Some Came Running

The Hepburn-Tracy Project #7: "Pat And Mike" (George Cukor, 1952)

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.

The Hepburn-Tracy Project #6: "Adam's Rib" (George Cukor, 1949)

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.

The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #5: "State of the Union" (Frank Capra, 1948)

GLENN (KENNY): So, not to be all “I’d never thought it’d come to this” or any such thing, but do you realize that the last installment of this project was posted six years and change ago? And that it ended with a promise that we would not let eight months elapse between installments, as had happened prior to our getting around to Sea of Grass? How crazy is that?

We have no excuse except the perennial “Do you have any idea how busy we got?” But that’s not even the whole story. There’s a sense in which this 1948 film defeated us. If my recollection serves, which it may not, we watched it all the way through once, let too much time elide without writing about it, then tried to get through it twice more, failed, and only finally the other night got all the way through. In the aggregate, I’ve seen this film more often than I’ve seen some of my favorites. Which maybe makes me resent it all the more. 

CLAIRE (KENNY) : I recall the same, and yeah, I share your resentment. Maybe we could argue that there’s a kind of resonance in the film now that we couldn’t have foreseen six years ago, in that it has Things to Teach Us, about The Way We Live Now, except I mean…not really?

Just to bring people up to speed if they haven’t seen this (which I assume most people haven’t? Seriously, there are so many better ways to spend our precious hours on Earth), this is a Frank Capra film, with Tracy as Grant Matthews, a wealthy businessman recruited to run for president (COUGH) by his not-so-secret other woman, Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury, below right, somehow possibly even chillier and more forbidding as a political mistress than she would be 14 years later as Mrs. Iselin, about which I have some further thoughts that I will get into later), with a game-time assist from his semi-estranged but devoted wife Mary (Hepburn). Oh, also there is Van Johnson.

I would just like to say that, to your great credit, in spite of how endless and tedious the whole thing seemed this time around, you diligently took detailed notes throughout, which I frankly did not even consider doing. I pretty much spent the whole movie sewing a bunch of buttons on a dress, which, insofar as that is exactly the kind of retrograde shit Kate H. gets up to throughout the film, I suppose could be considered a sort of immersive, meta-experiential viewing choice. But really I just couldn’t be bothered to write anything down.

GLENN: Let me provide some more boilerplate: The picture is adapted from a play by Lindsay and Crouse, a three-act piece with three settings: the house of politician James Conover in D.C.., a hotel suite in Detroit, and the Matthews home in New York. Despite its “opening up” by screenwriters Anthony Veiller and Myles Connolly, those three settings and the scenes therein, depicting persuasion, rebellion, capitulation and rebellion again, are the meat of the movie. As far as the ways it’s opened up are concerned, Matthews the industrialist—“Our Planes Have Wings, But Not Our Ideas” is the cover line quote below his Time magazine portrait—gets to have fun doing stunts with his own plane in one of the film’s most interminable and pointless scenes.

I kind of love the movie’s macabre opening, in which media mogul Lewis Stone tells Lansbury’s Kaye, his daughter, “I used to hate you for being a girl,” and then praises her brains, and by extension her mendacity, before blowing his own brains out. (It’s not a gratuitous gesture; he’s dying and doesn’t want to go out like a normal person.) After that, this aimless self-serious satire, which means to condemn smoke-filled-room deal-making in a similar vein as Capra’s rather more successful Mr. Smith Goes To Washington, and puts forward as an alternative to this system the directive that we just BE DECENT TO EACH OTHER (as another, more recent failed satire had it), slogs along being neither fish nor flesh nor good red herring. By which I mean it fails as satire, as drama, and as romantic sort-of comedy.

One problem is that it’s a complete misuse of Katharine Hepburn. Her role as the estranged but loyal and sensible wife of Tracy’s entitled philandering Lout With Grand Ideas is a particularly humiliating one, I think. Hepburn was capable of playing a lot of things, but ordinary and ordinarily sensible are two that I don’t think she was born for. The character’s dutifulness and rectitude throw buckets of cold water on whatever sparks she might have conjured with her leading man practically before she even steps into a frame.  

CLAIRE: Oh yes, I think that’s not just one problem, it’s close to being THE Problem, although probably if we really forced the call, we’d have to say that the film’s (impractical, incoherent) politics are the REAL real problem. (A moment of silent awe, please, for an era in which a hard-line Republican character could be plausibly written to advocate for a universal currency. A universal currency, Glenn.)

But as to the Hepburn problem, narratively speaking at least, it’s as much of a millstone as the political issues. She’s playing so much against type here that, in what one can only assume was an effort to counterbalance her natural sharpness and steel, the filmmakers have created a secondary Lansbury Problem, wherein the only place left for Lansbury to go in the way of portraying the urbane, dominant inverse of Hepburn’s traditional-helpmeet Mary is to just go full-dictator. And from there, one can’t possibly subscribe to the premise that this is a woman who recruits her lovers for political runs; you can’t groom someone for office if you kill all partners immediately after mating, as she most definitely does.

Imagine instead a version of the film in which Hepburn is cast as Kay Thorndyke, and is allowed to play her as written, with the counterpart of an ingénue-Mary, also allowed to play the part as written. Suddenly everything makes so much more sense--there is a pairing where campaign-as-seduction would have clicked right into place. Never would’ve happened, of course, but what a missed opportunity to help clean up this mess. Though even that still wouldn’t address the dumpster fire of the film’s politics.

GLENN: And I’m not going to address that dumpster fire either, except to note perhaps redundantly that the movie lacks the courage of its lack of conviction.

There’s also the matter of the film’s Jeb-Bush-like low energy. Despite its better-than-competent production values and the old-college-try consistency of the acting, the film never seems to achieve any momentum. When Adolphe Menjou’s crafty kingmaker Conover character is first conniving, there’s a flicker of enjoyment to be had. But that’s doused and we’ve got cornball huffing and puffing and a general attitude of “there’s nothing wrong with this scene that another monologue for Spencer Tracy won’t fix” for what seems like hours. The movie only perks up with the entrance of Charles Dingle, whom we shall remember from, among other things, Wyler/Hellman/Davis’s The Little Foxes, here as a corrupt labor guy who’s made a secret handshake with Marshall; that’s followed by the introduction of Florence Auer as an oddly intimidating fixer. These two have an underplayed sinister current that would have buttressed a smarter film; here they stick out like welcome sore thumbs. The power of their presences is ameliorated alas by the entrance of Raymond Walburn going full Guy Kibbee and beyond (see left), mugging like there’s no tomorrow in a sitting room drinking scene replete with shots that always come in handy when the likes of Chuck Workman need to cobble together a “vintage movies laughter” montage (as you see, below right). Ugh.

This was Capras’ followup to It’s A Wonderful Life, the now-classic that at the time was a rather ignominious failure for the director and his independent outfit, Liberty Films. I don’t have Joseph McBride’s excellent Capra bio at hand for consultation, but our friend Mark Harris writes movingly of Capra being rather at sea after World War II, in his wonderful book Five Came Back. What State of the Union indicates is not a lost talent but rather a talent that doesn’t know what to do with itself. And in the case of Tracy and Hepburn, doesn’t know what to do with them.

CLAIRE: Oh yes, about those Tracy monologues, of which there are…I’m going to say 65? 70?--in this movie: not only are they embarrassing self-indulgences on the part of the filmmakers (honestly, if you’re so puffed-up about your freshman-seminar ideas, just put together a book of essays, see how well that sells), each one eats up time that could be so much better spent at the thing for which people watch Tracy-Hepburn movies in the first place: the dialogue. What a horrible little lead weight in my chest each time I watched him talking at her, with her denied any response. No better when she finally gets her couple of puny speeches--no one wants to watch these two reciting; we’re here for the conversation.

GLENN: Which our next film—which we will rush to as if we were weary desert travelers just sighting an oasis—has plenty of…and it won’t be six years before we cover it.

The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #4: "The Sea of Grass" (Elia Kazan, 1947)

Glenn Kenny: In his autobiography, Elia Kazan: A Life, the great director concludes the section chronicling the making of Sea of Grass thusly: “It’s the only picture I’ve made that I’m ever ashamed of. Don’t see it.” Having tied ourselves to the project of watching all nine motion pictures co-starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, we were not able to heed his advice. And having not heeded his advice and seen the picture, my inclination to protest “It’s not THAT bad” is tempered by my understanding of pretty much exactly why Kazan didn’t care for it. It’s all up on screen, although the ten or so pages in Kazan’s autobiography that detail just why he’s ashamed of it are persuasive and compelling and worth reading. In short, Kazan allowed himself to be eaten up by what he calls “the Metromill,” a system that you sometimes hear about the genius of, a system wherein so many of the particulars concerning the film had been decided on and contrived before Kazan himself even stepped on the lot. Henry James described (and I know you and our readers have heard this a million times before, sorry) the artist as an individual on whom “nothing is lost,” and reading Kazan’s plaints—he was irritated at the horses Metro was giving him for this 19^th-century-set melodrama, complaining that they were too fat and cozy to be convincing as active farm animals—one feels the hand, understand the eye, of this artist, and he’s such a compelling writer that as he goes on about the difficulties posed by Sea of Grass, you empathize with him. And then he cuts off the discussion with a firm “Don’t see it” and that directive seems to carry the force of law.

But. As I say. We were obliged. And the film’s flaws aside, I have to say that what struck me particularly, at first, was how relatively daring this film seemed in terms of content. Consider that this 1947 film features a heroine who runs off from her (admittedly abusive and awful) husband and conceives and bears a child with another man, and is nevertheless, like, allowed to live, more or less. Not only does Hepburn’s Lutie do this, she does this with the most bitter enemy of said husband, Tracy’s Jim Brewton. It’s always bracing to see Tracy playing a bastard, although as is the convention with studio films about brawny, stubborn cattleman of the ‘40s and ‘50s, it’s made very clear that he is a Bastard With A Vision, yeah, yeah, whatever. And it is also odd to see Hepburn playing a character so largely tentative. Although as Lutie’s actions attest, when she ceases being tentative, it’s in a fairly big way.

I could speculate on what I thought Kazan’s relatively new-fangled notions about acting brought to the table with respect to the two stars, who had been doing it the Hollywood way for the better part of two decades apiece. (The actual age difference between Kazan and his actors wasn’t huge; he was nine year’s Tracy’s junior, and two years Hepburn’s.) But that would be projecting, to be honest. I remember at one point, Claire, you asking me why Kazan made a particular choice with respect to something, and I said. “I don’t know. If Martin Scorsese were here, he could tell us. Although actually, if Martin Scorsese were here, he would say,’What am I doing here? You two are in your pajamas.’” Do you remember your question?

Claire Kenny: I’m sorry to say, GK, I don’t remember my question. What I do remember is a lot of sitting on the sofa and moaning “Lord, when will this thing ever end?” For that reason I’m hard-pressed to explain why—but nonetheless compelled to admit that—I so thoroughly disobeyed Kazan by watching his non-masterpiece all the way through a second time, by myself. I’m still not clear how that happened…my intention in popping the disc back in for another go-round was to skim enough to refresh my memory regarding the smashing pioneer-woman gowns Walter Plunkett designed for Hepburn, about which I’d promised The Siren I would say a few words. And somehow I found myself unable to skip over one frame of a movie I hadn’t even much liked the first time. I can’t say that I liked it any better the second, but if it is in fact a failure (not really my place to say), it’s maybe all the more interesting for the nature of its failings. Among its biggest problems are length and scope—it’s both too short for the kind of epic sprawl it seems to want to capture, and too long for the relatively few major characters and details it provides. Three decades later, Conrad Richter’s novel might have looked like a natural fit for a TV miniseries, but it’s too trudging and unwieldy for this format—we’re offered glimpses of potentially rich conflicts and dramatic byways that are left unexplored, while we linger in scenes of extended exposition. But the outlines of something resonant and interesting and visually compelling and morally ambiguous are in place, and watching that promise sort of die on the vine is captivating in its own way.

And then as you mention, the casting against type and racy-for-the-era content make this noteworthy as a kind of curiosity. I had a hard time getting a read on Hepburn’s Lutie, and all that frantic, unfocused energy—was the nervous pitch of her performance meant to be a character choice? Though I don’t want to fall too far down this particular rabbit hole, part of the fascination with the movie is trying to figure out just what she’s going for. Hepburn’s characters are always grounded in her own sharp and relentless intelligence, and it’s as if here, she decided the character was more instinct than intellect, and had no idea how to work with that—her version of a non-brainy girl was someone with 25% more breath in her voice, or something.

I’m not sure I so much agree with you on the Jim Brewton character—yes, Bastard With a Vision, but I don’t think The Vision was meant to significantly mitigate his general awfulness. It seemed more like the ultimate expression of said awfulness, inasmuch as he was basically a land-drunk mercenary determined to keep his neighbors impoverished. It’s true that he had the almighty fall-on-your-knees-miraculous ability to identify the plains as better suited for grazing than farming, but then he also had a corresponding conviction that figuring this out meant that he deserved all the cattle. So though the character does have a few stray sympathetic qualities, he wasn’t especially ambiguous.

Glenn Kenny: What’s interesting to remember is that there were likely DOZENS of films not dissimilar to Sea of Grass churned out by MGM and other studios year in, year out all through the supposed Golden Age of Hollywood moviemaking, and the reason this picture is remembered at all is because of a particular confluence of talent it brought together. Clearly that confluence of talent did not succeed in creating a work that transcended its generic constraints and/or the studio house style, so to speak. But the collaboration seen in this context certainly does point to a sense in which our perspective on film history gets skewed. Necessarily skewed, I’d say, as one literally can’t see everything.

In any event, beyond the non-transcendence, and this might have been what helped hook you in on that second viewing in the first place, there are the incidental pleasures of the house style, which was responsible in a sense for the costumes you mention.  From my perspective, they have mostly to do with the casting. Melvyn Douglas is a pretty strong counter to Tracy; nice to see him facing a strong male presence, certainly spruces up the narrative. Also welcome are glimpses of Harry Carey and Robert Walker.  For lovers of older films, these faces/personalities resonate a particular way, and their welcome charisma and ability makes a slog such as this something less of a slog.

Claire Kenny: Absolutely agreed—the casting is exceptional, particularly in the case of Douglas, who makes trouble while staying just on the clean side of smarmy.

But back to those costumes, at last…Plunkett’s lovely work on this is particularly noteworthy for highlighting the dual challenges of a costume designer: serving a film and a character while also serving the body and physical presence of the actor. Katharine Hepburn’s lean, angular frame is not naturally suited to lacy frills or the calico homespun-homesteader look, but Plunkett ingeniously solves this issue by keeping her gowns very structured—instead of a lace collar, a pleated ruff; instead of a shawl, a trim, military-inspired jacket. A bell sleeve is balanced by a slender skirt, and the drama of more voluminous dresses is tempered by dark colors. This attention to details of tailoring, with firm grounding in the period’s style, lets Plunkett make Hepburn look at home even in white eyelet. White eyelet! While “Walter Plunkett aces period design!” isn’t going to read as big news to anyone who loves film costuming, a moment’s recognition, please, for the wise technician inside the artist.

And that is…way more than I intended to say about this movie, which I watched 100% more times than I meant to, and probably will not watch again. Right? We’re not watching this again, are we?

Glenn Kenny: No. We are not. Next we will treat Frank Capra's State of the Union, which stars, beyond Hepburn and Tracy, our favorite Jessica Fletcher portrayer Angela Lansbury, boiiii!!!!! And we'll have that posted in way fewer than eight months, we promise!

The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #3: "Without Love" (Harold S. Bucquet, 1945)

Part One here; Part Two here.

Claire Kenny: I’d seen this one before, ages ago, though I was surprised at how much I forgot.  The premise is entirely goofy—Tracy’s gruff absentminded professor/mad scientist Pat Jamieson, burned by love and plagued with somnambulism, takes over the basement of well-heeled widow Jamie Rowan (Hepburn)’s gracious D.C. townhouse to carry out a top-secret military project; they decide to get married, “without love,” to protect his cover—as is the execution, but really, what’s not to like?  You’ve got a script based on a play Philip Barry wrote for Hepburn, so there’s lots of madcap privileged-class fun.  A great cast, obviously (love pre-television Lucille Ball, and especially love that the film’s two female leads were both redheads. What up, redheads?). Another fabulous fantasy country house, as in Woman of the Year.  And couple-pushed-prematurely-into-a-serious-relationship-who-belatedly-discover-they’re-in-love is one of my personal favorite rom-com setups.  It obviously strains credulity in more than one way (has anyone in the real world ever recited “The Waste Land” as a seduction tactic?), but that mostly just adds to the overall charm.  The major problem for me was that there weren’t enough real obstacles—since it’s a romantic comedy, a happy ending is a foregone conclusion, but the tension here never gets quite high enough for even superficial suspense. Was this worth overlooking, you think, or did it kind of spoil the whole thing for you?

Glenn Kenny: I actually enjoyed the lack of hurdles; it gave the movie a relaxed, albeit arguably aimless feel that just allowed you to enjoy the characters and the settings.  And when I say “the characters,” I actually mean “the cast,” which, as you pointed out, is full of period interest. Aside from the saucy Lucille, there’s also young (not quite yet 30) Keenan Wynn, playing an oft-tipsy goofball (this was his eighth film), and also-young Gloria Grahame making an impression way out of proportion to her role, and screen time, as a flower girl. (The fellow between Tracy and Hepburn above, incidentally, is Felix Bressart, who you may remember from The Shop Around The Corner and To Be Or Not To Be, as Professor Ginza.) As for the straining-credulity part, it begins right off the bat, with Tracy’s scientist character engaged in a seemingly-not-particularly-determined hunt to find an anonymous basement he can convert into a lab, and just happens to land in the manse of Hepburn’s socialite…is THAT what her character is? Truth to tell, as amusing as the film can often be, I can’t say that its scenario struck me as all that focused. Which is odd, because once again we have the redoubtable Donald Ogden Stewart adapting a play by Phillip Barry. Don’t know the play, but I can’t say from the film that it necessarily had the same sense of forward motion you get in Holiday or The Philadelphia Story. In point of fact, I have to say that it certainly does take its time getting around to what’s ostensibly its central premise, relative to the title. Tracy’s dispassionate scientist character believes that the conceit known as “love” is an actual impediment to human improvement, but enters into marriage with Hepburn’s character anyway because man needs a helpmate. This leads to some of the film’s funnier scenes as the two experiment with the breathing contraption Tracy’s working on for the war effort (these scenes make it look like Hepburn’s in some kind of Robot Monster-ish sci-fi film) but of course the whole thing leads to you-know-what, and Tracy’s character gets a relatively sweet comeuppance. One problem, such as it is, is that Tracy’s too warm a screen presence to credibly pull off a dispassionate character. A stronger director—this film was helmed by Harold S. Bucquet, best known for the Dr. Kildare pictures, and this was actually his last completed feature, he died in 1946—might have been capable of putting the proceedings on more solid ground. But in the end it doesn’t seem to matter much. If I understand correctly, part of the film’s charm is that you don’t particularly hook into it as a narrative, but rather as a couple of pleasant and sometimes slightly odd hours spent with its stars. No?

Claire Kenny: Yes, absolutely. For that reason, I think it’s a very good film to watch if, say, you happen to be home in bed with a fever (I realize that sounds like damning with faint praise, but Flu Appeal can be a hard cinematic sweet spot to hit, and every collection needs a few of these movies). We seem to be coming away from these with very similar impressions; I think the closest we’re going to get in the way of lively disagreement is on minor points, and in that spirit, I have to dispute the idea that Tracy is too warm to pull off the Pat Jamieson character. He’s no Mr. Rochester, but he’s prickly enough—his persona in this kind of movie is usually on the curmudgeon-to-teddybear spectrum, and if anything, I think he goes light on the teddybear notes, here. In fact (brief digression) this reminds me of the only non-Beckinsale-related issue I had with the cast of Scorsese’s The Aviator, which was Kevin O’Rourke as Spencer Tracy. To be clear, I think O’Rourke is a terrific and underutilized character actor, and in principle I was really happy to see him get that kind of showcase. But he reads as way too much of a smoothie for me to see any of Spencer Tracy’s rough edges and lumpy bits* in him. All of which is to say: Spencer Tracy in Without Love—not too warm, not too dispassionate, but just right as far as I’m concerned. But…yeah, besides that, I think we completely agree here. Not much more to say about the aforementioned breathing contraption, though its silliness really cannot be overstated. Viewers would do well not to get too mired down in questions of what it’s actually supposed to be doing, which I’m not convinced made any sense even in the context of the time. Otherwise I’ll just say again: what’s not to like?

*Spencer Tracy’s Lumpy Bits is a limited edition flavor, made with organic, fair trade ingredients. Not recommended for children under the age of 18.

Glenn Kenny: Yours is as good a last word to pronounce on the film, so I'll let you have it, except to note, as you predicted I would, that I was very pleased to see that one of the few extras on the DVD, which was originally a stand-alone Warner release, is Swing Shift Cinderella, which is one of my all-time favorite Tex Avery cartoons and which reminds me how bad I'd like a DVD (or Blu-ray) collection of Avery stuff to surface some time. Here's a particularly nice image, prelude to a classic Avery male discombobulation:

And speaking of discombobulations, I see that our next film is Elia Kazan's The Sea of Grass, a problem picture if there ever was one. And that it's my turn to lead off the discussion. I'll need to gather my thoughts...

The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #2: "Keeper of the Flame" (George Cukor, 1942)

For part one, go here. 

Glenn Kenny: I have to admit two things about Keeper of the Flame: first, that I’d never seen it, and honestly had barely even heard of it before encountering it in this collection. And that given the descriptions of it I looked at almost directly before viewing it, I kind of dreaded it, George Cukor behind the camera or not. Come to think of it I’m not sure why I dreaded it, since theme-wise, it bears a certain resemblance to a couple of pieces of political-sociological pulp of which I’m kind of fond, for instance, Gabriel Over The White House. Before I get ahead of myself, lemme describe the picture. The followup to the popular and Oscar-winning (for Best Original Screenplay, of all things; Hepburn got a Best Actress nom) Woman of the Year is not romantic comedy, not even vaguely. You’d think maybe it would, what with Cukor directing and a script by Donald Ogden Stewart (who adapted both Holiday and The Philadelphia Story for the screen). But no. This is a Great-Man-With-Feet-Of-Not-Clay-But-Potential-Fascist-Steel melodrama, with an intriguing twist: the Great Man is never seen. True, as it were, to  the film’s title. The flame is the heroism and ideals of the never-seen Robert Forrest, a national hero for we-never-learn-what-exactly. Forrest meets his death in a spectacular auto crash, and the vultures of the press descend on the town wherein his compound is situated, but only one, Spencer Tracy’s former war correspondent Stephen O’Malley, is crafty enough to make it into the manse, where he meet’s Forrest’s  widow Christine (Hepburn, of course), the titular keeper of the flame—or is she? Soon O’Malley finds all manner of creepiness under all manner of rocks, including a surly groundskeeper (Howard DaSilva), a worshipful uptight amenuensis (Richard Whorf, in a sinister variation, coincidentally, of Dan Tobin’s character in Woman of the Year, or so it seems when you watch the two pictures in close temporal proximity) and Forrest’s loony mom (Margaret Wycherly). We learn that at the time of his death Forrest was working on a project to…Make America Fascist. And the truth about him has to come out! But there are powerful forces working to suppress that truth!

The material, as you see, has a lot of contextually fascinating resonances to it. Some consider the film to be a pronounced critique of the isolationist politics and suspicious fellow-travelling of Charles Lindbergh, a theory bolstered somewhat by the film’s stubbornness in withholding just what it was besides wartime valor that made Robert Forrest such a renowned national hero. I’ve read a latter-day consideration of the film that posits the scenario could conceivably have provided some inspiration for Philip Roth’s alternative-history novel The Plot Against America. This is the sort of thing I should be all over, but in fact I was kind of scared that the film it would resemble most would be another Tracy-starrer, 1933’s The Power And The Glory, a Great-Man-With-Feet-Of-Clay picture with an excellent pedigree; its writer Preston Sturges pointed out that its narrative innovations, more or less ignored at the time, were similar ones to what Citizen Kane would be praised to the skies for less than a decade later. That may be true, but it’s also a demonstration that if your innovations don’t resonate on the screen, they don’t resonate period, and The Power and the Glory is so thoroughly pedestrian in its mise-en-scene and overall direction that one recalls it as a real slog. And for some reason I was worried that Keeper of the Flame would be that as well.

Claire Kenny: You and I are on just the same page here, in terms of the film both confounding our expectations of content, and exceeding our expectations of quality. I know that we both relished the viewing, and found this satisfying, and satisfyingly ridiculous (in the way only a really juicy melodrama can be), for probably much the same reasons. The main difference in the way we approached the film is that you were a far better student than I--the only "advance reading" I did was the copy on the DVD box, which left me with the same dread you mention, which I likewise shortly found myself unable to justify. You mention the pervasive creepiness, but what I felt more was suspense. We know as soon as Tracy shows up that there is Something to Investigate, but the big bad truth about Robert Forrest is a long time emerging--is he a wronged man who was killed by his wife's lover? was he involved in shady business dealings? is Hepburn protecting him or herself?--and the buildup is entirely delicious. It's then jarring in the best kind of way (although giant clues pop up throughout) when his secret turns out to be the Big F. In the context of the time especially, a threat of fascism surely couldn't have been much scarier, but it's such a high-minded plan to make fascism the villain of a popular entertainment--and since Forrest himself is never seen, fascism really is pretty much literally the villain. As dated as this feels (I'm entirely conditioned by the movies I've grown up with to expect the shameful secret to be something sordid and very physical, like incest or serial murder or a gimp with a ball gag in the basement), it's more a delightful relic of its time than a wilted old bouquet in the manner of, say, Woman of the Year.

Glenn Kenny: Yes, exactly. A lot of the delight has to do with the pacing. The themes and characterizations and their treatment are a, true, a bit creaky and antiquated and all, but the picture itself really moves right along. Tracy as always gives great Man-of-Integrity value, and Tragic Heroine was never really a problem for Hepburn, so they’re both very enjoyable here. (The supporting cast is also impeccable; DaSilve always gave good sinister grump, and could turn that into fundamentally warm decent guy on a dime; I didn’t mention some good early Forrest Tucker action, he plays a menacing relative of a character). What’s odd, or maybe admirable, is that there are not even subtextual sparks between them in their interplay (their characters do not become romantically entangled in this picture, making this unique in their canon); he’s all do-the-right- thing, she’s all torn-between-love-and-disillusionment-and-duty-but- duty-to-what, and they don’t have any opportunity to connect in any other way. Claire, did you find this alienating/off-putting, or did the anomaly add to the fun?

Claire Kenny: Well, I’ll tell you, GK, I actually don’t agree with the premise that there were no sparks between them—though now I’m starting to doubt myself and wondering if I saw things just because I was expecting to find them there? Definitely, there was not the overt romantic involvement of their other films, but I nonetheless thought that an undercurrent of sexual tension was inherent in the way their characters were set against each other: as an investigator bound on uncovering the secret Hepburn felt compelled to keep, Stephen was her antagonist; at the same time, as the one person in the world of the film with the wherewithal to reveal the truth that Christine didn’t really want to hide, he was her rescuer. As archaic as that whole damsel-in-distress/white-knight setup is, Christine’s conflict about her own role creates the classic push-pull at the heart of all romantic friction. I’d say the anomaly here—other than the fact that a real romance never comes to fruition—is that the classic Tracy-Hepburn battle is one of words, while Keeper of the Flame trades more in wordless stares and meaningful pauses. I was happy if unsurprised to find that they could handle this form of interaction just as skillfully as they manage pages of banter.

Up next: 1945's Without Love, the DVD of which happens to include one of Glenn's all-time favorite Tex Avery cartoons, Swing Shift Cinderella. Not sure if that will also be subject to discussion. "Um, pardon me miss, I'm lookin' for the dame they call..."

The Hepburn-Tracy Project, #1: "Woman of the Year" (George Stevens, 1942)

In late April, Warner Home Video scored a coup of sorts and put out a DVD box called Tracy & Hepburn: The Definitive Collection, which puts together all nine of the films co-starring legends Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy in one handy-dandy package. A great number of the films they made together are not under the Warner rubric, so, like the recent Kazan box set from Fox, this is a bit of a diplomatic achievement. The thing about the Tracy-Hepburn collaborations is that, until I'd say as late as Adam's Rib, they don't look as if they were really approached as such, that is, as collaborative works by two distinctive artists; they were just films that had the two stars, who were romantically involved off-screen, working together. They didn't signify as "Tracy and Hepburn" pictures in other words.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. Or I should say ourselves. When I got the box set, I proposed to My Lovely Wife Claire that it might be a fun thing for us to assess together, since she and I are so VERY much like Tracy and Hepburn themselves. But seriously. Claire did some DVD reviewing for me back in the Premiere days, and I've always been a fan of her writing, and her overall perceptiveness and sunniness and all sorts of "ness" informs my work at its best, I like to think. So, this informal project, wherein we watch the Tracy/Hepburn pictures and concoct, each week, a "dialogue" about the picture. 

The first picture is the first that Hepburn and Tracy made together, of course, the 1942 Woman of the Year, directed by George Stevens, in which sports columnist Tracy falls for "emancipated" highfalutin political columnist and knows-all-the-right-people gadabout Hepburn, and shows her the proper place for a...well, I don't need to say it. The movie happens to rank pretty high on our friend The Self-Styled Siren's "Ten Movies The Siren Should Love...But Does Not" list, and when we popped it in Claire, who had not seen the picture before, was curious as to why. It didn't take her long to find out, as our dialogue below attests...

Claire Kenny: This was not at all what I expected, and I’m afraid I just didn’t much enjoy it…I think you felt the same? I feel like I’m SUPPOSED to enjoy it; I know that it’s a “classic,” and obviously KH/ST have all the fabulous zesty crackly brainy interactions we expect, but there was just too much stuff I would have to overlook. This is for the obvious thematic (anti-feminist) reasons, but they manifested themselves in ways I wasn’t anticipating. I thought, if anything, it was going to be one of those things where the big fancy career girl is Just Too Uppity For Her Own Good, and he’s going to have to “tame” her, which would of course have been frustrating and off-putting. But this was really worse in a way, because it’s not just that Hepburn’s Tess is smart and ambitious and successful, it’s that she’s not LIKABLE. She’s selfish and inconsiderate and flighty, exhibited most appallingly in her surprise adoption of an orphan and subsequent disinterest in even the most fundamental aspects of his wellbeing. Meanwhile Tracy’s Sam cranks around this big beautiful apartment, pouting over being neglected and getting no time alone with his new wife, and maybe you shouldn't have gotten married after knowing someone for thirty seconds, Spence?? I’m not sure what we’re supposed to get from this—is she insufferable because she doesn’t embrace her wifely station, or are we supposed to think of her as insufferable by nature, and in turn think of this quality as essential to feminine success? I realize I should make allowances for its datedness, but it may have aged past the point of being bearable.  The ending is…meh. The slapstick element of Tess’s attempts to make breakfast for Sam don’t really work—something is off with the pacing, it’s just not madcap enough—and her implied assumption of a more subservient role irks. On the other hand, I wasn’t clear what she was going to do exactly—it seemed the plan was basically “work less, hyphenate last name, leave my slick apartment behind for this townhouse complex.”  Which is fine, I guess. No suggestion that Sam was going work less, but this is probably too much to expect for 1942.

I do give the movie bonus points for Tess’s father’s scrumptious country house in Connecticut.  I’m a sucker for classic-movie country houses.

Glenn Kenny: You got more takeaway from the ostensible content than I did...or is it that I'm just an insensitive male? Everything you're saying about the offensiveness of the chauvinism is entirely correct, but none of that registered for me as strongly as just what a logy, dry, and leaden picture this is from stem to (almost) stern. George Stevens at his best is, as we all know from reading our copies of The American Cinema, an auteur, but damn, when I see a Stevens film that doesn't click for me I tend to ask myself, where the hell is George Stevens at his best, because this sure as hell is pretty far from it. [N.B., that's merely a quasi-rhetorical question designed to conjure my particular feeling of frustration with this movie; but for actual answers concerning Stevens' greatness, you could do worse than to check out Raymond De Felitta's pieces about him at Movies 'Til Dawn—part one is here—and/or The Siren's recent breakdown of a classic scene from Giant.]The Hepburn/Tracy "chemistry" is there but just barely...it seeps through the cracks of the cretinous plotting (man, that business with the orphaned kid is beyond crassly lame) and only really comes to life —and here's the main thing I disagree with you about concerning the film—in the finale, which, content aside, is a funny slapstick bit that harks back to Stevens' days as a director of Laurel and Hardy shorts, and underscores the teams' core talents in the comic arena. It is, admitedly, almost completely out of place here, but welcome nonetheless. If I may be so bold I'd like to speculate that had Hepburn and Tracy not wound up together romantically, they might have never been cast together again on the "strength" of this film. That's my story and I'm sticking to it!

Claire Kenny: It's not that I got more out of this than you did--I think I was having the same problems as you, and the most interesting emotional response I could find was righteous indignation. Which is really not saying much--"the only thing your movie offered me, Mr. Stevens, was enough offensive content to keep me moderately annoyed for two hours." I keep thinking about your last statement, though, and I can't decide whether or not I agree. It's of course a false exercise, because we have all the benefits of hindsight and a body of terrific joint work to look back on, but I can see why a viewer in 1942 would look at this and see the potential for lots of wonderful future pairings. Neither actor is at all like any other film actor I can think of, of any period, and the combination of their specific talents and intelligences and weird rough edges is something that doesn't make conceptual sense until you see it onscreen. Even from this weak start, I see what made people want more. And I'm still not with you on the finale. Here's why: I think that for slapstick (which I'll admit is not my favorite thing) to be really effective, the environmental obstacles almost have to take on the qualities of another character who's in active battle with the performer(s). And for THAT to work, the performer has to appear to *believe* that the obstacles have wills of their own, and might win the battle--whereas Katharine Hepburn is not believable as someone who can't master her environment. She's only effectively undone on film by some kind of emotional circumstance; she doesn't read as someone incapable in practical ways. So here, she looks like someone very good at waffle-making pretending like she doesn't know how to make waffles. Stevens compensates for this with lingering shots of the wafflemaker bubbling over, or whatever, which kills the pace.

Glenn Kenny: Touché. I can’t say you’re wrong in your analysis of that penultimate scene, Maybe I was so longing for a Laurel and Hardy short by that point in the dreary Woman that I overcompensated imaginatively. In any event, the picture itself is sufficiently dispiriting as a viewing experience (as opposed to a subject for historical study, that is) that I’m almost overeager to get to the next…

The next will be Keeper of the Flame, directed by George Cukor. Stay tuned!