The Great White Way-Katharine Hepburn And Ginger Rogers’ “Stage Door” (1937)-A Film Review

DVD Review

   

By Seth Garth

Stage Door, starring Katharine Hepburn, Ginger Rogers, Adolphe Menjou, and an ensemble cast of many well-known actresses from the 1930s and 1940s, based very loosely based on from the scuttle- bud on the play of the same name by Edna Ferber and George S Kaufman, 1937 

There was a time in an earlier part of the 20^th century when the lure of New York’s Broadway, the Great White Way, was what serious aspiring actors aimed for, serious theater, and considered Hollywood work fit for only upstarts and ragamuffins. Until the dough and the publicity shifted West. The film under review, Stage Door, based loosely, very loosely on the successful Broadway play by the same name by the Algonquin Roundtable’s Edna Ferber and George S. Kaufman takes a look, a hard if somewhat humorous look, at Broadway before the glitter out West swamped the place to the sidelines.      

I don’t know about now although I would be hard-pressed to think of a film almost totally centered on women but back then there were at least several where women, women as an ensemble, even if a star-studded ensemble, did some very good and fruitful work. That is the case here where a group of female actors are left to their own devices in a boarding house for mostly star-struck young actors where the rent is cheap and the food the same. Although Terry, a Brahmin upstart crashing the working life of the theater played by Katharine Hepburn (who else) and Jean, a salt of the earth working stiff played by Ginger Rogers, lead the cast, and grab a great deal of the story line there is plenty of repartee by the other denizens of this mad house. So we get a glimpse at all the aspects of trying to make it on Broadway from last year’s big thing now down on her uppers, a few gals happy to get chorus line work, to some waiting on the bright lights to shine before going off to wife-hood and motherhood-an expected path in those days.   

But the central story is the tension and ultimate friendship though sorrow of Terry who if slumming on the Great White Way is earnest about making it, or trying to, even if she is trying to the other less privileged working stiffs shuffling to try-outs and endless appointments to get a measly job and Jean, who is a world wise and world wary wisecracker making her way through her paces. The tragedy of a young boarder’s suicide after failing to stay in the bright lights brings them together. 

As for the guys they are mainly around as vague dates and butts of jokes except Adophe Menjou who as Anthony Powell is the great maker and shaker producer of plays and of nefarious efforts to snag any gullible stray young actress from hunger (Jean almost gets that snag). Grab this one if only for the great repartee among the denizens. I know I sure would not like to be around a roomful of what in the old days were called catty women as the butt of their rapier wit.