Claysaba Excellent, Without a doubt!!

Micransix Crappy film

Teringer An Exercise In Nonsense

Spoonatects Am i the only one who thinks........Average?

mark.waltz This isn't a great movie by any means, but for what it is, "A Woman Rebels" is very interesting and of interest to cinema buffs, feminists and history students. It is a picture of the changing perceptions of women in society, and who better to be the star of such a film as the very independent Katharine Hepburn? Hepburn and Elizabeth Allan ("A Tale of Two Cities", "David Copperfield") are sisters as different as night and day, and this is of great concern to their very strict widowed father (Donald Crisp). Their very prickly companion (Eily Malyon) reports them for offenses which brings Crisp's wrath down upon the two girls. Only the devoted Lucille Watson shows them any compassion, a role she will continue to film throughout the film as the only mother-like figure they've known since their own mother died. Hepburn falls in love with rebel Van Heflin and Allan marries the stable David Manners, but tragedy strikes when Hepburn visits her sister in Italy. Now left to raise a child she claims is her sister's, Hepburn returns home, and instead of fighting with her father becomes an independent woman and begins a career, originally without pay and with a male pseudonym, on a women's magazine which until she came along printed nothing but domestic articles on subjects no more confidential than needlepoint.Only two years after the production code came in, this film dared to cover the subject of unwed mothers with dignity and class. Even though it never mentions it, the subject is obvious, particularly with a young woman who visits Hepburn at the newspaper to get help for her ailing child, only to send her a cryptic letter later with tragic overtones. "Shame!" Hepburn screams at society in her column, ripping up the oh-so important story on needlepoint, "a career for respectable women", the print-out insinuates. Hepburn continues to raise her niece alone, keeping secrets when the young girl begins to date Heflin's grown son and becomes involved in scandal brought out by his vindictive wife.Along the way, Hepburn meets the dashing Herbert Marshall who stands by her through thick and thin. Their first encounter is hysterically funny as the stubborn Hepburn finds herself an adversary in a non-moving mule. Who do you think will win this battle? Crisp disappears for much of the second half of the film, but when he returns for a conclusion to the shattered father/daughter relationship, it is heartfelt and emotional, helping you understand the hardness of the patriarch of an earlier generation who simply didn't know how to bring girls up alone in a masculine dominated era.

bkoganbing In the pantheon of feminist films that Katherine Hepburn did in her career, A Woman Rebels definitely belongs. Even though this Victorian costume drama failed at the box office, seen today it's manifesto for the feminist cause and altogether proper for the daughter of a suffragette to have brought to the screen.Kate and her sister Elizabeth Allan are being raised as proper Victorian ladies by their widowed father Donald Crisp which means no rights at all. Liz dutifully accepts her lot, but not Kate. Liz accepts David Manners a young naval lieutenant as a husband picked out by Crisp, but Kate has a fling with Van Heflin that's left her pregnant. And Heflin's engaged to another proper Victorian lady to boot.Kate goes off to Italy to live with her sister while Manners is on duty. Allan is also expecting, but after Manners is killed in action, Allan dies of a broken heart. On Allan's deathbed she and Hepburn decide to raise Hepburn's expected as her niece rather than her daughter.Back in the United Kingdom, Hepburn goes to work for a woman's magazine and under her direction the publication becomes a feminist manifesto for its time. Still old sins have a way of coming back to haunt one and they do Kate in a most peculiar way.Herbert Marshall is in A Woman Rebels as Kate's faithful suitor and British nineteenth century diplomat. He looks earnest and faithful much like a pet collie, but in fairness the role isn't all that much. One can certainly see what attracted Hepburn to A Woman Rebels. It's very message was parlor talk in the Hepburn household when she was growing up. Still the film does have a lot of unresolved situations, mostly due to the Code being firmly in place now and flexing its censoring muscles.Kate's co-star Van Heflin was pretty unknown at this time and she would pick him to co-star with her as well as Joseph Cotten in The Philadelphia Story when Hollywood pronounced her box office poison. Though she didn't pick him for the screen version, she was the one who got him an MGM contract when she went there and from there Heflin became a star.A Woman Rebels is a story which probably would have been better told now than back in the day. Perhaps someone like Gwyneth Paltrow will take up where Kate the Great left off.

Neil Doyle At a time when she was considered "box-office poison" by film exhibitors, KATHARINE HEPBURN starred in A WOMAN REBELS, the story of the daughter of a strict judge (DONALD CRISP) crusading for women's rights in Victorian England, when it was unheard of for women to seek work in the office.Hepburn plays the role of Pamela Thistlewaite with all of her arch mannerisms intact under the direction of Mark Sandrich. VAN HEFLIN has a brief early role as one of her suitors who reveals that he's already married. She then switches her affection to HERBERT MARSHALL with whom she has an on again/off again relationship conflicted by Hepburn's stance on women's rights.Hepburn photographs beautifully and looks fetching in her Victorian costumes, but she's merely playing another facet of her "Little Women" character (Jo March), with ambitions to become a writer for a Ladies Home Journal and become an independent woman without need of a man in her life. Here, she's as self-sacrificing and noble as ever, but it's all rather stifling and mired in the '30s style of melodramatic screen acting.The supporting cast includes Elizabeth Allan, David Manners and Lucille Watson, who behaves exactly as though she's playing Aunt March again.Hepburn fans who enjoy seeing her play herself will probably enjoy this tremendously. Others beware. Best line in the movie goes to an aged Van Heflin who says, toward the end, "Hatred can bind two people together more strongly than love."

gleywong *Spoilers*With a tempting cast of Kate Hepburn and Herbert Marshall, and a strong title to boot, this movie was a frustrating disappointment. The actors seemed cast adrift in a ship without a rudder. "Woman Rebels" was shown as part of the recent TCM special on Kate Hepburn's birthday, with early pre-code movies from the 30's and 40's, when she was already in her mid-twenties, and it followed the 1933 Dorothy Arzner classic "Christopher Strong." Now THAT is a movie with a solid script and a director who knew what she wanted to say and what to do with her stars. It's no accident that the director was a woman.In "Woman Rebels," the story, which is pretty simple but appears to have been written by committee (three writers are credited), still left certain details dangling, such as why does her stern and unforgiving father (Donald Crisp, here woefully underused and misdirected) appear only in the beginning and inexplicably at the end? or exactly whose baby was she raising, and why aren't we(or she) clear about it? Or take the casting; besides the principals, Hepburn's "daughter" is played by an actress (Elizabeth Allen) who, when grown up, looks older than her aunt (Hepburn) who is supposed to be twenty years her senior. That bothered me constantly. As for Herbert Marshall, he is given a simpering one-dimensional role, supposedly of a diplomat, that relegates him to merely standing in the wings commiserating, while Kate does her "rebelling" by running her newspaper and commenting on social issues. The latter is all well and good, but the context is so limited, and the supporting roles all so weak that we are pained to watch her.One wonders how Hepburn accepted this role after putting in such a sterling performance at age 26 (and only her second film) for Arzner in "Christopher Strong." That movie should have been named "A Woman Rebels," instead of giving the title, as others have noted, to Kate's love interest-- her friend's father, a gentleman also ultimately and sadly too weak in character to match her strength (wouldn't you guess that he would ask her to give up flying and not care a hoot that she might be pregnant?) The daring plot of "Christopher Strong" must have been startling at the time, and even today, it can be viewed with some wonder at the taste and delicacy with which it was done. Reviewers mention that Kate's role in that was modeled after Amelia Earhart, but I believe it is closer to Beryl Markham ("West with the Night") in its daring and literate spirit. Juxtaposing that 1933 film with "Woman Rebels" makes one rue the fact that even after taking ten steps forward, only three years later she would have to take fifty steps backward. Hepburn would have to wait almost ten years to be paired with Spencer Tracy before making a recovery film worth her salt.