AWARDS AND HONORS

Alice Adams was nominated for 2 Academy Awards: Best Picture and Best Actress (Katharine Hepburn).

THE CRITIC'S CORNER - ALICE ADAMS

"Hollywood bestows a garland on the languishing Summer cinema in the splendid screen version of Alice Adams...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. Alice Adams, in addition to its success as a tragi-comedy, accomplishes several minor triumphs. By giving a performance which will rank with her finest work on the screen, Katharine Hepburn resumes her high place after faltering in several bad pictures. In his first talking film, Fred Stone portrays Alice's bewildered and futile father with a mixture of compassion and humor that would do credit to the great W.C. Fields. The film is a triumph, too, for its director, George Stevens, whose past work in the cinema has been unimportant enough to make his present success all the more astonishing." -- The New York Times

"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. The star's own performance is uncompromising and unvacillating. If she's a silly little ninny in her pretenses and simple pretexts, she is permitted to run almost berserk on the petty inanities of small-town aspirations." -- Variety

"From the beginning it was obvious that Miss Hepburn had conceived the part as a whole; that she was going to allow Alice to tell her story in her own way, and that she was not going to encompass poor Alice in a theatrical design of her own making. The result is that Miss Hepburn shows that there is a good deal more in Alice than mere vanity and man-hunting. Because of her insight into the part and the pathos she gives, it might appear to the superficial that Miss Hepburn has exaggerated the posings; what she really has done is to over-act as Alice over-acted every time she met a man or walked into a room." -- The London Times

"In the title role Miss Hepburn gives a performance that is superb--a performance that captures all the loneliness and heartache of the character. Fred Stone, playing the part of the father, does a fine job--a job that easily might have become much too homespun and likable. In his hands it does not." -- The New York World-Telegraph

"For the purpose of exhibiting an actress in a variety of moods and situations Alice Adams could scarcely be surpassed--and Miss Hepburn has obviously taken possession of her task with sympathy and enthusiasm. Had the temptation to make the film a starring vehicle for Miss Hepburn been a little more strenuously resisted, Alice Adams could have achieved considerably more than its niche as merely a better-than-average romance." -- The Brooklyn Daily Eagle

"What was in 1922 a shrewd and observant novel, emerges in 1935 as a bitingly satiric portrait of an era. Of Hollywood's leading stars, Katharine Hepburn is possibly the least versatile. It is precisely this limitation which made her the ideal choice for the role of Alice. The woebegone grimaces, the expressions, half childish and half addle-headed, which she used to convey youth's nameless longings and which are often so startlingly misplaced in her portrayals of women of the world, are those which make her portrayal of a girl whom she really understands her masterpiece to date. The supremely difficult feat of characterizing a poseuse so as to mock the poses without mocking the person behind them she carries off with success. The direction of George Stevens, who at 30 is the youngest important director in Hollywood, is almost flawless." -- Time magazine

"[Hepburn] has never looked more stunning nor played with such distinction, authority and charm. It is a performance that is superb in every detail, well sustained, carefully modulated and accurately pitched to the keys of humor and wistful pathos which define the character." -- The New York Post

"Excellent small-town Americana with social-climbing girl finally finding love in person of unpretentious MacMurray. Booth Tarkington's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel becomes fine film, if not altogether credible. The dinner-table scene is unforgettable." -- Leonard Maltin's Movie and Video Guide

Compiled by Andrea Passafiume