Its tender sentimentality is out of fashion today, of course, and has been for decades. But that's the point -- and that, for me, is the beauty of this film: it's positively luminous with an innocence and understated nobility that put our postmodern "edginess" to shame. I have to wonder if we've lost the capacity to experience and appreciate such rarefied sweetness of feeling. A sadly neglected film, with one of Katharine Hepburn's incomparable early performances -- radiant, charmingly quirky, and more emotionally expressive than a dozen Garbos. Sad, too, that co-star Robert Beal never crashed into the upper ranks of stardom; I saw tremendous potential in that performance.
Review of The Little Minister
