Eva Lovelace is an intelligent yet naive young woman who becomes the golden bough for a Broadway Producer and his Playwright, a new branch which immediately sprouts from the broken remains of the old one, an omen of success. Katharine Hepburn won her first Academy Award for her loquacious performance as Ms. Lovelace, her breathy and mannered speech dominating every scene and conversation. Adolphe Menjou (Producer Louis Easton) and Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. (Playwright Joseph Sheridan) can do nothing but react to her strident orations, because even when she’s conversing it seems like a monologue!
Eva comes to the Big Apple to take a bite out of Broadway but instead, it takes a bite out of her. Her strident urgency lands her small parts on stage and Vaudeville until, as understudy to a pampered star, she gets her big break. No points here for originality, as the film is held together by Hepburn’s force of personality, a woman who doesn’t give up and relies on only one person: herself. When fate converges and she attends a party as a guest of her mentor, her plain and simple clothes are diametrically opposed by the absurd frills and gowns that adorn the other actresses. When she gets drunk on two glasses of champagne (on an empty stomach, starving actress and all), she gets the attention of all the guests (and host Louis Easton) and performs two short vignettes, one from Hamlet and another from Romeo and Juliet. For the first time, the Director Lowell Sherman cuts to close-up on Hepburn accentuating the performance, making a grand statement that would be lost to a Broadway audience who sees only from their limited perspective. However briefly, he transitions the Bard from stage to screen! This scene alone probably won her the Oscar.
Eva hangs on as understudy, orbiting a star whose ego has enough mass to finally go supernova, and on opening night of The Golden Bough she gets her own chance to shine. Of course, she’s a hit and proclaims she isn’t afraid to be a Morning Glory, her one night of flouresence potentially curling and dying as the sun wanes towards dusk, fading as the neon lights flicker to life on billboards and marquees. But the title of the film is a double entendre, as she awoke to her own morning glory in Louis Easton’s bedroom! Though she sleeps with Louis Easton after a drunken Shakespearean soliloquy, she neither regrets it nor uses it as a springboard for success.
Final Grade: (C)