Gregory La Cava turns a stage play about out-of-work actresses into ninety minutes of women talking over one another, with Katharine Hepburn and Ginger Rogers sharing a room and a grudge. The second half goes somewhere sadder, and mostly earns it.
Gregory La Cava’s Stage Door is adapted from a stage play and behaves like nothing of the kind. Anthony Veiller and Morrie Ryskind’s screenplay keeps the setting, a boarding house full of actresses who cannot get work, throws out most of what happened there, and fills the space with talk: fast, overlapping, unkind and funny. It reached British cinemas on 31 December 1937 and it is still one of the quickest comedies of its decade. We recommend it without much hesitation, with one caveat about the second half that we will come to.
Hepburn is Terry Randall, the rich girl who arrives with a trunk, a fur and a set of opinions about the theatre, and Rogers is Jean Maitland, the dancer who has to share a room with her. The film is at its best when the two of them are in it together. Hepburn plays Terry stiff, clever and slightly ridiculous, and the house treats her exactly as it should. Rogers has the lines. She delivers them lying on a bed, filing her nails, and never seems to be trying, which is the hardest thing in comedy to do. We laughed a great deal, and we laughed most at the insults nobody on screen laughs at.
La Cava let his actresses improvise, and you can hear it. The dining-room scenes run six or seven conversations at once, and William Hamilton cuts them so that you catch the end of a joke at one end of the table while another is being set up at the other. Robert De Grasse shoots the house deep, through doorways and down the staircase, so there is nearly always a woman in the background listening and about to interrupt. Muriel King dresses Hepburn in tailored clothes with shoulders and puts everyone else in dressing gowns and one good frock that seems to get passed round; you can tell who has money in the first frame of any scene.
The rest of the house is cast with care. Lucille Ball’s Judith spends the film waiting for a lumberman called Butch (Grady Sutton) and is drier than anyone about it. Gail Patrick’s Linda Shaw does contempt so well that we started looking forward to her entrances. Constance Collier’s Miss Luther has played everything, once, and will tell you. Adolphe Menjou’s Powell is a producer who has seduced so many young actresses that he is bored by his own technique, and Franklin Pangborn, as his fussing man Harcourt, is funny for the length of time it takes to open a door.
Then there is Andrea Leeds. Kay Hamilton had a hit last season and has not worked since, and Leeds plays her quietly in a film where nobody else is quiet, with the face of someone who has stopped expecting to be fed. There is a look she gives across the dining table, while the others are trading insults, that stopped us laughing outright. The second half takes a turn we will not describe, and it is her turn.
The caveat is what the film does with that turn. When it stops being a comedy it stops all at once, and the last twenty minutes carry a weight the first hour did not prepare us for. One or two speeches are written out in full where a look would have done, and Hepburn, so good at being laughed at, is asked to be taken seriously at short notice. The line about calla lilies that Terry mangles in rehearsal is a fine running joke, and the film asks a good deal of it later. It gets most of the way. We felt the gears change.
Among the comedies of its decade it is unusual in having a house full of women and a handful of men who exist to be the joke, and unusual too in being 92 minutes long and never once slack. Watch it with someone who talks over films. For once it will not matter.
