Alice Adams

Hepburn is magnificent as the small-town social climber, although the script so softens Booth Tarkington's novel that she emerges throughout as a Persil-white heroine tarnished only by a little adolescent foolishness. With Tarkington's acidly observed social satire on Midwestern mores carefully ironed out by the Hollywood machine, little remains beyond a glowingly nostalgic slice of Americana. But Stevens fills the gap with some brilliant set pieces, including the exemplary scene-setting of the opening sequence, the society ball at which Hepburn is reduced to endless subterfuge to mask her gauche unease, and the ghastly dinner party at which all her social pretensions finally collapse under pressure from a heatwave.