Quality Street (1937)

In a London street full of curtain-twitchers, the chatter is rife when someone buys a cake! Who might be coming to luncheon? Well, quickly we discover that “Dr. Brown” (Franchot Tone) is coming to visit “Phoebe” (Katharine Hepburn). What he delivers, though, isn’t quite what she expects and off to the Napoleonic wars he goes. A decade later, he returns but seems disappointed that she, too, has aged. She’s crestfallen so decides to spruce herself up a bit and see if she can’t re-engage his attentions. Quite cunningly, though, she decides to adopt a sort of alias, and is introduced by the maid “Patty” (Cora Witherspoon) as visiting neice “Livvy”. He’s interested, all right, but soon so are a great many other, younger, uniformed would-be lotharios and so a delicate eggshell-treading drama now plays out with jealousness the name of the game! All the while, there are some meddling spinsters across the street who love nothing more than a good old gossip and with her own sisters out of the joke, too, it’s going to be tough for “Phoebe” or “Livvy” to get away with the masquerade. It’s one of Sir J.M. Barrie’s lesser known stories, this one, but it’s quite a potent one ultimately looking at the hypocrisies of style over substance and beauty being skin deep. Hepburn is on great form, as is the always reliable Estelle Winwood as the prim neighbour, but Tone is, really, more mono-tone. He has the looks ok, but is as flat as a pancake on screen and given the chemistry and spark between the two is crucial to the scheming naughtiness of the tale, he just doesn’t deliver. The score skips along jauntily; the production is packed full of lace and gowns and there are double-standards a-plenty amidst the dialogue. Perhaps, in the end “Brown” thought that perhaps he should just have stayed at the war.