THIS POST IS ALSO AVAILABLE AT margaretperry.org.
“I believe, I hope, audiences have forgotten I ever made that film. I try not to say bad things about pictures I chose to make and took money for making them, but this one doesn't count.” (Katharine Hepburn, Chandler 216)When THE IRON PETTICOAT was released in the middle of America's McCarthy Era of the 1950s, it failed as a political statement, as a comedy, and as a romance. It failed financially. Scholars have more or less dismissed it as an epic fail in every regard, labelling it one of Hepburn's major flops. However, the film contains an intriguing feminist angle that is not ridiculed and tamed, though the structure of the story is presumed to be headed in that general direction.
