Oscar Profiles: Katharine Hepburn in Morning Glory

Best Actress winner 1933

"I know I speak so nondescriptly," Eva Lovelace says at one point, which caused me to chortle, because in this early-career, first-Oscar performance, Katharine Hepburn could have benefitted from a little more nondescriptness. She's a naive, fledgling actress from Vermont trying to make it big on Broadway by the most direct route, first camping out in producer Adolphe Menjou's office and later embarrassing herself at a dinner party with drunken takes on Hamlet and Juliet. Hepburn's trademark staccato delivery is too mechanical here, and where the part needed a bit of softness and warmth, her machine-gun technique comes across as brittle and clinically cold. The script doesn't help her out a whit, eliding her big understudy-makes-good stage triumph, perhaps out of a sense of economy (although the slim 74-minute running time could actually do with some padding), but more likely because this unformed Hepburn wouldn't be able to live up to the praise that the other characters shower on her. And her final, utterly confusing speech ("I'm not afraid! I'm not afraid!" afraid of what?)—well, nobody could have pulled that off convincingly, because it doesn't make any damn sense. Hepburn's not terrible here—she uses her scatterbrained mannerisms well in a speech about the exact circumstances of her future death, and at least she's fully committed to the painfully embarrassing party scene—but she didn't deserve the Oscar, which she won because the competition was so lax. There were fine, even timelessly great performances by women in 1933, including Barbara Stanwyck in The Bitter Tea of General Yen, Loretta Young in Man's Castle, and even Hepburn's genuine triumph in Little Women, but Oscar picked a particularly undistinguished trio, with May Robson in Lady for a Day and Diana Wynyard in the dreadful Cavalcade filling the rest of the dance card. Performance rating: 2.5 goats