The Sea of Grass (1947)

(On Cable TV, March 2019) As someone who’s spent too much time getting interested in Katharine Hepburn’s career (wait, is that even possible?) the 1940s were an interesting decade for her, going from the career renewal of being a young romantic interest in The Philadelphia Story to the more mature role in Adam’s Rib. In those ten years, she met Spencer Tracy, her hair went shorter, her roles became more complex and she managed the transition from girlish ingenue to matronly powerhouse. This transformation is very much at work in The Sea of Grass, along with a striking odd note in her screen persona: As the story heads west for another tale of homesteaders against cattle ranchers, we also get one of the very few departures from Hepburn’s very urban screen persona—Aside from Rooster Cogburn, I can’t recall another western of hers, which is almost statistically improbable considering that she lived through the rise and death of westerns as a dominant film genre. Anyway—here she finds herself on the frontier along with Spencer Tracy (another largely urban type, albeit to a lesser extent) in a multi-generational epic drama of colonization of the grassy plains. (This being said, this is one of the few westerns in which the importance of big cities is recognized and exploited.)  The time skips, when they first take place, are a bit startling and feature far more dramatic twists and turns than you’d expect from a story with a shorter time span. On the other hand, this adaptation from a hefty novel does feel long and the melodramatic turns of the narrative are not necessarily what we now associate with a Hepburn/Tracy film. Ah well—if you’re forewarned that the film lasts 131 minutes and there’s a lot of heartbreak on the way to a milder conclusion, then it may be successful—as long as you’re in the mood for a low-violence, high-melodrama western. The really funny thing, in retrospect, is that while The Sea of Grass is not usually ranked very highly on the list of the nine Hepburn/Tracy films, it was at the time the highest-grossing of them.