I don't have time for a thorough retrospective. But a few highlights:<\/p>\n
I'm afraid I was never as fond of some of the Hepburn standards as most people are. I liked Philadelphia Story<\/cite> (and there are a few really great lines in that), but not as much as the above four. I'm afraid Bringing Up Baby<\/cite> did nothing at all for me (except for Cary Grant flouncing around saying that he felt gay). I thought African Queen<\/cite> was well-made, and that both Hepburn and Bogart did a good job, but it didn't really engage me. Rooster Cogburn<\/cite> was kinda fun, but not great. I found the rest of the Tracy\/Hepburn movies I've seen (Woman of the Year,<\/cite> State of the Union,<\/cite> Adam's Rib,<\/cite> Desk Set<\/cite>) enjoyable but flawed (see below). I haven't seen Keeper of the Flame<\/cite> or The Sea of Grass,<\/cite> and I don't think I've seen Without Love;<\/cite> I should probably see if I can dig those up. I also haven't seen Suddenly, Last Summer,<\/cite> Long Day's Journey Into Night,<\/cite> or The Glass Menagerie.<\/cite><\/p>\n Here's a bit from an email I sent Karen back in 2000:<\/p>\n [Hepburn's] big failing, imo, is that in most of her movies with Spencer Tracy [and a couple without him], she starts out a sassy spitfire, smartmouthed and strongwilled and tough and competent, and then she meets her match and melts and submits, because all she really needed was a strong enough man to take her in hand and ICK! It infuriates me, all the more so because in the beginnings of those movies she's perfect,<\/em> but then she learns the error of her ways (like in Philadelphia Story<\/cite>—\"Now I know that what I needed was to submit and be a real woman<\/em>\" Grr). In one or two [of the Tracy\/Hepburn movies]—like Pat and Mike<\/cite>—Tracy meets his<\/em> match as well, and I like those.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n But despite those flaws in some of her movies, she was possibly still my favorite actor. Also one of my favorites to look at. I haven't seen pictures of her lately, but I still thought she was quite attractive at age 85, and when she was in boy-drag for Sylvia Scarlett<\/cite> (a lousy movie, sadly) I found her really extraordinarily attractive. (I have a postcard of a photo from that movie on my refrigerator.)<\/p>\n I also admired her for doing things like (iIrc) inviting striking dockworkers up to her apartment for tea.<\/p>\n I always thought about writing her fan mail, but I didn't think I had anything to say to her that she hadn't heard thousands of times over the years. So I never wrote her. But I'll miss her, silly as that sounds to say about someone I didn't actually know.<\/p>\n The Times<\/cite> obituary closes with a quote from her autobiography, All About Me:<\/cite><\/p>\n In some ways I've lived my life as a man, made my own decisions. I've been as terrified as the next person, but you've got to keep a-going; you've got to dream.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I don’t have time for a thorough retrospective. But a few highlights: The Lion in Winter: Superb writing and excellent…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1261"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1261\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kith.org\/jed\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}\n
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