GLENN [KENNY]: Was my sigh of relief audible worldwide as we pushed “play” on the DVD remote? My secure knowledge that, after the ordeal of State of the Union, we were actually going to watch a GOOD movie, a certified classic, even?
1949’s Adam’s Rib, directed by George Cukor from a screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, is rightly the rock upon which the church of Hepburn and Tracy is built. And indeed, unlike I think ALL the pictures prior to it, it was conceived and crafted with the two of them in mind. Obviously and of course this is going to make a difference but that difference is particularly palpable when you watch Rib right after, or even several weeks after, watching State of the Union, in which Hepburn played maybe the least Hepburnesque character of her storied and diverse career.
For a movie I don’t customarily cite as one of my favorites, I’ve seen Adam’s Rib a whole bunch of times. Partly because when I was growing up it was one of those not-quite perennial pictures that everybody liked; when it aired on television some portion of the family would watch it, and it frequently turned up in high school and college film programs, and it’s kind of a staple of outdoor screening series in New York, as it is not just a battle of the sexes movie but a New York battle of the sexes movie.
But I always forget that the movie doesn’t open with Hepburn and Tracy as soon-to-be dueling attorneys Amanda and Adam Bonner. No, it opens with the inept Crime of Doris Attinger. In a not particularly comedic sequence that does double duty of showing the working-to-middle-class drudge world that its main characters are distinctly removed from. Judy Holliday, in her second film with director George Cukor (they would go on to Born Yesterday, The Marrying Kind, and It Should Happen To You, all Kanin or Kanin and Gordon-related scripts) follows Tom Ewell’s philanderer to his love nest, and shows her incompetently attempting…what, exactly? Doris covers her eyes as she fires, as if there’s a piñata involved, and she’s on her honor.
It's a striking scene, beautifully staged and tonally perfect, balanced on the edge of suspense and comedy. And when we cut to the Bonners, it’s in a way that subtly but definitely underscores an important subtext of the movie: the class difference between the upper crust husband-and-wife lawyers who are our heroes and the coarser participants in the criminal melodrama that will eventually almost drive the protagonists to divorce. The crime is the news on the front page of the morning papers, delivered to the respective beds of Adam and Amanda by their maid.
CLAIRE [KENNY]: Ha, yes, the “respective beds.” I can’t remember when that forced conceit of mid-century filmmaking has seemed more obviously stupid, and not just because the beds in question are positioned catty-corner to each other in Rib’s production design, for maximal distance. But as you say, this is in most every way the film most emblematic of the Hepburn/Tracy legend, and they spend most of the movie bridging the space between the beds in every way but the literal one (and aren’t we lucky that the Production Code neglected to forbid marital fights taking place during nightly rubdowns? I had forgotten that this movie involved so much spanking.)
As is always the case with this pairing, the battles are so thrilling because they’re truly a clash of equals, but then by the same lights, one can’t help but notice that they’re duking it out over issues we still haven’t settled almost 70 years on. (I mean, not we-we. Society-we.) Like: should a woman forgo a major professional opportunity if, in taking the opportunity, she risks making her husband’s professional life more challenging? Or really every question of principle raised by the trial itself, which addresses sexism and domestic violence and the thing now called slut-shaming (vis Jean Hagen’s character) in ways much more overt than Adam & Amanda’s fizzy variant.
And as you say, the script obviously (and surely intentionally) highlights how much easier it is to have a marital conflict when there’s lots of money around to cushion everyone’s hurt feelings. So much money, in fact, that none of their gender-related conflicts derive from that issue, even though (I assume?) she’s the one earning more money in the marriage. (I mean, that has to be how it works, right? He works for the DA; she’s in practice for herself. Though actually neither seems to be flying high enough to explain how they can afford THAT. DUPLEX. Or the country house that they paid off in just six years. Or the massive lingerie bill that their accountant brings up at the end of the movie. Maybe it’s all inherited wealth??)
GLENN: I feel you on all that stuff, but it’s to the filmmakers’ credit that as viewers we don’t feel like we’re having the Bonners’ affluence and privilege rubbed in our faces. Even the duplex, as swank and desirable as it is, doesn’t register as Real Estate Porn. Everything is conveyed at a level that’s plausible.
Except for a particular character dynamic that constitutes the movie’s sole overt weakness, one that was probably detectable even when it had not aged (I won’t say “got dated”) a bit. That is, the character of Kip, the friend and neighbor of the Bonners, who’s ostensibly covetous of Amanda in a way that apparently “convinces” Adam that they could in fact be up to something. Only hitch is that Kip, played by the usually more nuanced David Wayne in one of his broadest turns, is coded as gay. Gay not being a thing that even existed at this point in the history of the Breen Office. The character has its in-joke aspects—the fellow is a regular Cole Porter type, and the hit song he pens, “Farewell Amanda” was in fact especially composed for the film by, yup, Cole Porter, who repurposed an older tune he had written called “So Long, Samoa.” (No, really.) (And the “hit” version we hear six seconds of from the Bonners’ radio is sung by none other than Frank Sinatra.)
Why Kanin and Gordon should not have crafted a more conventionally credible rival for Amanda’s affections is not a concern of this exchange, which is mainly a treatment of our Direct Experience of the film. And in that aspect, the funny thing is that we watched the Kip scenes both thinking “these don’t work” but ultimately not really caring that they didn’t. In their own way they were delightful in their confoundedness. And there’s so much else in the movie that works spectacularly. I know we were both in awe of Amanda’s questioning of Doris, a scene replete with both laughs (Holliday’s investment of the character with underhandedly funny but never patronizing ingenuousness) and gasps (the details of Doris’ abuse at the hands of Warren), accomplished in a single, beautifully composed take that’s over five minutes long, during which the camera doesn’t move an eyelash. It’s a stunner that we watched twice during this viewing of the picture.
CLAIRE: Oh well yes—I enjoy the beautiful set and snazzy costumes, but it’s not like anyone is going to confuse Cukor with Nancy Meyers. The Bonners have the luxury of being able to bicker about ideas because they’re relieved of the burden of having to scrabble for survival, but they use that luxury fantastically well.
Kip is amazing. I still don’t know what that was all about, except that yes, I assume he was all in-joke and maybe had something to do with Kanin & Gordon’s own social life?? I’m just going to pretend that’s the case, anyway. The point, though, is that there doesn’t actually need to be a plausible romantic rival, since the conflicts between them are complete in themselves and more than provide plenty of dramatic tension. And in fact, the absolute watery-cocktail of Kip’s pursuit only highlights how perfectly paired these two are, and how hopeless anyone’s attempted seduction would be. Even Adam in the end can’t bring himself to believe it. Even Kip himself can’t bring himself to believe it, outright admitting that Amanda’s main appeal to him is her location, conveniently across the hall from where he lives with, one can only assume, the laziest penis in the history of cinema.
The Doris interview is extraordinary—I have nothing to add there, except to completely endorse all you’ve said. And in fact, if there’s one unfortunate thing about this film—and not even about the film as such, but about where it lives in people’s recollection—it’s that the complete flawlessness of the leads has really overshadowed the memory of Holliday’s exceptional work in a tricky, tricky role. This is really never anything but a comedy, even in its darker moments, and the easiest thing to do in playing a not-especially-smart woman in a comedy would be to play totally for laughs, but unless I’m forgetting something, she does that exactly zero times. The second-easiest thing would be to mine the dire circumstances of Doris’ life for the ample pathos therein, which would have dragged all of her scenes down like sandbags, and which she also does not do. She is absolutely free of vanity here, which I do not mean in the currently popular sense of “not afraid to look wrecked,” which in fact she does not; but by which I mean “willing to underplay her range and hide her prodigious comedic gifts in service to the piece.” She’s perfection.
GLENN: She is, and she’s a big part of why this picture was the most fun we had watching the movies for this project. The brevity of Holliday’s career is an American cultural tragedy — her movie career spanned a little over ten years before her final picture, Bells Are Ringing, and she died in 1965. As much as her work in Born Yesterday is reputed to be a definitive account of her unique qualities as a performer, it’s not a movie in which she had the opportunity to do as much underplaying as she does in Adam’s Rib. As I think the next couple of movies on our docket will demonstrate, supporting players count a great deal in Hepburn/Tracy movies. (As does the combination of screenwriters and director — one really notable feature of this movie is that there’s no dead air; check out the scene when Adam first learns he’s being assigned the Attinger case, and the bantering between his associates.) I think they never had a more apt supporting cast than they do here. And with that, Claire, I’ll extend to you what Adam never did to Amanda: the last word.
CLAIRE: What a gentleman!
I’ve been thinking, as we wrap up our conversation about this movie—and I realize it’s a little late in the day to introduce a whole new idea, but I mean, who’s gonna stop me??—about what constitutes a “perfect movie,” and whether in fact this is one? I think we’re both in agreement that it’s the absolute pinnacle of this particular collaboration (not just as applies to the movies we’ve already discussed--even the ones we’ve yet to talk about in this forum, we’ve definitely at least seen), and as such is certainly a Perfect Tracy-Hepburn Movie. But is it perfect-perfect? If our metric for perfection is “a thing without flaw,” then maybe not, but that largely depends on whether you consider the whole Kip thing a flaw, and I would argue that it’s not really as much a flaw as a delightfully bizarre choice. But if the metric is something more like “everything is the absolute best version of itself and even still somehow the whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” then I think maybe yes. It’s an absolutely impeccable triangulation of screenwriting/direction/performance, everything fits exactly as it’s supposed to, and it’s a pleasure every moment. So I’m going to go ahead and call this for Perfect.
We just watched something perfect! What fun.
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