Restless Grace: Katharine Hepburn at Il Cinema Ritrovato
Framed as “Katharine Hepburn: Feminist, Acrobat and Lover”, the Bologna retrospective paid tribute to one of the great nonconformists of classical Hollywood. The selection, curated by feminist theorist Molly Haskell, oscillated between memorable early disruptions of identity norms and later returns to a more “tamed” femininity.
Despite appearances – including her still-unmatched record for most Oscar wins for acting – Katharine Hepburn’s career was more of a bumpy ride. It saw its fair share of critical successes and box office flops alike. She vexed stiff, reactionary commentators just as she readily threw herself – especially in the latter half of her career – into crowd-pleasing commercial fare. Sometimes – as in the peak year of 1938, when she starred back-to-back in Bringing Up Baby (dir. Howard Hawks) and Holiday (dir. George Cukor), both opposite Cary Grant – those post-facto distinctions hardly apply. That career high – judging by the enduring acclaim both films now enjoy – coincided with a moment of personal crisis: in the same year, Hepburn bought out her contract with RKO at great personal expense and moved abruptly to Columbia. This achievement, born of tension – if not outright adversity – is emblematic of an actress now recognised as a forerunner of gender fluidity and nonconformity, a trait that could only antagonise the conservative production machine that was Hollywood under the Hays Code.
Given Il Cinema Ritrovato’s aura of cinephile dumpster-diving – where long-lost obscurities and long-coveted rediscoveries jostle against each other – this program dedicated to Hepburn, intentionally not exhaustive but rather introductory, felt a bit like festival comfort food. No doubt many filled the theatres simply to revisit films that, to borrow Jean Louis Schefer’s phrase, “shaped their adolescence.” I myself chose certain titles from the selection just to enjoy myself – and, in a way, to rest. I say “in a way” because, frankly, few films are as exhausting as Bringing Up Baby: with its nonstop stream of inane actions, the film is the purest expression of zany, high-energy cinema – a constant physical trial that somehow still feels like home.
Bringing Up Baby was, unsurprisingly, the program’s peak of virtuosity. A film everyone has seen and re-seen, it nonetheless manages to retain its improbable air of wonder. My own interest was based on the fact that, presenting a society girl (Hepburn) who relentlessly torments a nerdy bespectacled palaeontologist (Grant) she’s fallen for, the film is a display of the highest formal sophistication deployed in the service of sheer nonsense. No grand theme or serious thesis comes to interrupt this gratuitous spectacle, this shameless unrefinement built with the most refined cinematic craft – unlike, say, Adam’s Rib (1949), Cukor’s later progressive comedy where Hepburn fervently defends gender equality in the courtroom. Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong with films that carry a message – what I mean is that, from today’s perspective, where it’s rare to find such a wacky film executed with this much artistry and control, a nonsense that is also an artistic pinnacle, Bringing Up Baby was a kind of release. With its friendly leopard, Grant crawling on all fours in search of a bone, and Hepburn demonically steering this chaos, the film delivered a breath of fresh air. In Hawks’s cinema – as Monkey Business (1950) also shows – blurring gender norms isn’t just an abstract issue or a set of bullet points; it comes with real dramatic intensity, born from acting choices and precisely orchestrated gags. His mise-en-scène maps out a clear, almost Cartesian path through the most chaotic experiences.
It’s a delight to see Grant in a fluffy dressing gown, or Hepburn singing to a leopard on the roof while waking the neighbours, who instantly take her for a lunatic. The entire film is a delirium, a joyful leap into unreality. On the other hand, we know Hepburn wasn’t just a clown; today, she is rightly remembered as a proto-feminist icon, one of the actresses who most forcefully pushed Hollywood to grant women “agency”: the power to act on their own terms, to define themselves independently of their male counterparts. Compared to someone like Marlene Dietrich – the high priestess of stylised, exotic allure – Hepburn is easier to recover today for a progressive audience, since she initially helped renegotiate femininity in a way very much aligned with contemporary sensibilities.
In Woman of the Year (1941) by George Stevens – the first film to pair Hepburn with her future partner, both on screen and off, Spencer Tracy – her character dominates, unchallenged, for much of the story: she’s a career woman who pulls the strings of global diplomacy and writes widely influential articles about the state of the world, while Tracy plays a lowly sports journalist, clearly intimidated by the woman beside him and – partly due to the actor’s prematurely aged appearance – visibly ill at ease in his own body. Adam’s Rib only confirms this gentle-comic dynamic – whereas Hepburn-Grant was downright caustic, destructive to any semblance of rationality – showing the two as married lawyers who find themselves representing opposing sides in a case involving a woman who shot her abusive husband.
Woman of the Year, a rather inert film, strains to wring humor from this role reversal, with the woman in the more respectable professional position – only to end up falling back on a relieved celebration of the status quo in a forced slapstick sequence where Hepburn makes a fool of herself cooking a disastrous breakfast under her husband’s watchful eye, before declaring herself completely won over and returning to the submissive role of bonne femme. Adam’s Rib, Cukor’s film, is far more skillful in distributing small wins along the way: Hepburn boldly demands equality and even orchestrates a public humiliation of her husband, hoisted into the air by a burly circus performer in the middle of the trial, much to the courtroom’s amusement, while Tracy, already stooped over throughout the film, inspires more domestic boredom – if not outright pity – than any form of sexual appeal.
In a near-meta turn, Hepburn realises she’s gone too far – that the ultimate violence might be to strip such an otherwise decent man of his masculine dignity. The ending returns us to the status quo, to the unshaken harmony of bourgeois coupledom. This already foreshadows a tendency that would become more pronounced in the following decade, where Hepburn gradually relinquished her earlier emancipation – the role of the “free woman” she had embodied uncompromisingly in the 1930s. As Simon Watney writes, “her persona is eventually overwhelmed by its very longevity, transforming her into an icon of survival, yet another version of the American dream which successfully represses the history which determines it.”
The oldest film in the retrospective was Christopher Strong (1933), directed by Dorothy Arzner – the only female filmmaker working in Hollywood at the time – before the Hays Code and its moral censorship came into force. Here, Hepburn plays a pioneering aviatrix torn between her professional ambition – she dreams of circumnavigating the globe and breaking altitude records – and her first great love, who happens to be a married man and the father of a daughter not much younger than herself. Contrary to what one might expect from a more conservative Hollywood, the film maintains a surprising lucidity and doesn’t veer into melodrama, even though its premise is, by any standard of the time (and even long after), positively explosive.
Hepburn’s character must reconcile her inner Amelia Earhart – who craves the solitude and thrill of high altitudes, which she claims has “crippled her soul” – with the glamorous socialite who dazzles at elegant parties, manipulating the fates of those around her with cold-blooded precision and innate grace. While many studio heads considered her look unconventional or even off-putting – closer to athleticism than the era’s standard of beauty – James Naremore argues that “no one who has seen her wearing a skin-tight, silver lame jumpsuit in Christopher Strong could doubt her potential as an erotic female star.” Unlike in her later outings, Arzner’s film allows her a final moment of complete freedom: in a gesture not of desperation but of full awareness, the aviator lets herself die in the thin air after breaking her long-coveted record, forever untamed.
Undoubtedly, the boldest film in terms of gender politics was Sylvia Scarlett (1936), also directed by Cukor – a clear landmark in Hepburn’s trajectory and the first of four collaborations with Cary Grant. Hepburn and Grant, she with her boyish features and both dressed in circus garb, were everywhere in Bologna this year: the festival poster was dedicated to this hard-to-classify, drag film avant la lettre, in which Hepburn spends most of the story in radical cross-dress. What starts as a practical disguise to evade authorities – she’s travelling incognito with her father to England – gradually becomes an expression of pure pleasure, with Hepburn embracing the role of a “boy” who gains in hedonistic agility what he lacks in need.
It might have been too much to ask Sylvia Scarlett to treat her return to her official identity as a loss; nevertheless, in the way this shift is handled – almost brushed aside, the other characters barely batting an eye – the film allows the subterfuge to be integrated seamlessly into a system of classical narrative conventions, and thus to fade – ambivalently – into a more conventional storyline.
About Hepburn, James Naremore wrote that “she has the flexible, slender build of a tennis player, and she walks or jogs as forthrightly as she shakes hands,” setting her apart from most of her contemporaries, whose movement was often more fluid and rooted in dance. She was equally gifted at slapstick – she could easily play an automaton – and at old-fashioned Broadway-style romances. Holiday is one such contradictory blend, a showcase for Hepburn, who is called upon to deliver multiple feats of acting bravura. In his definitive analysis of the film, Naremore highlights the clear and accessible subtleties of her performance as a young woman from a wealthy family who falls in love with her sister’s suitor (played, of course, by Grant), a dreamer and a self-made man.
In service of its lightly critical stance toward capitalist accumulation, Cukor offers both a moment of acrobatics – with Hepburn and Grant doing somersaults and indulging in childish antics, wildly out of place in the stiff family mansion – and more traditional scenes of theatrical gravitas. What begins as an excuse to admire these stars’ physical virtuosity becomes deeply moving, straddling the border between comedy and drama. I discovered Holiday at the festival and rewatched it at home, aware that it’s a more serious and less formally inventive film than Bringing Up Baby, yet unable to shake the feeling that it speaks to me from some intimate corner, pulling me straight back to the state of a naïve teenager.
Built around an elaborate high-society party sequence that elegantly layers space and the characters’ opposing desires, Holiday is first and foremost a clean, effective, and clear rendering of a strong script. Cukor knows how to give each character their share of quiet nobility, of truth glimmering in the night. From the industrialist father who wants to see his lineage continued – a civilized man who doesn’t understand the younger generation, but who remains ultimately sympathetic – to the would-be son-in-law, equally blinded by his own self-importance, who reveals the hollowness of a life without happiness, the film is a kind of ode to naïve, almost hippie-like ideals.
Cukor finds in Linda/Hepburn and her brother, Ned/Lew Ayres, an aspiring musician, two extraordinary characters. The silent Ned moves through the rooms with resigned but regal composure, steadily drinking himself into oblivion; it’s clear he’s been emotionally wrecked by the family, and his floaty, detached demeanour gives these psychological ruins a hauntingly visible form. Predictably, Hepburn – the self-declared “black sheep” of the family – runs off with Grant. But as Naremore points out, the film’s conclusion feels somewhat underwhelming, more like a Pyrrhic victory.
Oddly paired (for no clear reason) with her mercantile sister – the film’s least interesting character, who gracefully exits the love triangle – Grant becomes contractually free. Hepburn’s rush to join him may be read symbolically as a trade-off between two forms of submission: one to the patriarchal father, and one to the egocentric husband. In Bringing Up Baby, even the long-awaited union at the end remains defiantly ambiguous. After dragging the man through a whirlwind of public humiliation and ruining his carefully arranged engagement (the film, at least here, clearly favours this turn of events), Hepburn leaves us in suspense – perched atop a pile of bones that, just moments earlier, had constituted an almost-complete dinosaur skeleton.
By 1955, Katharine Hepburn was 43, and the screwball comedy – a subgenre she had helped define with her energy, verve, and boldness – seemed far behind. Directed by David Lean (known for Brief Encounter [1945], a film about the neurotic consolidation of bourgeois monogamy) before his career shifted to large-scale historical epics, Summertime casts Hepburn as a lonely spinster wandering dejectedly through the canals of Venice. Built around a thin, almost minimal plot, the film plays like a travelogue (the character even films the scenery) layered with a compact love story – except that this time, the screenplay fails to bring it to a convincing halt and instead collapses into fabricated melodrama: the only obstacle to love seems to be the protagonist’s own capriciousness.
Playing a stubborn, fussy character who arrived at the festival right after those fireworks of irreverence, Summertime was a painful viewing experience, salvaged only in part by beautiful vignettes of Venice, already succumbing to mass tourism. Amid national stereotypes – vulgar Americans, passionate Italians – Hepburn carves out a path too narrow to leave much behind except the condescension of the directorial gaze. Smitten with an italiano vero, her character – this abandoned heroine – can no longer conceive of a life without a man. From sob to sob, the film ratifies the ideological regression of 1950s Hollywood, in which a woman is either sexually viable or nothing at all.
Hepburn’s career extended into the early 1990s, but the Il Cinema Ritrovato retrospective ended with Desk Set, a 1957 CinemaScope comedy directed by Walter Lang. A variation on the familiar theme of the ageing and lovelorn woman, Hepburn’s character here is somewhat more upbeat – chiefly because she’s the head of a reference library threatened with obsolescence by… artificial intelligence. As the last line of defence against cynical automation – “Hepburn’s brain in the film is an erogenous zone,” Molly Haskell said in her introduction – this walking encyclopedia anchors a debate that turns the film, if not into a masterpiece, then at least into a curiosity for our own times.
Desk Set is more compelling in its confrontation with technology than in its tedious handling of a battle-of-the-sexes dynamic: Spencer Tracy returns as a nerdy efficiency expert, while Hepburn, a diva less bitter than the synopsis might suggest, is stuck in a relationship with a man who keeps stringing her along with empty promises. With the exception of one genuinely funny imbroglio – where the two suitors, one passionate and the other (Tracy) incredibly laid-back thanks to life experience, trade barbs in front of a woman determined to observe the spectacle from a distance – the film feels entirely passé, a piece of entertainment narrowly aimed at specific audiences invited to be moved by the actors’ shared humanity. That’s all it takes, really, to mark them as “has-beens.” More and more hunched over, Tracy – the supposed “man of the people” and a valid romantic alternative – is inadvertently comic: sluggish and heavy-footed, while Hepburn remains lively and sharp. In truth, Desk Set’s appeal hinges on the widely known fact that the two were in a real-life relationship; the film merely doubled life, creating a redundant loop that turned cinema into a soap opera based on fandom.
Katharine Hepburn injected Hollywood with a dose of truly political audacity, then gradually began reconciling with mainstream audiences. The 1930s were a rollercoaster of praise and agonizing flops – an exhilarating time in which her contribution to the art of cinema must be measured in terms of creating a new emotional vocabulary on screen, on a par with the directors who made her a comic muse at the crossroads of circus, vaudeville, sport, and film. The retrospective charted her gradual settling into an increasingly familiar persona: the solitary, wistful woman who allows herself to be playfully wooed. This was by no means a defeat, but rather a sustained act of resistance against the usual roles allotted to female stars. With risky sincerity, Hepburn continued to thematise her own life, letting traces of her uncompromising choices seep into every performance.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.
Film critic and journalist; writes regularly for Dilema Veche and Scena9. Doing a MA film theory programme in Paris.
