If you enjoy stories from the early 1800s you might like this movie. It's a mild example of the type--pleasant, with moments of funny lines and good acting, and nobody is really fooled by the woman posing as her own niece, just confused over the cover up. The friends are not dopes, and neither is her fella. At first he seems as if he has a cruel streak which is probably from a lack of experience with sensitive women after so many years in the military and the difference between his memory and the reality--he was used to the way HE had aged, but he comes across by the end as an exceptionally nice guy, a real catch, with a taste for daffy dames rather than the plump sweet young things he was supposed to favor. He joined in with the ridiculous plan with stylish conviction when he figured out what was going on.
And of course Phoebe's mistake was being so hurt, and who wouldn't feel shocked when confronted by the knowledge that you have wasted your youth loving a man who thinks you are dowdy and unattractive and can't even recognize you when you are dressed up, that she decided to play this deception, likely because she read too much and lived too little to immediately see how foolish it was. It spiraled out of control because of her nosy neighbors who wouldn't allow her to merely send Livvy home and forget the whole thing. I have to think it did Phoebe's ego a world of good to be pursued so ardently by the soldiers! I'm sure when she got married her husband got to see both the restrained and capable school teacher and the goofy social butterfly in her from then on, which was probably a far better outcome than if everything had gone well from the start.
Modern reviewers can't know what original audiences thought of these movies but Depression era viewers would certainly have had an acute understanding of what happened to a woman without a man in an era when a woman had no rights or protections. Many a Depression era woman decided to settle, as Phoebe's sister did, for her situation and become a confirmed spinster school teacher, a type that my father disliked as much as the man in this movie. (In the 30s US, if a woman married she lost her teaching job.) And teachers were paid so little in the Depression that they boarded in people's homes or got rooms with other teachers, in my mother's case with her sister as in this movie, enduring intense financial distress and societal restriction that could make a woman seem old before her time. There were many women in the 30s who became single, childless career women from necessity, just as there were after WWI and other wars around the world. There were so many single, childless women scratching out a living in Britain after WWI that there was a name for them and they had a little social world of their own. So I would say this movie would have been a lot more comprehensible to audiences in the Depression than to us.
Hepburn was 30 when this came out. That was the right age for the story. In the 1930s, and in the early 1800s, 30 was NOT the new 20. 30 was well into maturity.
And of course Phoebe's mistake was being so hurt, and who wouldn't feel shocked when confronted by the knowledge that you have wasted your youth loving a man who thinks you are dowdy and unattractive and can't even recognize you when you are dressed up, that she decided to play this deception, likely because she read too much and lived too little to immediately see how foolish it was. It spiraled out of control because of her nosy neighbors who wouldn't allow her to merely send Livvy home and forget the whole thing. I have to think it did Phoebe's ego a world of good to be pursued so ardently by the soldiers! I'm sure when she got married her husband got to see both the restrained and capable school teacher and the goofy social butterfly in her from then on, which was probably a far better outcome than if everything had gone well from the start.
Modern reviewers can't know what original audiences thought of these movies but Depression era viewers would certainly have had an acute understanding of what happened to a woman without a man in an era when a woman had no rights or protections. Many a Depression era woman decided to settle, as Phoebe's sister did, for her situation and become a confirmed spinster school teacher, a type that my father disliked as much as the man in this movie. (In the 30s US, if a woman married she lost her teaching job.) And teachers were paid so little in the Depression that they boarded in people's homes or got rooms with other teachers, in my mother's case with her sister as in this movie, enduring intense financial distress and societal restriction that could make a woman seem old before her time. There were many women in the 30s who became single, childless career women from necessity, just as there were after WWI and other wars around the world. There were so many single, childless women scratching out a living in Britain after WWI that there was a name for them and they had a little social world of their own. So I would say this movie would have been a lot more comprehensible to audiences in the Depression than to us.
Hepburn was 30 when this came out. That was the right age for the story. In the 1930s, and in the early 1800s, 30 was NOT the new 20. 30 was well into maturity.