CLAIRE [KENNY]: Here we are again, and reuniting with so many of our old friends from Adam’s Rib! That would be, to remind everyone, screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, director George Cukor, and of course, KH/ST. This is all a little bit unfair, especially when the two films are viewed back-to-back, as we have done here, because the current selection does (somewhat) suffer by comparison to the prior. I do think we both had much more fun this time around than we did when we last watched Pat and Mike together, several years ago. But, oh my God, Glenn, there is such a golf problem with the first third of this movie. And I will say—this could in part just be a me-problem—because although I don’t not enjoy watching sports, that fact about me does not apply wholesale to all sports, and do you know what I especially hate watching more than any other sport?
GLENN [KENNY]: If I had to take a wild guess, I would say…golf?
CLAIRE: THAT’S RIGHT GOD YOU KNOW ME SO WELL. So, okay. A quick summary of the plot’s setup, and then we’ll get into the golf problem: Hepburn here plays Pat(ricia) Pemberton, a college instructor/women’s athletic coach, who is engaged to one of filmdom’s great Dud Fiancés, Collier Weld (William Ching, who I believe you felt was miscast, but for whom I’ve tried to spare some pity, because this really is a thankless part). In an effort to help impress some Money People on his behalf, she joins him for a golf outing. Collier asks Pat to more or less throw the game, and though she does try, she finally has a fit of pique after an afternoon of enduring these people, and goes all Arnold Palmer* (*a golfer whose name I know) and dazzles them with her…ball…hitting. And if this seems like a lot of explanation, it took like 10x longer to get there onscreen, in the most convoluted-possible narrative journey toward establishing a protagonist as a golf prodigy. I MEAN.
Still with me? Right, so then she’s drafted onto the women’s golf tour, and that is the first 30 minutes of the movie. Which as you know is the literal truth—there are just long, long, long scenes of Pat golfing, Pat walking along the green with a crowd following her, Pat narrowly missing the hole, Pat getting her ball caught in a sand trap. There are heaps of cameos from actual women’s golf celebrities of the era, perhaps in an effort to make this sequence more interesting, but if this was once successful it no longer is because I think I’m not alone in 2018 in having no idea who most of these people are. (except for Babe Didrikson Zaharias. I know her but I’m not sure why? Because as mentioned I do not like golf.)
And I’m dwelling so long on this section because the fact that it takes 30 minutes creates a substantial pacing problem from which the rest of the film never really recovers. Tracy is introduced in this first half-hour, but the banter that we all are longing for isn’t allowed to take off until we get off the green, because everything during this part is just getting sucked into the Golf Vacuum. If the golf sections of the movie had been handled with the pace & humor & deftness of the tennis sections, then the whole thing might have taken flight much more readily, but before digging into the tennis I’m going to take a breath and let you go.
GLENN: The extended sports depictions in this movie reminded me, as so many things do, of an SCTV sketch—the one where Guy Caballero’s running a pledge drive to keep the SCTV satellite up, and says that if viewers don’t pay off, the network will run nothing but soccer. “That’s right. Lots and lots of SOCCER.” Yes, the Endless Golf of the opening third of this movie — it’s only a tad over an hour and a half total — really gives it a noticeably lopsided structure. (It also made me think fondly of Happy Gilmore, a movie that really KNOWS how to integrate golf into its storyline.) To the extent that once we get to the tennis match that really gives a strong depiction of Pat’s fall-to-pieces syndrome with respect to the Dud Fiancé, our first inclination is to say “oh no not again” even though the scene eventually does pack a funny punch. (I should also mention, with respect to the golf scenes, that they feature an announcer who looks eerily like a young Ted Cruz.)
There’s no polite way of putting this so I’ll just say that both Tracy, at a 52 that speaks a little too eloquently of his hard living, and Hepburn, at a trim and feisty 45 or so, but past the days when she threw of a youthful radiance, are both too old for the roles they play. And, after a solid decade’s worth of Tracy playing some variant of a grandiloquent man of principle, it’s a little jarring to see him essay the sort of street-smart near-mook he played in the likes of, say, For Me and My Gal (and yes, I know he was a cop and not a semi-crook in that one, but you know what I mean).
And the notion that William Ching — who comes off, physically, a bit like a doofy brother of Peter Graves’, only we know he’s not, because we already know from Peter Graves’ brother, James Arness (who, by the way, as my recent viewing of Flame of the Islands attested, could be kind of doofy, but not in a Peter Gravesish way) — could intimidate Katharine Hepburn is beyond risible. Also Ching was six years Hepburn’s junior, speaking of age. While we were watching I idly made a list of actors Hepburn’s age who were more inherently intimidating than William Ching: John Wayne, Burgess Meredith, Canada Lee, Cesar Romero, Jack Albertson, Gene Autry, Lawrence Olivier, Robert Young, Ray Milland, Alan Reed, Dub Taylor, Joe Besser. There are more.
Once you get over those humps, though — pretty much at the point where Pat visits Mike’s New York office, and there’s that location shot of Broadway and a marquee of something Bert Lahr and Dolores Grey are starring in — the picture definitely picks up. You don’t suspend your disbelief, but the Hepburn/Tracy interplay is enjoyable in the way a vintage Carol Burnett Show sketch is — you like the performers so much you’ll sit still for anything they enact. So the Lindy’s lunch scene is fine. As is other stuff in that line.
Which isn’t to say there’s not a lot of wrong to come. The bad optical effect of Hepburn’s face projected onto that of a horse is…well, an inapt choice. On the other hand, this is a movie that manages to get our favorite Hollywood screen couple in the same frame with Chuck Connors, the future Charles Bronson (here billed as Charles Buchinsky), and Carl “Alfalfa” Switzler. That’s not nothing.
CLAIRE: Yes, they are too old for their roles (though I want to give the movie a pass for that, because when does that ever happen in Hollywood?), and also, somewhat as with her Mary Matthews in State of the Union, playing against type. But before I address that, I’m realizing that we haven’t yet explained who Tracy is playing, or how these two came to be together herein. So: Tracy is Mike Conovan, a real slickster of a sports agent—whose view of an appropriate commission is a 50-50 split and where is this poor woman’s union to defend her against that nonsense???—who ambushes Pat in her hotel room to convince her to (a) hitch her wagon to his houndstooth-jacketed star (hat-tip to the legendary Orry-Kelly for some truly and deliberately garish menswear); and (b) throw the golf tournament to the benefit of some gamblers of his acquaintance.
And actually, now that I think of it, the men in this movie all seem to be alike in their eagerness to have Pat deliberately underperform. I’m not really here for this.
In any event: Hepburn’s playing against type in this case shows itself in a total lack of self-assurance--as a sort of daffy, anxious, agitated, addled presence; the human equivalent of the terrible floppy ribbons they’ve stuck in her hair in every blessed scene. In all ways more talented and capable than the men around her, but completely unaware of it. On the other hand—while you were trying to think of other actors of the era who could have made a more convincing Collier Weld, I was trying to think of other marquee actresses of the time who could have taken on Pat Pemberton, a surprise phenomenon at every sport she attempts, and came up with not a one. Hepburn’s athleticism, both natural and, to my understanding, encouraged from a very young age by her father, makes her unusually well-suited for the role in at least that very important respect. It’s trickier to see how Tracy fits, but I will concede that the way in which he wore his age, here and elsewhere, softens the edges of what could otherwise be a fairly brittle, and brutal, character. Mike is in many ways not a Good Guy—his intentions are murky, his practices are questionable, his associates are alarming. But Tracy had settled into himself in such a way by this point that Mike feels redeemable. I dislike intensely the trope of the female lead existing mainly to redeem the male lead, but here at least I believe that she could.
GLENN: And there, I think, we can leave things. There are a few other wacky features here, like the animated multiple tennis balls, presumably the creation of special effects man Warren A. Newcombe. The fact that the movie ends before the title couple gets romantic. The stray echoes of Bringing Up Baby in that police station scene with Connors. Aldo Ray playing dumb, a little too broadly, for which I blame Cukor. There’s rather a lot of stuff here, which makes the persistent feeling of post-viewing insubstantiality a little odd. I suppose after the sublime Adam’s Rib anything short of a great sequel might feel like a letdown. I have to give the whole crew credit, though, because they clearly knew that as a follow-up, Pat and Mike was going to be offbeat. I don’t think even they had any idea how offbeat.
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