Alice Adams
Though Bette Davis won the 1935 Academy Award/Oscar for Dangerous (1935) beating out Katharine Hepburn in Alice Adams (1935), Davis was noted for saying more than once that she didn't deserve the award that year and that the one who did was Katharine Hepburn.,In the scene where Alice walks with Arthur toward her house for the first time you can see a woman watering her shrubs and a letter carrier walk up, then back down her porch steps twice. The background scene repeats itself, letter carrier, woman setting down hose, etc. The letter carrier approaches Alice moments later where she then has to shamefully admit to Arthur that this is indeed her house that she is in front of. Obviously a rear projection scene that was duplicated.,Mrs. Adams: Malena fell down the cellar stairs!
Virgil Adams: Did she break any of our things?,Featured in George Stevens: A Filmmaker's Journey (1984),I CAN'T WALTZ ALONE
(1935) (uncredited)
(incorporated into score)
Music by Max Steiner,I had heard of the famous Tarkington novel (but not read it) and had known that Katherine Hepburn won the Best Actress Oscar for this. So, I rented it.

It's just so moving. What I think some of the negative reviewers forget is just how much a girl's prospects in a small town in the 1920s are determined by whom she marries. For the intelligent, lively, vibrant, charming, warm-hearted Alice Adams - with a pitifully weak (but very sympathetic) and rather poor father, Alice's chance to "make anything" of her life is determined socially.

My heart ached with the snubs Alice receives - the routine unthinking cuts she receives at the hands of those from "better" families. Wearing a two year old dress with a corsage of violets illegally picked from the park, her loutish brother in his old beaten-up borrowed car as her date, she tries SO HARD to fit in - and doesn't because no one will let her. It's the most opaque of glass ceilings.

If you've ever felt (at a job, a party, a family gathering) that there was nothing you could do - no matter how hard you tried - to fit in - yet it was important that you did, you'll feel so much for this charming girl.

I do agree with others that the Arthur Russell part is underwritten.

But the movie boring? Not on your life. The painful moments are more difficult to watch than most war movies in which the protagonist is killed - because it is so well-done -

-- the pains of humiliation borne within, the disability one cannot hide, the old dress, the rude and outrageous relation, the thwarted eagerness - these are far more likely to be the painful moments in one's life (that one does not wish to remember) than any actual bullet wounds.

I love how the movie does not show a saintly Alice - she would love to snub others (e.g., the chubby boy at the dance), would love to parade before others in finery. yet her warmth toward her family - her essential sweetness, her strong frustrated yearning - are completely captivating.

We love this girl - and because of that, we love the movie.,