There are no other ways to describe this film but...bad. It's terrible. Katharine Hepburn is, if you hadn't figured it out already by the time you scrolled down to the bottom of the reviews on this page to read mine, miscast. To call her awful would be an understatement. Think of how bad she was in Christopher Strong and Morning Glory, then combine them and add three more bad performances by her.
Her regular Bryn Mawr accent combined with an obvious fake hillbilly drawl is so bad it makes Bette Davis's atrocious English accent in Of Human Bondage look natural. Country slang was not in Hepburn's vocabulary, and like with most of her films before Stage Door, she seems to have forgotten that she is quite a good actress (with very little variety, as proven by films like this and Dragon Seed, but still quite good. I will give her that.)
The story isn't even worth mentioning. Katharine Hepburn is a witch or something, who lives in a shack in the woods, and one day steals a sick baby, somehow manages to nurse it back to health, then when it goes back to its parents it dies, and so on, but Hepburn's "powers" are really due to a stack of prayer cards she carries around with her.
I hate to sound crass, but the film would have been much better if the village people had stoned her to death for her sorcery (and her awful attempt at an accent...gah, mah eahrs).
This is one of those "They don't make them like this anymore...and thank goodness!" films.
Her regular Bryn Mawr accent combined with an obvious fake hillbilly drawl is so bad it makes Bette Davis's atrocious English accent in Of Human Bondage look natural. Country slang was not in Hepburn's vocabulary, and like with most of her films before Stage Door, she seems to have forgotten that she is quite a good actress (with very little variety, as proven by films like this and Dragon Seed, but still quite good. I will give her that.)
The story isn't even worth mentioning. Katharine Hepburn is a witch or something, who lives in a shack in the woods, and one day steals a sick baby, somehow manages to nurse it back to health, then when it goes back to its parents it dies, and so on, but Hepburn's "powers" are really due to a stack of prayer cards she carries around with her.
I hate to sound crass, but the film would have been much better if the village people had stoned her to death for her sorcery (and her awful attempt at an accent...gah, mah eahrs).
This is one of those "They don't make them like this anymore...and thank goodness!" films.