Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn are one of those legendary screen duos who apparently had some good chemistry off-screen as well as on. And yet, though I have seen Hepburn in numerous movies, and Tracy in a few others, my only experience of the two of them together was Guess Who’s Coming For Dinner. And, well, I am not overly fond of that. It’s also not the sort of witty comedy the pair were known for.
But then I found Adam’s Rib in Hulu, and that means I can check off another box of my movie bucket list. Will this pair be as fun as their reputation?
The movie opens with a very nervous woman (Judy Holliday) following her philandering husband (Tom Ewell) into the heart of New York City. She finds him in the arms of his mistress (Jean Hagen), pulls a gun on the pair, and while wincing away, fires several shots into the room and wounds her no-good husband. The new energizes the city: a woman shot her no-good husband, and she’s going on trial for assault (he lives, so this movie isn’t that dark).
Cut the next day to the fancy apartment of Adam and Amanda Bonner (Tracy and Hepburn, natch). Amanda immediately seizes upon the story, saying the aggrieved wife Doris should get off as a man would under such extenuating circumstances and this is all about equality of the sexes. For Adam, the law is the law, and she should go to jail.
Did I mention the two are lawyers, Adam in the DA’s office and Amanda a private defense attorney?
And yes, it isn’t long before Adam is assigned the case and opts to call his firebrand wife to taunt her a bit. Her reaction is to immediately set herself up to defend Doris in court from her boorish husband.
And so we have the battle of the sexes, initially just in court, but it slowly starts to creep into their home life. That’s to the credit of the movie’s director George Cukor and a fairly smart script. I recently watched for a future podcast episode the Cukor-directed Born Yesterday with Judy Holliday, and he has a real talent for this sort of comedy. Adam and Amanda are able to keep things more or less separate at home. That doesn’t last as Adam sees the songwriter across the hall is clearly flirting with his otherwise oblivious wife, and Amanda is taking the little things Adam does at home, normally playful, as insulting to her as a woman. Amanda’s own actions in the courthouse seem more akin to a media circus than anything else. I mean, why else did she bring a literal circus performer into the trial to do back flips and then lift her husband?
Oh, on a side note, Holliday of course won an Oscar for the aforementioned Born Yesterday, but that was after she played the role on Broadway. And who was her understudy in that play? Jean Hagen. Apparently, that woman was all about swooping in and taking her place all over.
In all seriousness, this movie lives and dies on Tracy and Hepburn, and the pair do have the great chemistry they’re known for. I did mentally note that, though they are playing a married couple, their apartment uses separate beds. Meanwhile, the pair were apparently carrying on all over in real life and never married. Irony is fun sometimes.
But I dug this. The pair came across as largely equally formidable. True, it was 1949, so Hepburn could only be allowed to win so much due to sexism, but she does win the trail only to have Adam win her back with some convenient tears as the two plan a divorce after he played a nasty (and highly memorable) trick on her and the wannabe Lothario from across the hall with a licorice gun. The acrimony is pushed aside as both move on to better things, and I think I may need to find more of the movies they made together.
Grade: A
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