Ann Shoemaker makes a demanding mother worth watching without making her easy to like. Alice Adams gives the clearest reason to seek her out: she lets family ambition become uncomfortable, ordinary and persuasive.
Fi1m perspective
Ann Shoemaker's Mrs Adams wants more for her daughter, and her husband is expected to do something about it. In Alice Adams (1935), she nags Fred Stone's tired, decent Virgil into ambition without asking us to take her side. We found the family rows painful because Shoemaker allows concern for a daughter to become unkindness towards a husband. Mrs Adams has a wish we can understand, and a way of pursuing it that makes her difficult company.
George Stevens gets something valuable from her willingness to be disliked. Katharine Hepburn plays a girl who cannot stop pretending; Shoemaker gives that effort a home life in which wanting more has become a source of conflict. Stone's weariness matters here, giving her demands someone recognisably human to hurt. These are the film's truest scenes, and they survive an adaptation that loses its nerve in its last stretch.
Shoemaker was frequently cast as mothers and older female relatives through the 1930s and 1940s, including Ma in My Favorite Wife (1940). She also plays Miss Margaret Phillibrown in King Vidor's Stella Dallas (1937), though our recommendation there rests chiefly on Barbara Stanwyck and Anne Shirley. Their performances make the film's insistent sentiment worth accepting, even when its costumes push too hard. It is worth following Alice Adams with, but not the place we would begin with Shoemaker.
After largely withdrawing from screen work around 1950, she returned to stage and screen in the later 1950s. Her later roles included Sara Delano Roosevelt on Broadway and in Sunrise at Campobello (1960), then Sister Veronica in Billy Wilder's The Fortune Cookie (1966). These were further supporting parts in a career built largely on them. Choose Alice Adams first, and watch how little she does to make a mother's good intentions an excuse for her behaviour.
Biography
Ann Shoemaker was an American actress. Born Anne Dorothea Shoemaker in Brooklyn, New York, she appeared in around 70 films and television productions between 1928 and 1976, often in supporting roles. She began her career in theatre and maintained a presence on Broadway into the 1960s.
Shoemaker is noted for portraying Sara Delano Roosevelt, mother of Franklin D. Roosevelt, in the Broadway production of Sunrise at Campobello (1958) and its 1960 film adaptation. Among her other film credits are Alice Adams (1935), My Favorite Wife (1940), Stella Dallas (1937) and The Fortune Cookie (1966). She was married to the actors Louis Leon Hall and Henry Stephenson.
