VHS / DVD




Film data

RKO Radio Pictures
88 minutes on DVD - original release 87 minutes
Reels: 9
Produced: October 15-November 17, 1933
Filmed at Hemet - California - USA

Premiere: March 9, 1934


Synopsis

Trigger Hicks, a young tomboy faith healer in the Ozark mountains, believes that her prayers can heal the sick and raise the dead. However, she is feared by her neighbors, both for her temper and her strange religious fevor.


Critics' reviews

Eileen Creelman - New York Sun - 1934
"There is, unfortunately, nothing about Miss Hepburn's very modern, extremely urban personality to suggest a mystic healer from the far hills. John Cromwell, usually a lucid director, never makes quite clear the author's attitude towards young Trigger, whether she is to be accepted as a great healer or sympathized with as self-deluded child. Miss Hepburn seems equally bewildered."

Richard Watts Jr. - New York Herald Tribune - 1934
"Miss Hepburn plays so splendidly that she makes the girl a surprisingly real creation.... Her fine and straightforward work in Spitfire, however, should be pretty convincing proof that she is as striking a screen actress as those of us who have always admired her have insisted."

The New Yorker - 1934
"The picture would suggest that Katharine Hepburn is condemned to elegance, doomed to be a lady for the rest of her natural life, and that her artistry does not extend to the interpretation of the primitive or the uncouth. That her producer have not bothered to give her a scenario of any interest or quality whatsoever is another aspect of the situation."

The Times (London) - 1934
"In The wide world of cinema, the art of Miss Katharine Hepburn has too small a place - small, perhaps, because she has never courted popularity by appearing in a quick succession of sophisticated and sentimental stories. Popularity means little to her; she is content with films that do not requite her to throw away her rare gift of being able to touch us in an emotion usually free from the sentimentality which audiences have become accustomed to expect. She creates a feeling in the audience by a kind of vital expectation which causes a feeling to flow towards her."

Chris Peachment - Time Out
"Cromwell, who played the doddery priest in Altman?s A Wedding, had lengthy career as a director particularly adept with women leads; and certainly the entirely wonderful Katharine Hepburn constitutes the main interest in this otherwise plain sentimental comedy of backwoods superstition confronting civilization in the form of a dam construction company. Not remotely dismayed by the role of hillbilly, nor by having to mouth down-home Christian cracker mottoes, she cuts and acidic path through the general coyness, and runs counter to the formulary script by suggesting that finally she remains a shrew."


What Kate had to say

In treatment


What fellow actors, the director and friends had to say

In treatment


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