The Little Minister (1934)
Directed by Richard Wallace

Film Review

Anyone who believes that Katharine Hepburn was a late developer as an actress should check out her performance in this engaging little melodrama, which leaves little doubt that her capacity to enchant and move an audience was fully established long before her glory years.  The Little Minister is a liberal adaptation of a stage play by J.M. Barrie, which was in turn based on one of his novels and was enormously successful on both sides of the Atlantic.  Prior to this, five silent film adaptations of the play had been made, the best being Penrhyn Stanlaws's 1921 version starring Betty Compson and George Hackathorne.

Right from the outset, RKO considered this a prestige project and threw a fortune at it - 650 thousand dollars to be precise, an astronomical sum at the time.  Most of the money went on the lavish village set in which most of the drama takes place, and which is so detailed and authentic it matches almost seemlessly with the real locations used in the film.  The same set was reused in several subsequent films, most notably Laurel and Hardy's Bonnie Scotland (1935).  If the RKO executives had been a little less spendthrift, The Little Minister could have turned a decent profit.  As it was, in spite of its popularity, it made a nine thousand dollar loss on its first release.   This was Hepburn's second screen flop in a row (following the same year's Spitfire) and further failures led her to be dubbed box office poison.

The Little Minister may not be Hepburn's most riveting film but it gave the actress the opportunity to stretch herself as both a comedic and dramatic actress.  It also helped her to forge her reputation as a feisty champion of the rights of the individual, something she stuck to throughout her professional career.  Without Hepburn's charismatic presence and her penchant for crowbarring genuine feeling into the dullest and most trite of situations, this would have been a very solemn affair indeed.

After the screenwriters had done their best to exorcise much of the whimsical charm of Barrie's original play, it takes an actress of Hepburn's calibre to bring the story back to life and endow it with those qualities (compassion, humour and eccentricity) needed to prevent it from ending up as merely a desiccated husk of a melodrama.  If only RKO could have partnered Hepburn with a more charismatic and likeable co-star than John Beal The Little Minister could have been something quite special, but, alas, for most of the film Beal looks as if he could be substituted for a slab of marble without anyone noticing.  Fortunately, a bevy of colourful character actors (including Donald Crisp, Andy Clyde and Mary Gordon) makes up for this casting mishap, even if the Scottish accents sound a little dubious in some cases.

Film Synopsis

Scotland, 1840.  A prim young cleric, Gavin Dishart, soon gains the respect of his parishioners in the village of Thrum, and even habitual drunkards become reformed characters under his influence.  But his reputation is threatened when he slowly succumbs to the charms of an attractive gypsy girl, Babbie, who flirts with him and impresses him with her selfless acts of kindness.  Gavin can have no idea that Babbie is playing with him, that she is in fact the ward of a wealthy businessman, Lord Rintoul, who employs most of the locals as weavers.  Babbie chose to disguise herself as a gypsy so that she can forewarn the good people of Thrum of her guardian's plans to impose order on the community after a recent spate of riots.  When it becomes known that Gavin his been seen in the company of Babbie the young minister's reputation appears to be tainted beyond repair...