Titreenp SERIOUSLY. This is what the crap Hollywood still puts out?

Brightlyme i know i wasted 90 mins of my life.

PiraBit if their story seems completely bonkers, almost like a feverish work of fiction, you ain't heard nothing yet.

Janae Milner Easily the biggest piece of Right wing non sense propaganda I ever saw.

disinterested_spectator The title character of "Alice Adams," played by Katherine Hepburn, is a young woman who lives in a small town named South Renford. At first, it appears to be the strangest small town you ever saw, because everyone seems to be rich except the Adams family. Alice gets invited to dances and parties by rich women, but she cannot afford to dress the way they do. The rich men never ask her out, so she has to coerce her brother Virgil to escort her. At the dance, the rich men prefer to dance with rich women, and as her brother deserts her, she is left alone and comes across as a wallflower. In other words, we never see other young women of working class background for her to be friends with, and we never see working class men ask her out for a date. What an odd town.Of course, we know that this cannot be. No town is like that. In fact, there are bound to be far more working class families than rich ones: young women of her own class to be friends with; young men of her own class to date. Moreover, it is clear that her brother does stick to his own class. He even enjoys shooting craps with black servants, and at the dance, he greets the black bandleader, who in turn is happy to see him. They obviously know each other from nightclubs where working class people go to have fun. But not Alice. In fact, she is mortified when her brother says "Hi" to the bandleader.To put it bluntly, Alice is a big phony. And yet, we know we are supposed to feel sorry for her. To a certain extent we do. We all know how young people desperately want things that really don't matter, and it is painful to watch her suffer so from pretending to be something she is not, especially when we also know that she could be happy, if she just let all that go. In fact, that is why we never see young women of her own class inviting her to parties or young men of her own class asking her out. If we did, and she snubbed them, we would despise her. But by making it look as though she lives in a town where everyone is rich but her and her family, absurd as that is, we are more forgiving, because we are led to believe that she has no such opportunities.At the dance, Alice meets Arthur (Fred MacMurray), who seems to be quite taken with her, but she is just as much of a phony with him as with everyone else. It is hard to understand what he sees in her.But while we are trying to overlook Alice's affectations as the folly of youth, we discover that her mother, apparently in her fifties, is just as foolish as Alice in such matters. Instead of encouraging Alice to stay within her class, she berates her husband for not making more money so that Alice can continue to socialize with the town's upper crust. So much for the wisdom that supposedly comes with age.Alice's father is recovering from a long illness. His boss, Mr. Lamb, continues to pay him a salary and holds his job open for him, and her father wants to go back to work there when he gets better. But Alice's mother pushes him to go into business by starting a glue factory, based on a formula that actually seems to belong to his boss, inasmuch as Alice's father discovered it on company time.What we are hoping for is that Alice will realize how foolish she has been. Instead, the movie justifies her. Virgil gets into a jam and steals $150 from Mr. Lamb, whom he also works for, probably to pay off a gambling debt. In other words, we can no longer admire Virgil for being content to fraternize with those in his class, thereby making it seem right for Alice to avoid such people as unworthy.Anyway, with Alice's father stealing the glue formula and Alice's brother stealing the money, Mr. Lamb shows up at the Adams house to let them have a piece of his mind. It all looks pretty grim. But Alice tells him that it is all her and her mother's fault for pushing her father to make more money. Mr. Lamb is magnanimous, willing to let Alice's father have his job back when he gets well, willing to give them time to pay back the $150, and willing to let Alice's father share in the profits from the glue formula.But we should note that while Alice takes responsibility for her and her mother pushing her father to start a glue factory, she gives no indication that her desire to hobnob with rich society was an unworthy goal, only that she and her mother should not have pushed her father to make more money.Ultimately, she has learned nothing. We had hoped that she would quit being a phony, make friends with women in her own class, and fall in love with a man who is also from a working class background. But no. The movie rewards her phoniness by having Arthur fall in love with her and want to marry her. Because he is one of the elite, and presumably has plenty of money, she will get what she always wanted, inclusion in the upper class of South Renford. Now she can be the real thing.

richard-1787 This is really a wonderful movie in a lot of ways.To begin with, the script is great. It's intelligent, and develops the characters, showing different aspects of their personalities. They aren't always admirable personalities. Alice's mother has a lot of very superficial values, values she has transferred to her daughter.The direction is also first rate. The interest never flags.Where I have a real problem, however, is with Hepburn's performance. It is SOOOO mannered. If you know some of her later, much better performances, like Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, you can see that early on she developed a whole repertory of acting mannerisms. By the time she got to GWCTD, she knew how to use them sparingly and effectively. Here they sometimes overwhelm her performance. Her character, Alice Adams, is already superficial and despicable in a lot of ways. The mannerisms, as during the dinner fiasco, sometimes make her downright maniacal.Definitely watch this movie. The script and directing are great. But get ready to deal with a LOT of mannered acting from the female lead.

vincentlynch-moonoi Thank goodness that World War II allowed America to grow up! Poor Alice Adams -- a young woman (Katharine Hepburn) who lives in a fantasy world where she pretends to to be happy, while all the time being lonely. Poor Mother Adams who nags her husband constantly to make more money, even though it appears he is recovering from a heart attack. Poor Father Adams, suffering from a nagging wife while wanting all the best for his daughter, even though her prospects seem slim. And poor Brother Adams who has to take his sister to dances, putting a crimp on his ability to play craps.And then, into Alice's life comes a ray of sunshine -- Fred Mac Murray.Katharine Hepburn is excellent here, although the part is absolutely the opposite from the type of role that Hepburn later excelled at. This film was made only 3 years after Hepburn's film career first began.Fred MacMurray is excellent here as the beau. Today, audiences have forgotten just how popular MacMurray was, and how long his Hollywood career lasted. He was a very pleasing actor who could handle comedy or drama equally well.Fred Stone play's Alice's father here. He's an actor with whom I'm not familiar, but he had a very successful career dating back to the days of Annie Oakley, up through important roles in a number of motion pictures. Ann Shoemaker plays the mother, and plays the role so well that you'd like to see the poor husband shoot her dead; everyone hates a nag! Frank Albertson (not the one from "Chico And The Man") is good as the not very likable brother. Although their roles are small, it's interesting to see Hedda Hopper and Hattie McDaniel in supporting roles (the later, of course, as a maid, but here in a most demeaning nature).Once this film gets off the ground -- and it takes so LONG for it to do so -- it gets quite interesting. We could have learned that Alice was a wallflower much quicker at the beginning of the film. It really takes MacMurray to bring some life to the flick, and the dinner party scene is quite humorous...a comedy of errors. Admittedly, this happy ending could only happen in a much earlier era.I don't give this film the high marks some sources do, but it's a pretty decent outing about a very different time.

wmss-770-394192 I had the unpleasant experience of seeing this film for the first time. The only tolerable characters in the entire film are the father and brother.I was never a huge Kate Hepburn fan,but here she is basically unwatchable. The ridiculous way she yaks and twitters and tries to impress everybody is only the tip of the iceberg as to why this is so bad.I'm sure this film is the basis of the impressions comedians did of her for years.First,her family is considered so poor,but their house looks pretty middle class to me. Second,if she is so "poor" why do these rich idiots bother to invite her to parties? As shallow as everyone in the film is,one wouldn't think she'd even be on their social radar,much less a party guest. The level of racism in this film is astounding to my modern eyes. Black people are referred to as "darkies",yep,darkies. Was this the Civil War era or what? Also,her brother is looked down on because he actually (gasp!) has black friends he'd rather hang out with than the high class bigots and snobs his sister wants so much to be like. Then there is Hattie McDaniel. Yes,in a few years she would win an Oscar for GWTW,but here she is just as embarrassing as Hepburn(more so,I'm sure to any black people that actually saw this hot mess back then). The fact that Drew Barrymore thinks she is so funny in this opens up some questions in my mind about Miss Barrymore.At any rate,I will try to forget I ever saw this mess .