Stage Door, based on the play by Edna Ferber - Nine out of 10

Stage Door, based on the play by Edna Ferber

Nine out of 10

This is a note on the film based on the play by Edna Ferber

Katharine Hepburn might be called the Meryl Streep of her age, for those who are unfamiliar with what is an illustrious, majestic name, the winner of 4 (four!) Academy Awards and such a legend that she has now quite a few films were some grand artist of the present plays her – for instance, Cate Blanchett is remarkable as Hepburn in The Aviator, directed by Martin Scorsese and with Leonardo DiCaprio in the leading role.

In Stage Door, the royal highness of cinema seems to play herself, at least in the timeframe wherein her character, Terry Randall, is the determined, brave, inventive, humorous, strong, role model, formidable upcoming actress that would eventually have a phase in which she is more subdued, humble, modest, emotional, delicate, showing that Hepburn has the complete mastery over all the panel of shades, for any imaginable character, probably…no, surely!

Miss Randall is a rich girl, but she decides to try her luck and, in opposition to the wishes of her father, she wants to see if she has enough talent to be an artist, without help from her money, using, or abusing influence, illegitimate ends to get to the top.

It is nevertheless a daunting, if not impossible task and the title of the motion picture refers to the painful access through the Stage Door and into the light of the projectors…in his autobiography, The Moon is a Balloon (http://realini.blogspot.com/2019/08/the-moon-is-balloon-by-david-niven-9.html), David Niven, another brilliant actor of the last century, explains how troublesome it had been for him to get a role and that there were signs in Hollywood trying to deter candidates, stating that for every person who gets a role something like 1,000 had been rejected.

Another passage from the Stage Door reminds one of The Producers, where the main characters plan a failed performance in order to make a huge profit through a swindle and though there is no such scheme in this movie, the father desires so much that his daughter would renounce acting that he would be as happy as The Producers were she to perform badly in her first role…

Another supremo of the Golden Age of Cinema, Ginger Rogers, acts sometimes against Katharine Hepburn, though the two have a rather friendly relationship for some time, the way Terry maneuvers would antagonize Jean Maitland, another aspiring star, portrayed by Ms. Rogers.

The producer Anthony Powell – in an interesting coincidence we can suppose, he has the name of a genius, author of the Absolute Magnum Opus A Dance to the Music of Time - http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/04/books-do-furnish-room-by-anthony-powell.html - tries to play an early version of Harvey Weinstein, though without the efficiency of the now infamous monster, who had been responsible somewhat counterintuitively for some wonderful films, but then Paul Johnson, in his marvelous The Intellectuals, exposes the fact that some of the greatest minds of history, like Tolstoy, Ibsen, Rousseau and others, have proved in one way or another to be more than obnoxious men… Jean-Jacques Rousseau left his children at the door of an orphanage, at a time when something like nine out of ten would die…

Terry interferes to save Jean, but in the process, the latter is infuriated with what looks to her like a serious betrayal…

One last word about the author of the play that inspired the adaptation for the big screen, that is also theatrical, Edna Ferber is the author of another marvelous work, So Big - http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/06/so-big-by-edna-ferber.html