A Woman Rebels (1936)

Directed by Mark Sandrich. Starring Katharine Hepburn, Herbert Marshall, Doris Dudley, Donald Crisp, Van Heflin, Elizabeth Allan, David Manners, Lucile Watson, Connie Emerald, Marilyn Knowlden.

Made during her “box office poison” phase, few roles were better-suited for Hepburn’s public image and personal philosophy than Pamela Thistlethwaite, the defiant daughter of imperious Crisp in Victorian London, whose refusal to bow to the will of the era’s repressive social mores results in her crusading for women’s rights. A worthy message, and Hepburn makes it worth seeing, but the script is didactic and succumbs to soapy melodrama a few times too many—did the filmmakers have so little faith in the heroine’s central struggle that they needed to insert so many romantic complications and “shocking” incidents? Crisp’s line readings are on the monotonous side, and Marshall is better than his flimsy role as the diplomat who loves Pamela, although his final line delivery is choice; Hepburn personally recommended Heflin—her The Philadelphia Story castmate—for the role of her first-act lover (his film debut). Adapted by Ernest Vajda and Anthony Veiller from a 1930 Netta Syrett novel: “Portrait of a Rebel”.

65/100