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"Insanity is hereditary, you can get it from your children." The patriarch as addled vampire coming home for the lifeforce of the young, a Christmas story. George Cukor handles the introductory Yuletide party discreetly, duly dollying out from close-ups to proscenium-accommodating medium shots, until the canned-theater air is dissipated by a pair of fresh images: Katharine Hepburn lounging on pillows on the living room floor, and John Barrymore poking at furniture like a creature giddy and uneasy in lost territory. The two agitated figures circle each other, and the Freudian density of the situation is promptly voiced: "My wife's not my wife... she's my daughter!" He's a fugitive from the insane asylum, one of war's "forgotten men," quite the needy Nosferatu camped out in the drawing room. Lucidity strikes him "like a curtain lifted," he's a dead man revived, a bit of an awkward spot for the divorcing wife (Billie Burke) who's ready to move on. "There are troubles in every family. One doesn't talk about them." The dramaturgy of the Clemence Dane play is what somebody calls "pure 19th-century," yet Cukor gives you Barrymore and the debuting Hepburn (already the most angular of ingénues) cutting through it like long-stemmed knives. Their finale at the piano—an unfinished sonata in an empty mansion—is both a rough draft for the tragedy of Camille, and a perverse happy ending: Madness may be the heroine's curse, but how preferable is normalcy when it boils down to marriage to David Manners? Capra (Arsenic and Old Lace), Jones (Claws for Alarm) and Cassavetes (She's So Lovely) supply mocking studies. With Paul Cavanaugh, Gayle Evers, Henry Stephenson, and Elizabeth Patterson. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |