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

The Great Balloon Adventure (1978)

          Originally titled Olly, Olly, Oxen Free, this attractively produced children’s film features a prominent supporting performance by Katharine Hepburn and a few passages of visual spectacle, but these elements are not sufficient to overcome the movie’s myriad shortcomings. Chief among the problems plaguing The Great Balloon Adventure is an anemic storyline, because the film’s three protagonists never confront anything resembling dramatic conflict, and they evade dangerous situations without much effort or risk. In lieu of genuinely exciting scenes, director/producer/co-writer Richard A. Colla fills the screen with vignettes that feel like placeholders. For instance, a lengthy scene of characters accidentally lighting fabric on fire is the closest equivalent the movie has to mortal danger, and the interminable soliloquy that Hepburn delivers late in the second act is the closest equivalent the movie has to something personally revelatory.
          In its broadest outlines, the premise of the movie seems like it should have generated colorful escapism bursting with themes of friendship and imagination. After all, the story concerns a young boy who decides to honor his late grandfather by rebuilding the hot-air balloon in which the grandfather once performed stunt shows. The Great Balloon Adventure opens in San Francisco, where preteen Alby (Kevin McKenzie) is obsessed by the memory of his grandfather, who performed under the name “The Great Sandusky.” Together with his pal, Chris (Dennis Dimster), Alby gathers money and tools for rebuilding his grandfather’s balloon. The boys trek to a nearby junk shop and encounter the shop’s eccentric proprietor, Miss Pudd (Hepburn). After briefly rebuffing the boys, she commits wholeheartedly to participating in their plan, providing free labor and material.

          The motivations of the characters are never explained in satisfactory ways, which contributes to the general air of artificiality and lifelessness pervading the project. (Bob Alcivar’s needlessly downbeat musical score doesn’t help.) While Colla’s actual filmmaking is quite slick, with passable special effects, vivid production design, and well-chosen camera angles, the storytelling is as enervated as the story itself. Nothing much happens, the movie unspools as a meditative pace, and the audience is left waiting in vain for the thrilling highlights that should appear but never do. The Great Balloon Adventure runs its course quickly, since the picture is only 92 minutes long, and the climax is visually interesting. Still, it’s hard to imagine young viewers sustaining attention during the talky bits, and it’s hard to imagine even the most devoted Hepburn fans enjoying the drably frivolous scenes involving the children.

The Great Balloon Adventure: FUNKY

The Trojan Women (1971)

          A grim drama from antiquity that director Michael Cacoyannis adapted for the screen with limited visual imagination and oppressive seriousness, The Trojan Women is notable for its impressive international cast: Katherine Hepburn costars with Geneviève Bujold, Irene Papas, and Vanessa Redgrave. Time has proven the staying power of the Euripedes play upon which the film is based (Cacoyannis employed a 20th-century translation of the original 415 B.C. text) so appraising the dramatic merits of The Trojan Women is unnecessary. That said, Cacoyannis did precious little in terms of reimagining The Trojan Women as proper cinema. Although the director shot most of the picture outdoors, presumably to erase the most obvious traces of theatricality, staging the majority of the scenes amid barren fields and craggy rock formations has the effect of accentuating artificiality. (Cities are only visible, fleetingly, as wreckage.) Even more problematically, the stilted language and the tendency of actors to scream their dialogue makes The Trojan Women feel histrionic.

          To be fair, the story concerns suffering of epic proportions, namely the emotional and physical horrors visited upon the female population of Troy during the Trojan Wars. Therefore, it’s not as if total restraint would have been a prudent storytelling strategy. Nonetheless, watching Bujold rave as the mad Cassandra, or watching Redgrave wail as the bereaved Andromache, inevitably creates a wall between the audience and the story—germane to the material or not, emotional monotony inhibits real engagement. And while Hepburn provides slightly more variance in her performance as the Trojan queen, Hecuba, she begins the picture by clutching at dirt upon realizing the depth of her defeat and then closes the picture by walking, zombie-like, toward a future as a slave, so each moment of her performance represents a steady progression into nonstop misery. Similarly, a key moment of Papas’ appearance involves the actress cowering, nude, behind a flimsy slatted wall while crazed women attempt to stone her to death. Among the film’s few prominent male actors, Brian Blessed screams longer and louder than anyone else in the cast, while Patrick Magee echoes Hepburn by incarnating assorted varieties of anguish. A favorable appraisal would characterize all of this stuff as relentless, though it’s just as accurate to say that The Trojan Women is simply unpleasant to watch.

          Cacoyannis, the Cyprus-born filmmaker whose career peaked with the Oscar-winning Zorba the Greek (1964), has said that he felt compelled to make The Trojan Women because of the play’s antiwar sentiments. However, it’s hard to imagine anything less suited to the popular culture of 1971 than a straight adaptation of a play from before Christianity. In any event, The Trojan Women received a fairly insignificant release, garnering just a couple of minor awards for Hepburn and Papas, and the picture has not risen to any special stature in the intervening years.

The Trojan Women: FUNKY

Rooster Cogburn (1975)

          More of a merger between two established cinematic brand names than an organic creative enterprise, Rooster Cogburn offers the unlikely screen duo of towering he-man John Wayne and delicate blueblood Katharine Hepburn. A sequel to True Grit (1969), the movie for which Wayne won his only Oscar, this lively Western adventure story reprises Wayne’s award-winning role of drunken, one-eyed U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn and pairs the character with a Bible-thumping East Coast transplant named Eula Goodnight (Hepburn). Each role is catered to the persona of the respective screen legend, so Rooster Cogburn delivers exactly what longtime fans of the actors want, and nothing more: Wayne is cranky and heroic and macho, while Hepburn is articulate and defiant and indomitable. The movie is therefore hard to beat for sheer crowd-pleasing star power, but aesthetic dissonance abounds.

          For instance, the acting styles of the two stars are so wildly divergent that the performers seem to exist in parallel universes even when they occupy the same shot. Wayne poses and preens, pausing arbitrarily like he’s struggling to remember his lines, while Hepburn powers through reams of dialogue effortlessly; however, each accentuates the other’s peculiar appeal, since Wayne’s frontier authenticity compensates for his lack of acting ability in the same way that Hepburn’s numerous affectations are leavened by her supreme dramatic skills. With star personalities the main attraction, it doesn’t matter that Rooster Cogburn’s story is redundant and trite.

          Just like in True Grit, Cogburn embarks on a hunt for a pack of killers accompanied by the willful daughter of a murdered man. In this case, Eula is the adult child of a preacher who was gunned down by varmints led by Hawk (Richard Jordan), a thief who has stolen a wagonload of government nitro for use in a robbery. When Cogburn accepts the job of capturing Hawk, Eula insists on tagging along, so the bulk of the picture comprises cutesy scenes of Rooster and Eula bickering even as they develop grudging affection for each other. There are several exciting action sequences, particularly a raft ride down nasty white water, and attractive location photography in Oregon adds to the film’s appeal. Jordan delivers enjoyable villainy, doing the best he can with an underwritten role, and costar Anthony Zerbe lends a bit of nuance as a gun-for-hire with conflicted emotions. Directed with workmanlike efficiency by Stuart Millar, Rooster Cogburn is pure hokum, and it never pretends otherwise.

Rooster Cogburn: FUNKY