The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #4: "The Sea of Grass" (Elia Kazan, 1947)

Glenn Kenny: In his auto­bi­o­graphy, Elia Kazan: A Life, the great dir­ect­or con­cludes the sec­tion chron­ic­ling the mak­ing of Sea of Grass thusly: “It’s the only pic­ture I’ve made that I’m ever ashamed of. Don’t see it.” Having tied ourselves to the pro­ject of watch­ing all nine motion pic­tures co-starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, we were not able to heed his advice. And hav­ing not heeded his advice and seen the pic­ture, my inclin­a­tion to protest “It’s not THAT bad” is tempered by my under­stand­ing of pretty much exactly why Kazan didn’t care for it. It’s all up on screen, although the ten or so pages in Kazan’s auto­bi­o­graphy that detail just why he’s ashamed of it are per­suas­ive and com­pel­ling and worth read­ing. In short, Kazan allowed him­self to be eaten up by what he calls “the Metromill,” a sys­tem that you some­times hear about the geni­us of, a sys­tem wherein so many of the par­tic­u­lars con­cern­ing the film had been decided on and con­trived before Kazan him­self even stepped on the lot. Henry James described (and I know you and our read­ers have heard this a mil­lion times before, sorry) the artist as an indi­vidu­al on whom “noth­ing is lost,” and read­ing Kazan’s plaints—he was irrit­ated at the horses Metro was giv­ing him for this 19^th-century-set melo­drama, com­plain­ing that they were too fat and cozy to be con­vin­cing as act­ive farm animals—one feels the hand, under­stand the eye, of this artist, and he’s such a com­pel­ling writer that as he goes on about the dif­fi­culties posed by Sea of Grass, you empath­ize with him. And then he cuts off the dis­cus­sion with a firm “Don’t see it” and that dir­ect­ive seems to carry the force of law.

But. As I say. We were obliged. And the film’s flaws aside, I have to say that what struck me par­tic­u­larly, at first, was how rel­at­ively dar­ing this film seemed in terms of con­tent. Consider that this 1947 film fea­tures a heroine who runs off from her (admit­tedly abus­ive and awful) hus­band and con­ceives and bears a child with anoth­er man, and is nev­er­the­less, like, allowed to live, more or less. Not only does Hepburn’s Lutie do this, she does this with the most bit­ter enemy of said hus­band, Tracy’s Jim Brewton. It’s always bra­cing to see Tracy play­ing a bas­tard, although as is the con­ven­tion with stu­dio films about brawny, stub­born cat­tle­man of the ‘40s and ‘50s, it’s made very clear that he is a Bastard With A Vision, yeah, yeah, whatever. And it is also odd to see Hepburn play­ing a char­ac­ter so largely tent­at­ive. Although as Lutie’s actions attest, when she ceases being tent­at­ive, it’s in a fairly big way.

I could spec­u­late on what I thought Kazan’s rel­at­ively new-fangled notions about act­ing brought to the table with respect to the two stars, who had been doing it the Hollywood way for the bet­ter part of two dec­ades apiece. (The actu­al age dif­fer­ence between Kazan and his act­ors wasn’t huge; he was nine year’s Tracy’s juni­or, and two years Hepburn’s.) But that would be pro­ject­ing, to be hon­est. I remem­ber at one point, Claire, you ask­ing me why Kazan made a par­tic­u­lar choice with respect to some­thing, and I said. “I don’t know. If Martin Scorsese were here, he could tell us. Although actu­ally, if Martin Scorsese were here, he would say,’What am I doing here? You two are in your paja­mas.’” Do you remem­ber your question?

Claire Kenny: I’m sorry to say, GK, I don’t remem­ber my ques­tion. What I do remem­ber is a lot of sit­ting on the sofa and moan­ing “Lord, when will this thing ever end?” For that reas­on I’m hard-pressed to explain why—but non­ethe­less com­pelled to admit that—I so thor­oughly dis­obeyed Kazan by watch­ing his non-masterpiece all the way through a second time, by myself. I’m still not clear how that happened…my inten­tion in pop­ping the disc back in for anoth­er go-round was to skim enough to refresh my memory regard­ing the smash­ing pioneer-woman gowns Walter Plunkett designed for Hepburn, about which I’d prom­ised The Siren I would say a few words. And some­how I found myself unable to skip over one frame of a movie I hadn’t even much liked the first time. I can’t say that I liked it any bet­ter the second, but if it is in fact a fail­ure (not really my place to say), it’s maybe all the more inter­est­ing for the nature of its fail­ings. Among its biggest prob­lems are length and scope—it’s both too short for the kind of epic sprawl it seems to want to cap­ture, and too long for the rel­at­ively few major char­ac­ters and details it provides. Three dec­ades later, Conrad Richter’s nov­el might have looked like a nat­ur­al fit for a TV min­iser­ies, but it’s too trudging and unwieldy for this format—we’re offered glimpses of poten­tially rich con­flicts and dra­mat­ic byways that are left unex­plored, while we linger in scenes of exten­ded expos­i­tion. But the out­lines of some­thing res­on­ant and inter­est­ing and visu­ally com­pel­ling and mor­ally ambigu­ous are in place, and watch­ing that prom­ise sort of die on the vine is cap­tiv­at­ing in its own way.

And then as you men­tion, the cast­ing against type and racy-for-the-era con­tent make this note­worthy as a kind of curi­os­ity. I had a hard time get­ting a read on Hepburn’s Lutie, and all that frantic, unfocused energy—was the nervous pitch of her per­form­ance meant to be a char­ac­ter choice? Though I don’t want to fall too far down this par­tic­u­lar rab­bit hole, part of the fas­cin­a­tion with the movie is try­ing to fig­ure out just what she’s going for. Hepburn’s char­ac­ters are always groun­ded in her own sharp and relent­less intel­li­gence, and it’s as if here, she decided the char­ac­ter was more instinct than intel­lect, and had no idea how to work with that—her ver­sion of a non-brainy girl was someone with 25% more breath in her voice, or something.

I’m not sure I so much agree with you on the Jim Brewton character—yes, Bastard With a Vision, but I don’t think The Vision was meant to sig­ni­fic­antly mit­ig­ate his gen­er­al awful­ness. It seemed more like the ulti­mate expres­sion of said awful­ness, inas­much as he was basic­ally a land-drunk mer­cen­ary determ­ined to keep his neigh­bors impov­er­ished. It’s true that he had the almighty fall-on-your-knees-miraculous abil­ity to identi­fy the plains as bet­ter suited for graz­ing than farm­ing, but then he also had a cor­res­pond­ing con­vic­tion that fig­ur­ing this out meant that he deserved all the cattle. So though the char­ac­ter does have a few stray sym­path­et­ic qual­it­ies, he wasn’t espe­cially ambiguous.

Glenn Kenny: What’s inter­est­ing to remem­ber is that there were likely DOZENS of films not dis­sim­il­ar to Sea of Grass churned out by MGM and oth­er stu­di­os year in, year out all through the sup­posed Golden Age of Hollywood movie­mak­ing, and the reas­on this pic­ture is remembered at all is because of a par­tic­u­lar con­flu­ence of tal­ent it brought togeth­er. Clearly that con­flu­ence of tal­ent did not suc­ceed in cre­at­ing a work that tran­scen­ded its gen­er­ic con­straints and/or the stu­dio house style, so to speak. But the col­lab­or­a­tion seen in this con­text cer­tainly does point to a sense in which our per­spect­ive on film his­tory gets skewed. Necessarily skewed, I’d say, as one lit­er­ally can’t see everything.

In any event, bey­ond the non-transcendence, and this might have been what helped hook you in on that second view­ing in the first place, there are the incid­ent­al pleas­ures of the house style, which was respons­ible in a sense for the cos­tumes you men­tion.  From my per­spect­ive, they have mostly to do with the cast­ing. Melvyn Douglas is a pretty strong counter to Tracy; nice to see him facing a strong male pres­ence, cer­tainly spruces up the nar­rat­ive. Also wel­come are glimpses of Harry Carey and Robert Walker.  For lov­ers of older films, these faces/personalities res­on­ate a par­tic­u­lar way, and their wel­come cha­risma and abil­ity makes a slog such as this some­thing less of a slog.

Claire Kenny: Absolutely agreed—the cast­ing is excep­tion­al, par­tic­u­larly in the case of Douglas, who makes trouble while stay­ing just on the clean side of smarmy.

But back to those cos­tumes, at last…Plunkett’s lovely work on this is par­tic­u­larly note­worthy for high­light­ing the dual chal­lenges of a cos­tume design­er: serving a film and a char­ac­ter while also serving the body and phys­ic­al pres­ence of the act­or. Katharine Hepburn’s lean, angu­lar frame is not nat­ur­ally suited to lacy frills or the calico homespun-homesteader look, but Plunkett ingeni­ously solves this issue by keep­ing her gowns very structured—instead of a lace col­lar, a pleated ruff; instead of a shawl, a trim, military-inspired jack­et. A bell sleeve is bal­anced by a slender skirt, and the drama of more volu­min­ous dresses is tempered by dark col­ors. This atten­tion to details of tail­or­ing, with firm ground­ing in the period’s style, lets Plunkett make Hepburn look at home even in white eye­let. White eye­let! While “Walter Plunkett aces peri­od design!” isn’t going to read as big news to any­one who loves film cos­tum­ing, a moment’s recog­ni­tion, please, for the wise tech­ni­cian inside the artist.

And that is…way more than I inten­ded to say about this movie, which I watched 100% more times than I meant to, and prob­ably will not watch again. Right? We’re not watch­ing this again, are we?

Glenn Kenny: No. We are not. Next we will treat Frank Capra’s State of the Union, which stars, bey­ond Hepburn and Tracy, our favor­ite Jessica Fletcher por­tray­er Angela Lansbury, boiiii!!!!! And we’ll have that pos­ted in way few­er than eight months, we promise!