Paley (who plays her romantic rival) and they couldn't figure out why the audience weren't laughing at the funnier scenes. At one point during the movie, audiences stared to leave. Afterwards Cukor and Hepburn went up to producer Pandro Berman (who never wanted to make the picture in the first place) and told him they'd make another movie for him for nothing. He said he never wanted to see either of them ever again (he would - they made a lot more pictures together both at RKO and MGM).

However badly SYLVIA SCARLETT did at the box office, Hepburn herself received some fairly positive notices (Edwards, 145):

"The dynamic Miss Hepburn is the handsomest boy of the season. I don't care for SYLVIA SCARLETT a bit, but I do think Miss Hepburn is much better in it than she was as the small-town wallflower in ALICE ADAMS" (New York Harold Tribune).

"SYLVIA SCARLETT reveals the interesting fact that Katharine Hepburn is better looking as a boy than a woman" (Time).

"SYLVIA SCARLETT is a tour de force, made possible by Miss Hepburn's physical resemblance to the adolescent male" (New York Post).

SYLVIA SCARLETT is a film nested in multiple layers of doubles and contradictions. First of all, the subject matter contains themes of gender ambiguity which are paired off in doubles, the most prominent of which is that Sylvia/Sylvester is a girl masquerading as a boy. There is also the dual nationality aspect of the film which places the Hepburn character in particular in a sort of no man's land of identity. The film itself failed to win over audiences because it was simultaneously too safe yet too risqué. The result is altogether too ambiguous.

SYLVIA SCARLETT is about a girl and her father, Henry (Edmund Gwenn), who are forced to flee France because he has been fiddling with the accounts. In an attempt to deceive the authorities, Sylvia cuts off all her hair and disguises herself as a boy. On the boat to England, she/he and her father meet Monkey (Cary Grant), an English con-artist with whom they join forces. The group is joined by a cockney housemaid named Maudie, who becomes Henry’s new wife, and the troupe goes to the English seaside as a traveling band of performers. It is there they meet local Bohemian artist Michael Fane (Brian Aherne). Sylvia immediately falls for him and he himself gets a "queer feeling" whenever he looks at the boy.

The Hepburn character is confronted with a struggle that often accompanies "doubles roles," roles in which the character switches between two identities. This is especially true in this case if we examine Sylvia/Sylvester's relationship with the father figure. The opening sequence in the movie (which was tacked on at the last minute in an attempt to justify Sylvia's radical transformation into Sylvester) explains to the audience how the Hepburn character both adopts yet resists the dead mother's position in relation to the father. On the one hand, she insists on remaining "faithful" to the father by refusing to marry. But on the other hand, she rejects femininity by refusing to be "weak and silly." It is this strange attempt to negotiate the incompatible that renders this film literally in-credible.

A certain theatrical thread runs through this movie, tying together various themes of oppositional identity. It is a radical film in the sense that it defines femininity as an act and gender as a matter of style. At the point in the film when Sylvester reverts back to Sylvia, another character asks an extremely significant question: "Which is which?" That is the real question mark of the entire film! The sexual ambiguity of the Hepburn character becomes more evident as Sylvia and Michael attempt to negotiate the definitions of gender identity. As the film progresses, we forget which of Sylvia/Sylvester's genders is an act and which is her true nature. Without a doubt, Hepburn is much more convincing as a boy than as a girl and this is very apparent in her romantic scenes, which have a tendency to work against her credibility: the more feminine and girly she behaves, the less valid her performance becomes.

Sylvia/Sylvester's relationship between the other female characters of the film is also worth taking a closer look at. As in two other notably popular LGBT films, QUEEN CHRISTINA (1933) and MOROCCO (1930), SYLVIA SCARLETT does contain a lesbian kiss. This is one of those moments when the film could have been more ambitious but chose to err on the side of caution by having the Hepburn character reject a kiss from another woman - another woman who, incidentally, believed she was kissing a man in the first place. It's an odd scene which serves little purpose but to highlight the gender trap which the Hepburn character has set for herself. She cannot devote herself to true masculinity nor true femininity unless she wants to cross the line from the hetero- to the homo-sexual. 

The Kiss

Sylvia also has an odd relationship to the woman who would be her romantic rival for Michael. Although Lily is catty and jealous, Sylvia refuses to reciprocate those disgustingly traditional female stereotypes. Instead she ideologically allies with Lily and in fact saves her life in order to allow her to be with the man she, Sylvia, loves (this sort of female allegiance can also be found in HOLIDAY (1938), another Hepburn/Grant film). When Monkley questions her devotion to her female rival, she rejects his cynical view of life and says, "She was willing to die for him. That must count for something" and "It might be a pig of a world for you and me, but not for her, if I can help it." Then when she goes to bring Michael back to Lily, she explains, "You mustn't let her be [this unhappy]." 

Allies or rivals?

When the film places Hepburn back into male costume toward the end of the film, at a point when every other character knows she is a woman, and as she continues to take the part of ally rather than rival to the other female characters, her status as "another one of the guys" is solidified. She and her would-be lover are shown as either homosexual man and man or heterosexual/asexual man and man. It isn't until circumstances force them to chose is the issue somewhat resolved. Even then, the resolution is incomplete, because we are unsure whether they will prefer to continue are rather confused gender charade with Sylvia as Sylvester, or if we can assume that at some point she will attempt to revert to complete femininity (a feat we doubt she can actually achieve anyway).

Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn

Although the film fails to come to any definite conclusions about gender and sexuality, it does follow through on many of the issues about gender which are present in many of Katharine Hepburn's other film roles. Like many of her other more radically feminist film, it directly addresses the question of gender identity, even if it does confuse the matter more than clarify it. I find it an immensely humorous film - Cary Grant is really at the top of his game as a performer, even is her does have a more minor part. He really shines as the cockney acrobatic circus performer. Remember that it's in another Hepburn/Grant film that he becomes the first character ever to use the term "gay" for its homosexual connotations (in BRINGING UP BABY (1938)). I encourage you to see SYLVIA SCARLETT and enjoy it, both as a fun comedy, and as an examination of the representation of LGBT themes in classic Hollywood films.

Poll: Who's your favorite of Hepburn's leading men?

The Most Radically Feminist Films of Katharine Hepburn

Katharine Hepburn has been called a feminist film persona and a 20^th century feminist icon, but few have really delved into the sources and manifestations of the term “feminist” as it relates to this great star. Is she called a feminist because she insisted on wearing pants in a time when most women were expected to wear skirts and high heels? We all know the story about the time the studio, in an effort to force her into dresses and skirts, stole the trousers from her trailer and Hepburn paraded around the studio in her underwear until her slacks were returned. Her feminism was also manifested in her choice of a career over marriage. Although these aspects of her life choices contribute to our image of the feminist, it is within her films themselves that the strength of her feminism is most prevalent.

M. Carey Thomas of Bryn Mawr

Hepburn’s feminist choices and tendencies can be traced back to a couple different sources, but I believe that the major feminizing influence on Katharine Hepburn is Bryn Mawr College, one of the Seven Sister’s colleges on the East coast. Not only did Hepburn herself go there, but the major female influences of her childhood also attended, including her mother, her Aunt Edith, and her mother’s friends from college, “Aunts” Mary Towle and Bertha Rembaugh (prominent lawyers living in Greenwich Village). At Bryn Mawr, Hepburn’s mother’s generation adopted the feminist principles of the college’s president M. Carey Thomas. Katharine Hepburn was raised in the midst of the Bohemian society that these early feminist created for themselves - a female society of free thought, speech, and action. The Hepburn feminist persona is a product of the feminism she experienced first-hand as a child.

Although many of Hepburn's films contain themes of feminism, her most radically feminist films can be divided into three categories: those in which communities of women are central to the plot/story, those in which Hepburn portrays strong female characters from literature and history, and those films which directly address the "woman issue." 

Hepburn as Jo from
LITTLE WOMEN (1933)

In a previous post, I described the nature of films in which communities of women are featured the way in which such films break down stereotypes about female professionals. The Hepburn films that follow the "communities of women" structure are LITTLE WOMEN (1933), QUALITY STREET (1937), STAGE DOOR (1937), DESK SET (1957), THE MADWOMAN OF CHAILLOT (1969), and THE TROJAN WOMEN (1971).

Hepburn plays women from literature and history a number of times: LITTLE WOMEN (1933), MARY OF SCOTLAND (1936), SONG OF LOVE (1947), and THE LION IN WINTER (1968). As you can see, these women are characteristically  independent and freethinking individuals. In two of these films, Hepburn is portraying women of power, women in leadership roles.

Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in
ADAM'S RIB (1949)

Only a couple of Hepburn's films directly address the question of woman's equality, or gender issues generally, but these films are the most significant because of the pertinence of their message: LITTLE WOMEN (1933), SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935), A WOMAN REBELS (1936), WOMAN OF THE YEAR (1942), ADAM'S RIB (1949), and ROOSTER COGBURN (1975). One could argue that a couple of these films don't meet the qualifications for the category, but the gender stereotypes are so central to the thrust of the story, I chose to include them in this group.


The films listed here make up more than 25% of the movies Katharine Hepburn made in her 60-year career. Even in those films that didn't qualify for these categories, Hepburn carries the standard of female autonomy high. LITTLE WOMEN is the only film that overlapped in these three divisions, which goes to show how significant the Jo March character is to the feminist ideal. M. Carey Thomas herself used to sign her diary as Jo when she was a girl. George Cukor, who directed Hepburn in that film and many others, often remarked that LITTLE WOMEN was Hepburn's seminal film because she actually was Jo, in more ways than one!

As Eleanor of Aquitaine in THE LION IN WINTER (1968)
(with Peter O'Toole)

If I were to compose a canon of Hepburn's most feminist films, I would choose only a couple from each of the groups listed above. Clearly, LITTLE WOMEN would make the top of the list, closely followed by ADAM'S RIB, in which Hepburn and Tracy play husband and wife lawyers on opposite sides of the courtroom - she defending the female position, he the male. The two films which best embody the manifestation of female autonomy are STAGE DOOR and DESK SET, not because the Hepburn character is radically feminist, but because the film text as a whole supports a feminist agenda. The last film I would add to the canon would be THE LION IN WINTER, because Eleanor of Aquitaine was a feminist in her own right long before there was a fancy word for it. Hepburn really did her research for that part and felt an immediate affinity for the queen who had lived hundreds of years before her. There is no doubt she deserved the Oscar she won for that role.


I hope you enjoy watching these films! I always love to hear what you think about Katharine Hepburn as a feminist persona. Do you agree with my list? What changes would you make? What films would you add or take away? Thanks for reading and happy viewing!

Hepburn and the Anti-HUAC Brigade

Hollywood A-Listers, heading by Humphrey Bogart and his  wife Lauren Bacall
head to Washington to protest the HUAC Hollywood report.

On 8 June, 1949, the House Un-American Activities Committee published a report labeling more than 300 film industry individuals Communists. Aurora of The Cinementals writes about it in her recent post.

Although Hepburn always claimed that she wasn’t political, she did tend to follow her parents’ liberal example. Very early on in the McCarthy era, Hepburn took a stand against the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). At a mass rally at Gilmore Stadium in May 1947 featured Progressive Party presidential candidate Henry Wallace, Hepburn, clad in a stunning red dress, delivered a speech written by screenwriter Dalton Trumbo in which she declared "Silence the artist, and you silence the most articulate voice the people have. Destroy culture and you destroy one of the strongest sources of inspiration from which a people can draw strength to fight for a better life" (Mann, 345).

John Huston, then vice president of the Directors Guild, met with director William Wyler and screenwriter Philip Dunne to create a group called the Committee for the First Amendment. CFA organized Hollywood's liberals and left to resist HUAC, and lyricist Ira Gershwin hosted a star-studded anti-witch-hunt party that included Humphrey Bogart, Lauren Bacall, Edward G. Robinson, Judy Garland, Gene Kelly, Burt Lancaster, Danny Kaye, Billy Wilder and others. Their position was that the impending inquisition had nothing to do with communism per se but was about civil liberties, especially free speech. Some 500 people signed an anti-HUAC petition.

The woman whose mother threw a party to celebrate
the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917

Poll: What's your favorite Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn movie?

HOLIDAY (1938)

Yes, they did actually
make this film.

By the end of the 1930s it had appeared that Katharine Hepburn's star had already risen and fallen. Due to a string of commercial failures (BREAK OF HEARTS, SYLVIA SCARLETT, A WOMAN REBELS, QUALITY STREET, to name a few), the independent movie theatres had labelled Hepburn "box office poison." This bad press made it difficult for even her good films of the period (ALICE ADAMS, STAGE DOOR, BRINGING UP BABY) to turn a profit for the studio. When RKO Radio Pictures offered Katharine Hepburn a part in a film entitled MOTHER CAREY'S CHICKENS, she knew it was time for her to quit that studio and move on to greener pastures. She paid RKO $75,000 to loan her out to Columbia for HOLIDAY (for which she was paid a handsome $150,000).

Hope Williams
as Linda Seton

This wasn't the first time Hepburn had seen this material. After her graduation from Bryn Mawr in 1928, she got a job as understudy to Hope Williams who was playing the lead in Philip Barry's play Holiday on Broadway (it was while working as Williams' understudy that she married her beau from college days, Ludlow Ogden Smith, and moved to New York City). However, when Hepburn remembers this early opportunity in show business, she says "I soon realized that Hope was a very healthy girl. It wasn't that I wished her anything bad. She was very talented and very nice. But I understood that being an understudy was almost worse than not being in the theatre at all, if you understudied someone who never missed a performance" (Chandler, 122). When Williams offered to stay home for a matinee and allow Hepburn perform in her stead, Hepburn turned her down. "An excess of pride," explains Hepburn. "It was what I suffered from." Hepburn would later use material from Holiday for her first ever screen test, which is how she caught the eye of director and long-time friend George Cukor.

Linda and Johnny perform an
acrobatic stunt in HOLIDAY

HOLIDAY is a very thoughtful story, bordering on the philosophical. Johnny Case (Cary Grant) is engaged to Julia Seton (Doris Nolan) only ten days after meeting her on vacation at Lake Placid. When he comes home to meet the family, he confides in Julia's older sister Linda (Hepburn) about his plans for the future. His dream is to quickly make enough money to quit work and take an extended holiday so that he can take time to think and discover what it is he is working for. Although he and Linda understand the grand potential of his scheme, he has a harder time convincing his fiancee and their father the viability of the plan. Linda and Johnny are both taken aback by Julia's reluctance to stray from the severe conventionality of the patriarchal way of life exhibited by other members of their social class. Linda, like Johnny, has always despised wealth and the lifestyle it forces upon its subjects. Julia and her father, on the other hand, aspire to expand the family's fortune and respectability as far as possible and are unsympathetic towards Johnny's attempt to excuse himself from the cycle of acquiring wealth and privilege. Johnny is conflicted between his love from Julia and his desire to follow his dreams. Linda is conflicted by her love for her sister, and her sister's potential happiness with Johnny, and her own romantic feelings for him and the life he wants to pursue. (NOTE: In a future post on this blog, I intend to pursue a feminist reading of HOLIDAY, examining the role of the Hepburn character in the narrative of the story, as well as the more subtle nuances concerning the representation of women in the film text as a whole.)

"Don't you say a word about Leopold! He's very sensitive!"
"Your's?"
"Uh-huh - Looks like me."

Although critics praised HOLIDAY, and Katharine Hepburn's performance in it, depression-era audiences did not enjoy some of the inherent themes. While 30s movie-goers loved to observe "the privileged class enjoying its privileges" (THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)), they were not sympathetic to the Johnny character who wanted to chuck a good job out the window so that he could have the freedom to think. America was looking for pragmatism and optimism during the 1930s, and Johnny's happy-go-lucky scheme to quit work and philosophize about life was too impractical to be attractive.

Katharine Hepburn did not linger long in Hollywood after the release of HOLIDAY. Selznick was tempted to cast her as Scarlett in GONE WITH THE WIND, but she withdrew her name from that contest. Though she must have been aware of what such a role would mean for her dwindling career, Hepburn never felt that the part was right for her. When Vivien Leigh was discovered, Hepburn returned East for a year or so of self-imposed exile from Hollywood. She would not be in Hollywood for all of 1939, universally acknowledged to be the biggest year in cinema history, but she would return in 1940 in a big way with THE PHILADELPHIA STORY.

Blog Updates

There have been a lot of changes around here, making The Great Katharine Hepburn a much more user-friendly site to navigate! Check out my new pages via the tabs along the top of the blog, just under the blog title. The Table of Contents groups posts by category, making it easier to navigate to the posts your most interested in. Under Polls you will find a collection of ongoing surveys about Katharine Hepburn and her movies - don't forget to place your vote! In the Gallery you will find a display of Katharine Hepburn photos by prominent photographers. I will also be adding behind-the-scenes pictures and personal family photos of the Hepburn clan. Stay tuned for Gallery updates! The Bibliography tab will lead you to a list of books by and about the great lady herself. Under Filmography, you will find a list of all Katharine Hepburn's movies, in chronological order, with relevant information about each picture she made. The Shop is now open! There you can view Katharine Hepburn products for sale on Amazon. You will also find Amazon links to Hepburn movies and books at the end and within the text of each post. It's the best way to find the best price for the best products!

I hope you enjoy exploring my blog! If you have any comments or suggestions about how I can improve the look and functionality of this blog, please let me know and I will make adjustments accordingly! Thank you for being loyal Katharine Hepburn fans!

Poll: What's your favorite Katharine Hepburn Oscar win?