Spitfire ** (1934, Katharine Hepburn, Robert Young, Ralph Bellamy) – Classic Movie Review 3,940

Katharine Hepburn is a great actress, of course, but playing an illiterate hillbilly mountain girl is quite beyond her, especially one called Trigger Hicks!

Director John Cromwell’s 1934 drama film Spitfire stars a miscast Katharine Hepburn, who adopts a very theatrical manner in a hollow, unconvincing performance as an illiterate mountain girl called Trigger Hicks, who arouses passion in both philandering engineer John Stafford (Robert Young) and George Fleetwood (Ralph Bellamy), another engineer building a dam in the mountains.

Trigger rescues an abused baby from its parents, and seeks help from Stafford and the engineers who are working on the new dam. Trigger is the local faith healer, whom the locals think is a witch.

Alas, the stagey melodrama Spitfire, based on Lula Vollmer’s 1927 Broadway play Trigger, must be counted a misfire. Hepburn is a great actress, of course, but playing an illiterate hillbilly mountain girl is quite beyond her, especially one called Trigger Hicks!

The part was intended for Dorothy Jordan, but Hollywood power player Hepburn insisted on playing the role, which started increasing public antipathy towards her, a reaction that became so strong that she was labelled ‘box office poison’.

Nevertheless, the film did well at the box office, taking $604,000 on a budget of $223,000, and made a profit for RKO of $113,000.

Also in the cast are Martha Sleeper, Louis Mason, Sara Haden, Virginia Howell, Will Geer, John Beck, Therese Wittler and Sidney Toler.

The play Trigger was directed at the Little Theatre in New York by Hepburn’s friend George Cukor. It opened on 6 December 1927 and ran for only 47 performances. Claiborne Foster played the lead. In the cast were Sara Haden and Louis Mason, who are also in the movie.

Talk about star power, Hepburn demanded and received $10,000 in addition to her $50,000 salary to stay on set an extra day for Cromwell’s reshoot of the two final scenes that he was dissatisfied with.

The cast are Katharine Hepburn as Trigger Hicks, Robert Young as John Stafford, Ralph Bellamy as George Fleetwood, Martha Sleeper as Eleanor Stafford, Louis Mason as Bill Grayson, Sara Haden as Etta Dawson, Virginia Howell as Granny Raines, Sidney Toler as Jim Sawyer, Will Geer [High Ghere] as West Fry, John Beck as Jake Hawkins, and Therese Wittler as Mrs Jim Sawyer.

© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3,940

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