On 23 May 2020, after countless years of owning but never watching this
movie, I finally got around to viewing my big box ex-rental VHS videocassette
of the American black comedy Grace
Quigley.
Directed
by Anthony Harvey and released in 1985, Grace
Qigley stars Katharine Hepburn in the title role (which was also her last leading
film role) of an elderly widow living alone and deeply unhappy in a
down-at-heel New York apartment who hires a young hit man named Seymour Flint (played
by Nick Nolte) to end her misery by killing her. However, when several of her
equally aged and aimless acquaintances learn of this, they too want to hire Seymour
to end their own lives. As a result, Grace decides that she has found a reason
to live after all, having become galvanised into setting up a business in which
she seeks out willing paying clients for Seymour to dispose of mercifully – but,
surprise surprise, things do not go according to anyone's plans.
With a
plot like that, and even when suspending disbelief throughout, Grace Quigley is always going to teeter
along a very thin and shaky line between outright farce and disturbing
distastefulness (a fair few real-life serial killers of sick, elderly people
come to mind when viewing something like this). Added to it is the problem that
whereas the first two thirds of the movie are at least tightly paced and
plotted, the final third veers crazily and uncontrollably, with earlier
carefully-laid conventions abruptly uprooted and reversed for no apparent
reason.
In my opinion,
it's almost as if the screen writers and director had no idea how to bring this
movie to an end, so simply threw every tried and trusted option at it in the
hope that somehow it would all turn out well – even that hoariest of old chestnuts
a frenetic car chase is included. Ultimately, the movie simply peters out,
which in hindsight may be no bad thing. Hepburn was famous in earlier decades
for classic screwball comedies, but this much later one is more oddball than
screwball.
Also
mystifying is why the artwork portraying Hepburn and Nolte on the front cover
of my official Grace Quigley VHS videocassette's
case bears no resemblance to any scene featuring in the actual movie itself.
True, there is a very brief scene in which Hepburn does ride pillion on a
motorbike ridden by Nolte, but Nolte is wearing an entirely different outfit in
the artwork from the version that he wears in the movie scene, and Hepburn is
certainly not carrying a gun in the movie scene. All very odd, but only to be
expected, I suppose, with a film as strange as this one.
An official
trailer for the decidedly quirky Grace Quigley
can be viewed here
on YouTube.
And to view a complete listing of all of my Shuker In MovieLand blog's other film reviews and articles (each one instantly accessible via a direct clickable link), please click HERE!
The full cover of my official big box ex-rental VHS videocassette of Grace Quigley (©
Anthony Harvey /Golan-Globus Productions/The Cannon Group - reproduced here on a strictly non-commercial Fair Use basis for educational/review purposes only)
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