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Katharine Hepburn: Performances
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Intoxicated by her success, Hepburn felt it was time to return to the theater. She chose The Lake, but was unable to obtain a release from RKO and instead went back to Hollywood to film the forgettable Spitfire. Having satisfied RKO, Hepburn went immediately back to Manhattan to begin the play, in which she played an English girl unhappy with her overbearing mother and wimpy father. The play was generally considered a flop, and Hepburn's performance elicited Dorothy Parker's famous quip that the actress "ran the gamut of emotions from A to B."
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Looking at Hepburn's work from the '30s, maybe even especially those movies that she made (circa 1938) when she was so infamously labeled "box office poison," it's not so hard to imagine why she must have seemed odd to audiences. She was "poison," pure and simple, because she didn't ingratiate herself with moviegoers. She demanded that they come to her -- but once they did, once they took the at first awkward step of readjusting their inner clocks to move with hers, they became privy to performances that rank among the most original, and the most purely affecting, of American movies: The young Hepburn gave us true, unvarnished emotion with every drop of sentimentality dried out of it.
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It would be terribly shortsighted... to contend that Hepburn and Peck merely incarnated aspects of American bourgeois-liberal ideology. Historical and cultural processes do not work themselves out as conveniently as that. It might be more accurate to suggest that their performances and representations were saturated by certain aspects of American democratic idealism (Hepburn “the independent woman,” Peck “the moral conscience”), an ethos present in the most progressive liberal circles, but one that official liberalism eventually and inevitably betrayed as it made its devil’s bargain with the most predatory sections of the US establishment in the Cold War period.
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