MORNING GLORY (1933)

A young, naïve aspiring actress (Katherine Hepburn) arrives in Manhattan from a small town in Vermont, ready to take Broadway by storm. While in a crowded waiting room, hoping to talk with Broadway hotshot Adolphe Menjou, she chats up older actor C. Aubrey Smith who takes a fatherly liking to her, and he agrees to be her mentor, giving her acting lessons that she'll pay him for when she can. Playwright Douglas Fairbanks Jr. also takes note of Hepburn, but her bubbly chattiness and her high opinion of herself are a bit off-putting; she's reluctant to take small roles, so her career essentially stalls out. Weeks later, Menjou, Smith and Fairbanks (and obnoxious alcoholic leading lady Mary Duncan) have a hit show and Smith brings a starving, struggling Hepburn to the opening night party where she proceeds to get smashed on champagne but also delivers a couple of Shakespeare pieces that are truly impressive. That night, Menjou beds her, but the next morning he regrets it and tells Fairbanks, who is a bit in love with Hepburn himself. Eventually, she realizes that Menjou has just been toying with her, and she goes off to do stock and vaudeville. But months later, as another Fairbanks play is about to open, Duncan throws a tantrum on opening night, so Menjou has Hepburn, who has been hired as her understudy, take her role. She's a success and, as she soaks in the praise (and a declaration of love from Fairbanks which she turns aside), she is warned by her dresser, a former Broadway star, not to become a "morning glory," one who blooms beautifully but who then fades quickly. Confident in herself, she claims that even if that does happen to her, she's not afraid of the future.

This well-worn making-of-a-star story was, I imagine, rather old hat even in 1933. But a few things make this stand out. One, of course, is Hepburn, who pulls off the role quite well. Too much of either starry-eyed innocence or blind confidence could have made us not like the character, but Hepburn strikes a good balance, and the ending, in which she is left in limbo, is unusual—the norm would have been to either have her future star status be assured, or to have her decide that love trumps her career, but neither thing happens. The three men in her life, though stereotypes, have characters that are developed about as well as they could be in a short (75 minutes) movie. Fairbanks is sweetly charming, Smith is likeable, and Menjou even makes his cold-hearted producer come off in a way that isn't totally alienating. Hepburn won her first of four Oscars for this role, soon proving that she certainly was no morning glory. [TCM]