Quality Street (1937)
(On Cable TV, January 2020) One may admire Katharine Hepburn for the incredible longevity of her career, or the steely matrons she played in the latter half of her career, but there’s a place for her cute ingenue roles as well, and that’s what Quality Street delivers in spades. Finding some originality in romantic comedy tropes, the film has Hepburn as a 19th-century-England romantic lead pining for her beau to propose… only to be made speechless when he announces that he’s leaving for the Napoleonic Wars. Ten years pass until his return, at which point she ends up creating a charade posing as her own (fictional) niece for reasons that worked better at a time when unmarried 30-year-old were considered old maids. Many misunderstandings occur until they both get tired of the fiction and take action to get rid of the nonexistent niece in order to keep up appearances. There’s not a whole lot more to the film, but there’s a restrained sense of humour to it all that makes it almost credible despite the ludicrousness of the identity plot. As a costume drama, it hits the necessary high notes with great sets and costumes. While it certainly doesn’t qualify as a great Hepburn film (there’s little here of her famous persona), and she’s not exactly credible as an innocent niece, the film is only 82 minutes long, and it does help round off a career that spanned sixty years. There are better examples of young-Hepburn roles, for sure, but it’s not a bad thing to have a few more of those around.