Love Among the Ruins (1975) & The Corn Is Green (1979)

          Among director George Cukor’s myriad accomplishments, he introduced Katharine Hepburn to the big screen, directing her first film, A Bill of Divorcement (1932), and featuring her in several more pictures—including The Philadelphia Story (1940)—before helming a pair of early-’60s comedies starring Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. More than a decade later, the longtime collaborators reunited to make two telefilms.

          First came the highly enjoyable romantic comedy Love Among the Ruins, which pairs Hepburn with another acting legend, Laurence Olivier. Set in England circa 1911, the playful film concerns Jessica Medlicott (Hepburn), a society lady mired in scandal. Widowed two years ago, she has become engaged to a younger man and now seeks to break the engagement because she realizes her fiancé is a gold digger. To plead her case, Jessica hires lawyer Sir Arthur Glanville Jones (Olivier). He’s thrilled because 40 years ago, he and Jessica had a three-day romantic idyll in Toronto, when he was a college student and she was a touring actress. The central joke of Love Among the Ruins is that while Arthur is as smitten with Jessica now as he was then, she doesn’t remember their time together—or does she? It’s a perfect role for Hepburn in the autumn of her years, because she gets to play haughty and narcissistic while winking at the audience to indicate the warmth hidden behind her character’s upper-crust façade.

          Constructed like a play and written with considerable verbal dexterity by James Costigan, Love Among the Ruins features Olivier in nearly every scene and Hepburn in almost as many, so viewers who love these actors can immerse themselves in the stars’ distinctive personas from start to finish. Olivier, whose ’70s work was often cartoonish, mostly restrains himself here, relying upon still-nimble physicality and the incredible musical instrument of his mellifluous diction. With Cukor orchestrating the action so there’s always motion and speed, Love Among the Ruins is often quite delightful even though it’s old-fashioned and talky. The opulent costumes and locations help create the desired effect, and so, too, does the characteristically romantic musical score by the great John Barry.

          For their second TV project, Cukor and Hepburn revived The Corn Is Green, a 1938 play that was previously filmed in 1945, with Bette Davis in the lead role of an English schoolteacher whose integrity and willpower changes provincial attitudes toward education in a 19th-century Welsh mining town. Miss Lilly Moffat is a quintessential Hepburn character. After a small-minded woman says, “Men do know best, I think,” Moffat shoots back, “Then don’t think!” As Hepburn did in real life, Moffat challenges social rules, whether she’s defying restrictive ideas of gender or pushing illiterate people to better themselves.

          In the well-constructed narrative, Moffat inherits a small estate near a coalmine and then opens a school, using her household staff as fellow teachers. Moffat takes a special interest in Morgan Evans (Ian Saynor), a young man who honors tradition by working in the mine but secretly nurtures his natural gift for writing. Moffat tutors Morgan and secures an entrance interview for Trinity College at Oxford, despite resistance from locals. Further complicating matters is Moffat’s nubile charge, Bessie (Toyah Wilcox), who seduces Morgan as a means of expressing her boredom with small-town life.

          There’s never much doubt that Moffat will conquer adversity, but Cukor puts across the material with his signature sophistication. In addition to filming many scenes with long takes and wide shots, a stylistic departure from the usual closeup-heavy mode of ’70s TV, Cukor sparingly employs original music, again by Barry. While Hepburn’s age shows (she shakes periodically and her voice isn’t the blaring trumpet it once was), she convey her unmistakable resolve. By story’s end, Hepburn conveys her character’s pride at a job well done—a fitting final image after nearly 50 years of Cukor/Hepburn collaborations.

Love Among the Ruins: GROOVY

The Corn Is Green: GROOVY

Travels With My Aunt (1972)

          Based on a whimsical novel by the revered British author Graham Greene, this offbeat comedy was originally conceived as a Katharine Hepburn vehicle. Director George Cukor, a studio-era giant who helmed several of Hepburn’s classic films, enlisted the iconic actress’ participation, but MGM nixed Hepburn partly because she was too old to convincingly play her character in flashbacks. The star was replaced by Maggie Smith, who interprets the lead role so broadly that the character becomes surrealistic. This otherworldly flavor is exacerbated by Cukor’s use of over-the-top costuming and production design. Smith’s character comes across like a refugee from glamorous MGM productions of the ’30s, all flowing dresses and opulent headgear, making her an extreme anachronism within the otherwise realistic milieu of the movie. Obviously, Cukor envisioned an arch culture-clash comedy, and the effect probably works for some viewers. To these eyes, however, the movie is merely garish and shrill.

          The story begins at a funeral, when uptight British banker Henry Pulling (Alec McCowen) oversees his mother’s cremation. During the service, he’s distracted by the wailings of a strange-looking redhead in flamboyant clothing, Augusta Bertram (Smith). She introduces herself as Henry’s long-lost aunt, and then she pulls him into her eccentric world. Augusta lives with pot-smoking African psychic Wordsworth (Louis Gossett Jr.), but she’s romantically linked to a string of European men with whom she shared adventures in the past. One of her ex-lovers has been kidnapped, so Augusta agrees to transport stolen goods as a means of raising cash for ransom. This odyssey is intercut with flashbacks depicting Augusta in her glory days as the mistress for various wealthy men. Emboldened by Augusta’s freethinking ways, Henry enjoys a chaste tryst with American hippie chick Tooley (Cindy Williams), who travels on the famed Orient Express at the same time as Augusta and Henry.

          Travels With My Aunt goes on rather windily through myriad episodes, some of which are amusing but none of which is remotely believable. And since the movie never reaches laugh-out-loud levels of absurdity, it ends up feeling quite pointless. One problem is Smith’s over-the-top acting, and another is McCowen’s bloodlessly competent performance: The movie cries out for a brilliant comic foil, like Dudley Moore or Gene Wilder, but Smith’s energy is not returned in kind. However, Cukor’s stylization is the most distracting aspect of the picture, because all the directorial flourishes in the world can’t obscure the film’s lack of substance. Improbably, the picture received several major nominations, though its only significant win was an Oscar for Anthony Powell’s costumes. (Available at WarnerArchive.com)

Travels With My Aunt: FUNKY

The Blue Bird (1976)

          Belgian playwright Maurice Maeterlink’s fantasy about peasant children drifting through a magical dreamworld, originally titled L’Oiseau blue, provided the source material for two silent films and an Oscar-nominated Shirley Temple movie in 1940, all bearing the English-language title The Blue Bird, before venerable director George Cukor helmed this full-color musical version in 1976. Whatever charms the piece has in its previous incarnations are absent from Cukor’s picture, however, which is awkward, dull, and vapid. The whimsical story has two kids whisked away to a trippy fantasyland by a fairy named Light (Elizabeth Taylor) in order to recover the Blue Bird of Happiness, which will enrich the life of a sick child living near the peasants.

          Accompanying the children on their adventure are personified versions of household items like bread and sugar and water, plus walking-and-talking incarnations of their pet cat (Cicely Tyson) and dog (George Cole). During their journey, the kids meet an obnoxious oak tree (Harry Andrews), a demonic creature called Night (Jane Fonda), a seductive woman representing all things luxurious (Ava Gardner), and even cranky old Father Time (Robert Morley). The sheer amount of hokum crammed into one story is numbing, as are the muddled aesthetics of Cukor’s version.

          The costumes are self-consciously artificial (Tyson wears a leotard, a scarf, and half-hearted cat makeup), the settings fluctuate indiscriminately between tacky sets and lush European forests (the picture was shot in Russia), and the songs are so cloying and insubstantial that they barely register as anything more than background noise. The young actors playing the leads (including Patsy Kensit, who years later costarred in Lethal Weapon 2) are weak, and the adults fail to impress—Cukor, who seems to think he’s making a glossy MGM musical in the ’30s, steers his cast toward florid line readings instead of performances, with only Cole offering a glimmer of characterization as a loyal puppy who digs being able to chat with his master.

The Blue Bird: LAME