BEFORE: Here it is, the last documentary in this year's Doc Block. I made it! I can tell you that something weird may happen to you after you watch 43 documentaries, because right now I can't remember a time when I was NOT watching docs. I mean, I know there WAS a time before the Doc Block, it's just hard to remember it. But I'm am STARVING for a fiction film - I re-watched "Deadpool 2" on Thursday afternoon, because I wanted to get ready for "Deadpool & Wolverine", and it seemed like the most brilliant narrative film of all time! Or at least the best superhero film of all time, let's be real. But it was really, really nice to watch fiction again, so I can't wait to finish this doc and move on to something fictional tomorrow!
Angela Lansbury carries over from "Famous Nathan".
THE PLOT: A documentary which captures Katharine Hepburn's spirit and determination, exploring her story using her own words through a combination of previously hidden audio tapes, videos and photographs.
AFTER: This is another film that uses the "Belushi" technique, which occurs when someone finds a big box of a dead celebrity's correspondence and decides to make a documentary about that. In this case, the Katharine Hepburn museum, which is in Old Saybrook, CT got a donation of a big box of Hepburn's personal letters, which was found in the last house she lived in, I think. It seems that most of her personal belongings were put up for auction in 2004, in accordance with her final wishes, but I guess somebody missed this box of letters, so what better use for them than to gain insights about her personal life and thoughts?
Unlike the Rock Hudson revelations, nobody really seems to know definitively about Hepburn, she's a bit more like Cary Grant, in that of course there were rumors, but nobody can really say for sure. Hepburn was married once to Ludlow Smith, who helped her get into acting, and moved with her back to New York from Philadelphia, and then she left with his car and broke his heart. This guy even changed his NAME to S. Ogden Ludlow so she wouldn't have to go by the very plain name "Kate Smith", but it turned out she didn't believe in taking her husband's last name, anyway, so he did that for nothing. By her accounts, he was a very decent guy, but she needed to move out to California and be in movies, so he had to get left behind.
Then she had relationships with her married agent, Leland Hayward, and of course the famous one with Howard Hughes. You know, for a lesbian she sure slept with a lot of guys. I know, maybe she went both ways because she did always travel with another woman, just saying. A few biographers have insisted over the years that she was lesbian or bisexual, but one was Liz Smith and she might have had her own agenda. Anyway the doc really leans on the love she had for Spencer Tracy, who was also married, but that's OK, she really liked dating married guys, just not her own husband. Celebrities, right?
The relationship between Hepburn and Tracy was something of an open secret, but since Tracy stayed married to someone else, they tried to keep things as clandestine as possible. They had separate residences, and spent long periods apart, especially if one or both of them was away on a movie shoot, but then they also made a lot of films together, so that was probably just as much time spent together as apart. Still, a lot of sneaking around and trying not to be seen together, it was probably a lot more trouble than it was worth. As Tracy began to lose his health due partly to his alcoholism, Hepburn took a break from her career to care for him, for five years, and she was with him when he died, but did not attend his funeral out of respect for his family. Look, I get it, it sucks to be cheated on and it also sucks to BE the cheaters, you do what you can do, and everyone's really just making it all up as they go along.
Hepburn stayed active after that, playing tennis every day into her eighties, and also swimming regularly. She also took up painting later in life, just like David Bowie did. OK, maybe not JUST like Bowie. Early on she'd been a feminist, and supported birth control and abortion, and if you believe this documentary, she was also the first woman to ever wear pants. I'd like to see the supporting evidence on that, though. Maybe it was a feminist thing and maybe it wasn't - one report was that she just like to walk around barefoot, and pants made that easier. But then the doc ran clips from an early film of Hepburn's ("Sylvia Scarlett"), and it shows her being disguised as a man, so a Drag King, if you will, and she did look very masculine with short hair and an added mustache.
Much like "Sid & Judy", this doc skips quickly over Hepburn's earlier movies - "A Bill of Divorcement", "Christopher Strong", "Morning Glory", "Spitfire" and "The Little Minister", among others, because it wants very badly to get to the meatier ones - "Stage Door", "Holiday", "The Philadelphia Story", and then of course the films co-starring with Spencer Tracy - "Woman of the Year", "Adam's Rib", "Pat and Mike" and "Desk Set". Hey, I've seen most of those.
Then there's the later films, "The African Queen", "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", and "The Lion in Winter". Now, "The African Queen" was released 6 years before "Desk Set", but you wouldn't know that from the order this documentary presents her movies. I guess they just wanted to deal with all the Spencer Tracy stuff together? Anyway they spend quite a bit of time on these last three films, because they interviewed the continuity person from "The African Queen", she was somehow still alive, and she remembers everything about being in the jungle with Hepburn, Bogart and John Huston. Then we go BACK to Spencer Tracy for "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", where they played the parents of a young woman (Katherine Houghton, who was also Katharine Hepburn's niece) who brings home a black man she's dating for them to meet. Well, jeez, it was Sidney Poitier, how could they not accept him?
And then there's "The Lion in Winter", which was the first film she starred in after Spencer Tracy's death, and it was Oscar-nominated in every category it could be nominated in. Hepburn shared the Oscar that year with Barbra Streisand (yes, there can be a tie) and Hepburn also got a double-BAFTA for that film and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner", I guess in the U.K. both films came out in the same year. Now by showing clips from "The Lion in Winter" here, for me this is a call-back to the first documentary in my Block, because "Sly" also showed footage from "The Lion in Winter", because I guess Sylvester Stallone likes that movie? I think he showed the clip just because "it's about family", but yeah, it kind of is but it kind of isn't, still, thanks, Sly, you made my Doc Block loop back in on itself and form a giant circle of sorts.
But really, saying it was a circle is just a bit too simple. Maybe the Doc Block was a giant Mobius strip, something that loops around and joins itself again and forms a giant surface with two sides, that in the end are really only one side. Nah, that doesn't really work either, it's still like a giant circle, but there are lines across the circle that connect different points on the circle, for no reason at all, but at least I know the connections are there, and I know all of them. Like "Call Me Kate" doesn't just connect back with "Sly", it connects to "Sid & Judy", and it connects to 15 other films via Dick Cavett or Larry King, and it connects back to "Yogi Berra: It Ain't Over" because Cary Grant was also in that movie, and it connects back to "Remembering Gene Wilder" through Sidney Poitier, and so on.
Anyway, "Call Me Kate" ended up leaving out a LOT of details about Katharine Hepburn's movies, and her life as well. I guess it's impossible to sum up the life of a person who lived for 96 years in a documentary portrait that's not even 96 minutes long. It can't be done, we just can't learn everything we need to know, they just have to generalize things given the viewers' short attention spans. But this has kind of been the case for every film in the last month and a half. Anyway, it's over now and I have to look at the big picture to see everything I learned - now, what did everybody have in common?
Well, my doc subjects this year have been mostly Americans, most born in America but others who were immigrants (Charlie Chaplin, John Lennon, David Bowie). OK, we had a few Brits in the mix, too, like Elton John and Wham! But come on, who's more American than Mary Tyler Moore, Burt Reynolds and Yogi Berra? The Beach Boys, Donna Summer and Little Richard? Stan Lee, Mike Wallace and Jim Henson? Belushi, Farley, Gene Wilder and Albert Brooks? Keith Haring, Rock Hudson and Billie Jean King? Billie Holiday, Marvin Hamlisch and Judy Garland? Surely this is one of the finest cross-sections of famous and mostly-dead Americans ever profiled!
If I'm really generalizing, these are also successful people, and most of them were workaholics. Is that a common thread that ran through everything? Work very hard, and you'll be successful at acting, singing, baseball or puppeting - but work too hard and it may cost you your marriage. Fame gives and fame also takes away, unless you work to achieve some kind of balance. How many of the people listed above were divorced several times? The majority of them, right? I think Judy Garland had the record with five husbands, but honestly I haven't done the math. Mike Wallace had four wives, too. Others like Little Richard and Rock Hudson tried marriage but come on, it just wasn't in the cards for them. Jim Henson and Mary Tyler Moore had long-term marriages, but those ended too - the only ones who really stayed married for a long time were Yogi Berra and Stan Lee. Well, at least somebody did.
All right, I'm packing up the documentaries (really, not many left on my list to pack up) and I'll get back to some more next year if I can link enough of them together. Moving on back to fiction films, I can't wait.
Also starring Angela Allen, Robin Andreoli, Bonnie Greer, Mundy Hepburn, Kat Kramer, Glenn Paskin, Claudia Roth Pierpont, Joe Tracy, Sean Tracy, Toyah Willcox,
with archive footage of Katharine Hepburn (last seen in "The Half of It"), Lauren Bacall (last seen in "Sid & Judy"), Humphrey Bogart (ditto), George Cukor (ditto), Louis B. Mayer (ditto), John Barrymore (last seen in "Grand Hotel"), Cate Blanchett (last seen in "Tár"), Charles Boyer (last seen in "She's Funny That Way"), Barbara Bush (last seen in "The Special Relationship"), Dick Cavett (last seen in "Billie"), Jane Fonda (last seen in "Georgia Rule"), Henry Fonda (also carrying over from "Famous Nathan"), Clark Gable (last seen in "Mr. Warmth - The Don Rickles Project"), Ava Gardner (last seen in "The Kid Stays in the Picture"), Cary Grant (last seen in "Yogi Berra: It Ain't Over"), Laura Harding, Anthony Harvey, Leland Hayward, Howard Hildebrand, Anthony Hopkins (last seen in "Sly"), Peter O'Toole (ditto), Katharine Houghton (last seen in "The Night We Never Met"), Howard Hughes (last seen in "F for Fake"), John Huston (last seen in "They'll Love Me When I'm Dead"), Larry King (last seen in "Marvin Hamlisch: What He Did for Love"), Fred MacMurray (last seen in "Double Indemnity"), Sidney Poitier (last seen in "Remembering Gene Wilder"), Gig Young (ditto), Ludlow Smith, James Stewart (last seen in "Ira & Abby"), Spencer Tracy (last seen in "Everything Is Copy"), Phyllis Wilbourne.
RATING: 5 out of 10 early roles in theater - as an understudy!
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