Driving by her deep will of having a good life, Alice Adams, a young beautiful girl from a lower class, who is always acts to be from an upper class and dreams of marrying a wealthy man, falls in love with a handsome playboy, the thing that brings terrible for her.
An oddly exciting blend of tenderness, comedy and realistic despair, it touches life intimately at many points during its account of a lonely girl in a typical American small town.
Film4
May 24, 2003
Alice Adams would be forgotten if it weren't for Hepburn's typically charismatic performance as the woman who turns social climbing into an art form.
George Stevens' poignant adaptation of the Tarkington famous novel is one of the few Ameriacn films of its era to examine the impact of social class in a realistic way.
Stevens's talent for stepping away from the plotline and creating intimate, casual, and naturalistic moments is given plenty of opportunity here, as it would not be in his later superproductions.
The pathetic, social-climbing heroine of Booth Tarkington's novel was never better played than by Hepburn, who brought a fierce determination, clutching coyness, and tragic optimism to the part.
That George Stevens' direction captures the wistfulness of Katharine Hepburn's superb histrionism, and yet has not sacrificed audience values at the altar of too much drabness and prosaic realism, is an achievement of no small order.
