Stage Door

Movie Review: Stage Door

Year of Release: 1937
Country of Origin: USA
Director: Gregory La Cava
Cast: Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou

Plot outline: A boarding house full of aspiring actresses and their ambitions, dreams and disappointments (IMDb).

Adapted from the play of the same name by Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman, Stage Door is the most successful of the genre, largely because of the quality of its cast. While Katherine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers were already stars, the supporting cast included rising actresses Lucille Ball, Eve Arden and Ann Miller. They traded sharp but good-natured insults, but their tough exterior was just a front for facing their career setbacks. The only actress with an unflattering role is Gail Patrick, whose character is a snob and an second-choice mistress. Hepburn, who receives top billing, has the largest part of the ensemble cast. Her role is similar to that in Morning Glory, for which she won her first of four Best Actress Academy Awards back in 1934. She is once again a headstrong, well-educated, star-struck amateur, but this time she is rich as well. Hepburn's monotone reading of her play entrance line, "The calla lillies are in bloom again", was fodder for comics for the rest of her career. It would be a spoiler to reveal how her character becomes a good actress, but I can say that you'll either roll your eyes or cry. The ladies dominate the movie. The few men that are present are generally stereotyped. Adolphe Menjou plays a smug Broadway producer who uses his position to seduce much younger women. Jack Carson, in one of his earliest movies, plays a good-natured but rather slow-witted lumberjack. Samuel S. Hinds is a humorless wheat magnate who predictably doesn't want his daughter in show business. The most rewarding male supporting role is given to Franklin Pangborn, who is a riot as Menjou's obsequious butler. Stage Door received four Academy Award nominations, including the major categories of Best Picture, Best Director and Best Screenplay. Despite being surrounded by much better known actresses, it was tearjerking Andrea Leeds who landed the remaining nomination, for Best Supporting Actress. (BK)

My judgement: ***1/2 out of 4 stars