Katharine Hepburn: 100th Anniversary Collection

At one point in Morning Glory (1933), one of the six films included in this collection, Katherine Hepburn, as aspiring actress Eva Lovelace, remarks, "I want the best or nothing else." Viewers with similar aspirations might think twice about this boxed set, which contains one of Hepburn's career curiosities, Dragon Seed (1944), based on the novel by Pearl S. Buck and starring the great Kate as a Chinese woman whose rural way of life is threatened by the Japanese occupation. But for more broadminded Hepburn fans, Katharine Hepburn: 100th Anniversary Collection is essential. All of the films are making their DVD debuts, and—taken together—help to complete the portrait of Hepburn as Hollywood's greatest female movie star (rightly designated by the American Film Institute). The two most celebrated films in this collection are actually the most dated: Morning Glory, for which Hepburn won her first Academy Award, finds her playing a star-struck kid newly arrived in New York looking for her big break, while Sylvia Scarlett (1935), costarring Cary Grant and helmed by George Cukor (who would later direct the pair in The Philadelphia Story), has acquired something of a cult following for the “celluloid closet” implications of Hepburn's character impersonating a boy while on the lam with her embezzler father. Without Love (1945) is perhaps the weakest of her films with Spencer Tracy, but this romantic wartime comedy, about a scientist and a widow who agree to a marriage of convenience, is sparkling entertainment (Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn likewise have great screen chemistry here as a bickering couple). Hepburn doesn't usually play the damsel in distress, but she makes a good one in the noirish thriller Undercurrent (1946), as the new wife of a man (an increasingly creepy Robert Taylor) with a deadly secret and an estranged brother (Robert Mitchum) who threatens to expose it. Last, but not least, The Corn is Green (1979) is a prestigious made-for-TV adaptation of Emlyn Williams' beloved play about a British woman who dedicates herself to teaching children in a Welsh mining town. Each disc replicates an old fashioned night out at the movies, complete with a vintage short (several Oscar-nominated) and cartoon (the best, on the Without Love disc, is Tex Avery's Swingshift Cinderella). Recommended. (D. Liebenson)