Grace Quigley

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.

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.

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 ****

This little unpolished gem from Cannon films almost defies definition with its frankly depressing premise and it's superannuated director and actors. It's no surprise it never found mainstream box office or even critical success at least in the mangled form it was largely released in. Talking Pictures TV ran the Ultimate Solution of... version - generally considered a good later screenplay fix. What can I say, it's one for movie nerds perhaps but with the spirited work of the great Nolte and Hepburn one can be assured it gets carried through safely, even over the several rough patches in a production that has the rather cheap and gaudy feel of 80s television, but don't let that disguise the fact this is a deadly serious drama about the futility of old age, with some jokes. There are just enough minor gags and sweet moments to prevent the viewer from sticking one's own head in the proverbial oven before the movie is out. Of course there's tongue in cheek elements and it's ultimately ambiguous morally, and even with Katherine's rather disturbing real-life Parkinson's on display, playing a desperate suicidal granny, one might forget she went on to live for two more golden decades, well after this film sort of had quietly died in its sleep with hardly a trace of collective memory. There's enough humour in the history of this much maligned film alone to give it a patient and respectful look. I admire it's quirkiness and subversive attitude, giving the polite finger to the whole entertainment film establishment in a way, an anti-epitaph for many of the crew, but done in such a humane and quietly charismatic way.

The coming together of such disparate talents as Katherine Hepburn, director Anthony Harvey and the dreaded team of Cannon supremos Golan & Globus yields certainly the most idiosyncratic treatment of assisted suicide since Edward G. Robinson went to meet his maker in 'Soylent Green' in this project long nurtured by Miss Hepburn which heats up the old chestnut about a citizen hiring a professional hitman to provide his services.

Miss Hepburn and Nick Nolte certainly make strange bedfellows as the client and her employee with quirky contributions from Walter Abel, Kip Le Fever, William Duell and Elizabeth Wilson.