The film that made Hepburn a star features her as a cheerful-on-the-outsidesad- on-the-inside young woman living in a small town who has aspirations above her class and family. George Stevens directs this adaptation of a novel by Booth Tarkington (The Magnificent Ambersons), and somehow through his chemistry with Hepburn, makes the potentially odious figure of a social climber not only attractive but moving.

The head of the Adams family (Fred Stone) is something of a permanent invalid living on his boss’s kindness. The harpy mother berates him for not getting off his bottom and improving himself (and them) in the world. The turning point comes when Hepburn is going to a debutante party and can’t even afford a pretty dress or corsage. She plucks some flowers from a public garden to make a posy. At the party, Hepburn the wallflower is seated alone, when Fred MacMurray plucks her abandoned posy from the floor and gives it to her, to her mortification. Luckily he is undaunted by the wilted mess, and will woo the awkward Hepburn to everyone’s astonishment, not least her own. (Interestingly, they meet again as she is mounting the steps to take a secretarial course; love will intervene.)

As she’s too embarrassed to have him see the shabby interior of her house, their courtship takes place on the porch on successive nights and it’s here we see in its most dramatic form the female identity crisis, the need not just for male approval but for self-definition.

In her desperate gaiety, she looks into his eyes, appeals to him to show her who she is. In the beginning, her posh accent seems out of place, but gradually we see it as a kind of histrionic artifice, one of the acting tools of a woman who wants desperately to be something else, but what? She glows with desirability under George Stevens’ sympathetic direction, her social climber becomes a parable about women’s search for their place in the world.

Molly Haskell