Grace Quigley

Seven stars. And the only reason it's that high is that I'm such a fan of Katharine Hepburn's. I've been in the "I'll watch her in anything" camp since I first saw Guess Who's Coming to Dinner in the late 1960s. Her part is nuts, but she carries it anyway, because she was so good at showing emotional complexity. Her interactions with Nick Nolte are the essence of the film. And Nolte does a good job of keeping up with her. Nolte has never been a great actor, although he's become really solid in the last twenty years or so. Back in the early 80s, he was sort of a stiff, and was typecast into dumb hunk sorts of roles. Here he shows some subtlety, playing a sort of parody of Jack Cates. He's a hit-man who's in therapy, after all.

Past those two, I should also give nods to William Duell, Walter Abel, and Elizabeth Wilson for their work as some of Grace's first "customers". This was Abel's last role in a career that went back 66 years to 1918. Seeing him gave me one of those classic, "Who is THAT guy?" moments.

Hepburn was great at playing absolutely indomitable characters. Here her Grace hijacks Seymour's (Nolte) life for absolutely absurd reasons. But they both play it so straight that I was willing to buy into the crazy scheme. The problem is that the director kept pushing the concept until it jumped the shark with the car-chase bit at the end. It also seemed to fall into dream-scape surreality at that point. The point-to-point connection between scenes started to feel like something from a Terrence Malick film. The resolution was a funny little comic nugget that resolves Seymour's story, but doesn't really address Grace's. This is an amusing film, with a solid performance from a legend to lead the bill. If you are a fan of Hepburn's, or of Nolte's, you should watch this. Otherwise, not so much. 9 December 2024.

This film has an offbeat premise, and many offbeat characters. The last theatrical release of Kate's career is neither a fitting nor typical valedictory -- and in that way, perhaps it is a fitting testimonial to Hepburn's career --- unconventional and poignant while always entertaining. Although the laughs are uneven and the subject matter may offend some, I found it entertaining and interesting.

Grace Quigley (Katharine Hepburn) is a struggling senior living in New York City. She witnesses a professional hit performed by hitman Seymour Flint (Nick Nolte). She hides in his car. She had tried to commit suicide and sees him as a solution. She comes up with the idea to 'help' other suicidal seniors.

This is supposed to be a black comedy. It's in here somewhere. The characters are definitely oddballs coming out of left field. It's not actually funny and I don't know if it's actually fun. It has the underlying layer of sadness. I'm just not sure if this dark premise is a fun one.

Golan-Globus, something like that, and Cannon films: Ancient film producers from the early eighties when videocassettes were starting to change the nature of the American Movie Biz. Films had begun to boom!

Enter two extraordinary actors: Katherine Hepburn and Nick Nolte.

Nolte had been appearing in commercial Hollywood productions for years, but he is a real actor and wanted to appear in quality productions.

The prospect of appearing with Great Katherine must have seduced him into working with these hopelessly exploitive producers and Cannon films. Kate looks great, her Parkinson disease notwithstanding, in the last theater movie she ever made. It appeared in 1984, when she was still in her seventies, her etched cheekbones intact, and her teeth still movie star white.

Here's the plot: Kate Hepburn watches as Hit-man Nick Nolte, just barely in his forties, kills her noxious landlord. Impressed, Kate who has been thinking of checking out herself decides to hire Nick to off her. Before long, complications ensue. The whole gerontological

group that Kate knows, including most of the unemployed aging actors in New York, want to leave the stage, as it were, themselves. They want to join Kate in that great actors home in the sky.

The Plot thread is helped when Kate invites a friend to join her by arranging a package deal to have them both killed by Nick. But Nick turns out to be a sensitive hit-man, not willing to go along with all of Kate's murderous fantasies. The plot eventually spirals out of control. Nick offs few of the older set, but becomes very popular with this group. After all, if this Golan-Globus (they're the producers) hadn't put together these two stars, Walter Abel probably would have died before he worked in another film. The same goes for many of the other actors in this film.

Toward the end, a cabbie keeps Kate's shoe as ransom for a cab fare she can't pay. Kate wants Nick to off the cabbie. But this black comedy has wandered to too many side alleys. Nick's psychiatrist warns him that Kate has unearthed his sensitive side, and he had better change his ways.

In the end, there is no plot-driven denouement to this tale. Nick and Kate spot an enormous throng of old folks looking for a way to end it all near her apartment, and decide to escape these growing responsibilities by lighting out for what passes for the territories in Manhattan.

So who's driving the cab they hail on the street? You guessed it, the cabbie who stole Kate's shoe. The hack looks at her surprised, looks even more apprehensively at Nick, and turns around to drive his fares where they want to go.

Nick and Kate have apparently won some sort of battle by getting the last laugh on the cabbie, and so the film ends with both of them alive and smiling in the back of the cab, all their problems solved. Its not a great ending, but a fair compromise to finish this wildly out-of-hand scenario.

Katharine Hepburn in a Cannon production? Yes, and though the color process on the photography is typically brackish and the technical aspects of "Grace Quigley" seem slapdash, this turns out to be a quirky, exceptionally funny piece about a hit-man's friendship with an elderly woman in New York. Reportedly, Hepburn and Nick Nolte clashed during filming, but you'd never suspect that from the finished returns (they have an easy rapport). The crux of the plot (that aged folks would rather die mercifully at the hands of a hired killer then live in loneliness or pain) was controversial in 1984--and still smacks of bad taste--yet director Anthony Harvey keeps the whole thing bubbling like the most genial of comedies. As for Kate, she's feisty as usual, but also delightfully daffy and loose; she's a team player. **1/2 from ****