The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 4

Desk Set (1957)
***
Director: Walter Lang

In Desk Set Katharine Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, head of the reference department at a national television network, an all-female department staffed by Hepburn and her three coworkers (Dina Merrill, Sue Randall, and a delightful Joan Blondell). When their territory is invaded by an absent-minded "methods engineer," Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), who shows up unannounced one day and begins measuring the office space, Bunny assumes Sumner is some sort of efficiency expert hired to reorganize the layout of the office. But nobody knows for sure what he is up to until twenty minutes or so into the film, when he drops a bombshell. He is actually a computer engineer whose job is to install a giant computer (or "electronic brain," in the jargon of 1957) to store all the information currently held in the department's archives of print sources. Bunny, who has an absolutely retentive memory for all sorts of minutiae organized according to her own idiosyncratic method, is intellectually offended by the prospect of being replaced by a machine. "I'd match my memory any day against any machine," she boasts. The other women in the office have a more practical concern: they can't afford to lose their livelihood.

As you might expect, romantic complications soon arise. For seven years Bunny has been dating an executive at the network, Mike Cutler (Gig Young), in the expectation that a proposal of marriage is forthcoming, but to no avail. After she and Richard are caught in a rainstorm, she invites him to her apartment, where they slip into bathrobes and enjoy a comfortable dinner (fried chicken prepared by Richard) while their clothes dry. When Mike shows up unexpectedly, he jumps to the wrong conclusion and leaves in a huff. Things reach the crisis point during the drunken office Christmas party when Mike finally proposes—but on the assumption that Bunny will give up her career and life in New York and follow him to his new job in California—and the entire office learns that the new computer is to be installed the next day. The rest of the movie explains how Bunny's romantic dilemma and the department's uncertain future are ultimately resolved. (Happily, of course, for this is a comedy.)

This was the first Tracy-Hepburn movie shot in color. It was also the first not made by MGM, but instead at 20th Century-Fox, by Fox house director Walter Lang. The British film critic and historian Leslie Halliwell calls him a "director of competent but seldom outstanding entertainments," and I would say that is a fair summation of this film. When the plot begins to drag, you can sit back and admire the elaborate production design and the chic wardrobes of Hepburn and her female costars. Or you can always direct your attention to the imaginative ways Fox house cinematographer Leon Shamroy applies the CinemaScope screen ratio typical of the studio's output in the 1950s to the intimacy of a romantic comedy. Especially interesting is the way he treats the reference department as a sort of stage (the movie was, in fact, based on a play), spreading the actors and props across the screen and using dollops of color to break up the monolithic shape of the frame.

Desk Set is a bit slow to get started, the exposition of its first section more functional than engaging. The situations and characters surrounding Tracy and Hepburn have the slightness of a sitcom, although a very smoothly engineered and not unintelligent sitcom. When the focus settles on Tracy and Hepburn, however, things immediately pick up. Their interactions are quite well written, especially the scenes in which they are the only two characters present, and form the core of the film's appeal. By the time Desk Set was made, these two were so comfortable with each other onscreen that they could have taken turns reading the telephone book and made us believe it was as witty as the dialogue in a play written by Oscar Wilde. There is no doubt that their personal charisma and their star power are the things above all else that put this movie over.


Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)
**^½
Director: Stanley Kramer

In Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn's last film together—and Tracy's last film ever—they play a married San Francisco couple, Matt and Christina Drayton. He's the editor of a newspaper and she owns an art gallery. When their 23-year old daughter Joey (played by Hepburn's niece, Katharine Houghton) returns from a vacation and announces plans to marry after a whirlwind romance with a man she has known only a few days—a widower nearly fifteen years older than herself—her mother is alarmed. She is in for an even greater shock when she meets the man and finds he is black. He is Dr. John Prentice, a medical researcher played by Sidney Poitier. As political liberals, the Draytons claim to have no objection to the marriage on racial grounds. It's the reaction of society and the problems they believe their naive daughter will encounter as part of a mixed-race marriage that trouble them. Christina quickly comes to accept the idea but realizes that the greatest obstacle to the marriage will be her husband.

Prentice further complicates matters when he proclaims to Matt that he won't marry Joey without her father's approval, and moreover that since he will be leaving for Geneva the next day, Matt has twenty-four hours to make up his mind. An additional complication ensues when Prentice's parents suddenly announce they are flying up from Los Angeles and plan to come to dinner at the Draytons' home. As the film builds to its long climactic scene, the dinner party, the women have agreed to support the marriage, but sparks are still flying between the men—Matt, Dr. Prentice, and Dr. Prentice's querulous, disapproving father—and the question of Matt's final decision in the matter is still up in the air.

Director Stanley Kramer got his start in the late 1940s as a producer of social issues movies and, after becoming a director in the mid-1950s, directed a series of issues movies of his own. But by 1967 Kramer's once-daring liberalism was beginning to look ponderous and tired. His attempt to make a serious statement about the contemporary state of race relations in the U.S. in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner seems hopelessly dated and unrealistic, and I mean dated not just in today's terms, but in the context of its own time. In the year that Bonnie and Clyde, The Graduate, even In the Heat of the Night were released, the sensibility of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner seems just plain out-of-step with the times. And Kramer's direction of the film, with its obviously fake backdrops of San Francisco and long didactic conversations, is as outdated as his take on its subject.

The movie has two huge flaws that make its central conflict ring false. Reviewers of the time criticized Poitier's character as being such a paragon that it made the Draytons' agonizing over the engagement seem implausible. But I find his behavior quite passive-aggressive. The "choice" he offers Matt seems more an ultimatum. He says that knowing how much Joey loves her mother and father, he couldn't bear it if a marriage without their approval caused a rift between Joey and her parents. But what does he expect to happen if he refuses to marry Joey because her parents object? Can he honestly believe such an outcome would be likely to preserve good relations between parents and daughter? Another major problem with the picture is Matt's ambivalence about the marriage. He says he only wants to protect his daughter from the unhappiness of being shunned by society. But come on. Never mind that the Draytons live in San Francisco, the most liberal city in America. Just consider that Prentice is a world-famous expert on infectious diseases and a consultant to the World Health Organization. Not only does he mix with highly educated, cosmopolitan people for whom interracial couples would hardly be unheard of, but he could choose to work and live anywhere in the world, in cities and countries where such couples were accepted even in 1967.

Then there is the strangely inconsistent tone of the film. William Rose's screenplay and Kramer's direction waver between treating the film's issues seriously and presenting them almost in sitcom trappings. Cecil Kellaway plays a friendly priest who serves as Matt's speaking conscience, urging him to greater tolerance. Kellaway starts out like a priest from a Leo McCarey picture of the 1940s, complete with Irish brogue and blarney-laden platitudes, then midway through the movie unaccountably loses both the brogue and the leprechaun personality. Isabel Sanford, as the Draytons' outspoken housekeeper haranguing Poitier for the brashness of his designs on Joey, whom she considers a surrogate daughter, comes off as a cross between Hattie McDaniel in Gone With the Wind and Thelma Ritter. Still, she steals every scene she's in. Then there's the cringe-inducing sequence where Kramer attempts to deal with the generation gap by contriving to send Christina and Matt to Mel's drive-in, where they have an unpleasant/humorous encounter with a carhop and a pair of middle-aged-looking youths in a jalopy who seem to have strayed in from an Andy Hardy movie. And this is supposed to be San Francisco in 1967, the year of the Summer of Love!

As a finale to the Tracy-Hepburn collaboration, this film seems in every way a mistake. Tracy might have had success earlier in the decade in movies directed by Stanley Kramer, but Kramer's preoccupation with weighty political and social questions and his obvious discomfort with comedy strike me as a terrible mismatch with Tracy and Hepburn, who were at their best in pictures that concentrated on the personal relationship between their characters and leavened any serious issues underlying the plot with airy comedy. There's just no way around the fact that Guess Who's Coming to Dinner is a disappointing end to one of the great acting partnerships of the movies.

The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 3

Adam's Rib (1949)
****
Director: George Cukor

Tracy and Hepburn reached what is for me their absolute peak in their sixth movie together, in which they play a pair of married New York City lawyers, Adam and Amanda Bonner. He works for the district attorney's office; she has a private practice. When Brooklyn housewife Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday) shoots her two-timing husband (Tom Ewell) in the apartment of his girl friend (Jean Hagen) and is charged with attempted murder, the Bonners find themselves on opposite sides of the case, he as prosecutor and she as attorney for the defense. Amanda sees the case as a question of the social double standard for men and women. She wants to make this the issue and defend her client by painting the shooting as a gender-reversal crime of passion. "Why 'not nice' if he does it," Amanda asks, "and 'something terrible' if she does it?" Adam, on the other hand, sees the case in strictly legal terms and views Amanda's attempt to put society on trial as an underhanded diversion that threatens to subvert the legal system.

The Bonners begin as friendly adversaries. But as the stubborn Amanda tries harder and harder to use the case to score points for feminism, resorting to courtroom showboating to humiliate Adam, and Adam digs in to restrict the trial to strictly legal issues, the legal dispute becomes a personal one that puts their own marriage in jeopardy. Things come to a head during the famous rubdown scene after a long day in court. Frustrated by Amanda's willingness to use any tactic to get her client acquitted, Adam slaps her behind a bit too hard during the rubdown. She retaliates with a sneaky kick to his rear end, and by the end of the evening Adam has packed his clothes and moved out. Now all is out-and-out warfare both personally and professionally. Things are further complicated when their neighbor Kip (David Wayne), an obnoxious Broadway songwriter with a crush on Amanda, takes advantage of the situation by trying to romance her. The question now is not only will Doris be convicted or acquitted, but will Adam and Amanda's marriage survive or fail.

What makes Adam's Rib such a great movie? Where to begin. There's the great screenplay by Ruth Gordon (yes, that Ruth Gordon from Rosemary's Baby and Harold and Maude) and her husband Garson Kanin, the well-known screenwriter/script doctor, playwright, and film director who specialized in romantic comedy. Adam's Rib, the second of four films they wrote for director George Cukor, may be the best "battle of the sexes" comedy ever written for the screen. The dialogue is never mechanical or perfunctory, but always tells us something about what the characters are thinking or feeling without ever seeming contrived to do so. The characters, especially Tracy and Hepburn, don't seem to be speaking lines so much as having real, although highly intelligent, conversations. And both the dialogue and the situations sparkle with wit and humor. Adam's Rib has as many belly laughs as you'll ever find in a movie, all without ever sacrificing its polished tone. This is humor entirely without vulgarity on the one hand, and artifice on the other.

The direction by George Cukor is flawless. From the opening sequence—nearly five minutes long and almost entirely without dialogue—in which Holliday ineptly stalks and finally shoots Ewell, to the mirror image sequence with Tracy, Hepburn, and Wayne at the end, Cukor's perfect coordination of tone and action never falters. His pacing of that fabulous dialogue is impeccable. The physical comedy is also brilliantly handled—always restrained, never coarse, its degree of physicality always right on the mark. The comedic high point of the film comes when Hepburn, addressing the jury in her closing speech, asks them to imagine their reactions to the crime if the gender of each of the principals were reversed. For a few seconds we see a succession of shots of Holliday, Hagen, and Ewell seated in the courtroom which dissolve briefly to shots of each of them in drag. Ewell in particular is hilarious as his female alter ego, flicking her wrist, pursing her lips, narrowing her eyes, and quickly snapping her head to one side with a defiant smirk on her face.

Above all, Adam's Rib is quite simply one of the most entertaining and realistic depictions of marriage ever to appear on the screen. Adam and Amanda Bonner are the very personification of a mid-twentieth century New York professional couple in the MGM mold—intelligent, sophisticated, rich without being ostentatious, yet all too human in their emotions. Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn seem so responsive to each other's rhythms and moods that it requires no effort at all to accept them as a married couple who, despite their disagreements, have a deep psychic rapport. In this film they offer us a working definition of "screen chemistry." It is without question the pinnacle of the Tracy-Hepburn movies.


Pat and Mike (1952)
***^½
Director: George Cukor

The follow-up to Adam's Rib was again written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and directed by George Cukor and again deals with a battle of the sexes. Hepburn plays Pat Pemberton, a physical education instructor at a California college engaged to an administrator at the college, Collier Weld (William Ching). The very first sequence establishes the nature of their relationship. Pat is meeting Collier after class so they can drive to the golf course for a game with a potential donor and his wife. Collier complains about the slacks Pat is wearing, afraid such masculine attire will make a bad impression on his millionaire, and tells her to change into a skirt. And he reminds her that even though she is an expert golfer, she must lose the game. Collier is condescending and bossy towards Pat, but she is apparently so smitten with him (he does appear a few years younger and rather good-looking in a bland way) that she is willing to tolerate his attitude.

When she blows up after forcing herself to lose the match and impulsively quits her job at the college, she takes up the suggestion of a friendly bartender at the golf club and enters a national golf tournament. Here she meets Mike Conovan (Tracy), a professional sports promoter who, realizing how talented she is, offers to become her agent/trainer and represent her as a professional athlete. The only problem is Collier, who doesn't think it seemly for Pat to pursue a career, especially one in competitive sports, after their marriage. His disapproval becomes a jinx, for every time he shows up at a competition, Pat freezes up and fumbles. As she tells Mike, "I can't do anything well while he's watching me." Now she finds herself in the classic dilemma of romantic comedy. Will she stick with the obviously inappropriate romantic interest, or will she acknowledge the growing affection between her and Mike?

Like Adam's Rib, this film seems specifically tailored to the talents of Tracy and Hepburn, but in a completely different way. Hepburn's character is clearly based on her own natural athleticism. Hepburn was well known as a vigorous, active woman who regularly rode horses, golfed, played tennis, and swam. She reportedly swam daily until well into her eighties. It's obvious that for the most part Hepburn is really playing her own golf and tennis in Pat and Mike, with miminal use of a double. That first scene in the film where Pat's fiancé chides her for wearing slacks is surely an allusion to Hepburn's insistence on wearing slacks in the 1930s, at the time something unheard of for female stars in Hollywood. In fact, one anecdote about her recounts how RKO had her slacks removed from her dressing room to force her to wear a skirt. In protest, Hepburn strolled around the sound stage in her underwear until her slacks were returned.

Spencer Tracy was a gifted naturalistic actor whose typical approach to a role was to slip into it without much emphasis on external details. But his part in Pat and Mike, although the male lead, is essentially a character role. Under Cukor's direction, he appears quite comfortable as Mike, having fun with the mannerisms of the character and with the novelty of playing a colorful huckster conceived almost in the Damon Runyon vein. His Mike is certainly an eyeful in his gaudy faux-mobster attire—suits in loud checks, plaids, and chalk stripes worn over dark shirts and light-colored ties. Tracy manages to find the simple nobility in the character, though, despite his obvious lack of education, social polish, and fashion sense.

As much fun as this movie is—and make no mistake, it's a great deal of fun, the most sheerly enjoyable Tracy-Hepburn picture after Adam's Rib—it has a decidedly serious undertone. Even though Adam's Rib deals more openly with gender inequality as a concept, this issue is just as much at the heart of Pat and Mike. Mike's social and educational background may be a mismatch with Pat's, but unlike the patronizing Collier, a classic male chauvinist who tries to suffocate her personality, he actually respects her athletic accomplishments and treats her as an equal. Pat's association with Mike and her experience as an athlete holding her own in a male-dominated environment help her shed her submissive attitude and find her independence. The movie may wrap its feminist sensibility in a sugar coating of humor, but the message comes through nevertheless. The story of one woman's liberation, Pat and Mike is a worthy companion piece to Adam's Rib.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 2

The Sea of Grass (1947)
***
Director: Elia Kazan

The fourth movie Tracy and Hepburn made together is a Western, a nineteenth-century family saga that will remind many of Giant. As the film opens, Lutie Cameron (Hepburn), a young woman from St. Louis, is engaged to Jim Brewton (Tracy), the owner of a huge cattle ranch in New Mexico. When Jim sends a message saying he can't leave the ranch to come to St. Louis for the wedding, that they will have to be married in New Mexico, it's clear where his priorities lie. Once in New Mexico and married, Lutie finds herself in an environment she has trouble adjusting to. Jim is involved in a legal dispute with homesteaders, the kind of conflict that fuels so many Westerns, and is willing to go to any lengths to prevail, even acts of brutality. When his brutality harms a farming couple with whom Lutie has become friendly, forcing them to abandon their homestead, it becomes too much for her and she leaves Jim and her young daughter and goes to Denver.

In Denver the lonely and emotionally vulnerable Lutie runs into Brice Chamberlain (Melvyn Douglas), the lawyer who represents the homesteaders in court and is Jim's bitter enemy. After a one-night stand with Brice, Lutie returns home, contrite and pregnant, and gives birth to a son, Brock. When Jim accidentally finds out the truth about Brock and Lutie refuses to support him in his illegal range war with the homesteaders, he asks her to leave. She goes back to St. Louis and except for one brief visit doesn't return to the ranch until many years later, after her children are grown. Her daughter Sarah Beth (Phyllis Thaxter) has become a sensible young woman, but Brock (Robert Walker) has grown into a surly, impulsive young man with a hot temper. Out of concern for him she finally returns, only to find that he is a fugitive wanted for murder. Brock's tragic outcome proves to be the act that finally reunites the now middle-aged couple at the end of the film.

The Sea of Grass was the second movie directed by Elia Kazan, right before his social issues pictures of the late forties and A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway. As such, it doesn't bear the stylistic stamp of his later, better-known films. (Kazan was not pleased with the film. "It's the only picture I've ever made that I'm ashamed of," he writes in his 1988 autobiography.) One thing it does have in common with his later work, though, is the quality of the acting, no surprise since Kazan was a former actor and in late 1947 would become a co-founder of the Actors Studio. Attention is often focused on Robert Walker's flavorful performance as the bad boy Brock, and his acting here is certainly an eye-opener, one of his few early performances that hint at the greatness he was to achieve later in his career as the loopy Bruno in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train. Still, Tracy and Hepburn hold their own against his more showy role.

One hardly associates Spencer Tracy or Katharine Hepburn with the Method, yet both excel under Kazan's direction. Tracy eschews the relaxed affability he made appear so effortless, instead tapping into the hardness of earlier roles like those in Man's Castle and Fury. His Jim Brewton is a man driven by ambition to create an empire and by ruthlessness to hold on to it at any cost. He is obstinate, domineering, and unforgiving, a man who demands unquestioning loyalty from Lutie and when he doesn't get it drives her out, then redirects his love for her to overindulgent affection for his children. Jim isn't exactly an unsympathetic character, but his flaws do make him a hard one to like completely.

Like Tracy, Hepburn also avoids what comes easily to her. In her straight dramatic performances, she often seemed self-conscious and overly earnest. Her brittle acting style—especially as she aged—was better suited to comedy or to seriocomic parts where she turned her screen image to her advantage by poking fun at it. Toning down her mannerisms, she convincingly portrays Lutie, who ages some twenty years during the picture, by skillfully balancing the character's strength and vulnerability. It's one of Hepburn's unsung performances and lingers in the memory long after the film is over. The range wars plot might be familiar and the personal relationships at times close to soap opera, but the acting can't be faulted. Of the Tracy-Hepburn films, this is the dark horse, the film most likely to rise in one's estimation on repeat viewing.


State of the Union (1948)
***^½
Director: Frank Capra

Tracy and Hepburn's next movie, State of the Union, was a political comedy-drama based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning play by the renowned Broadway writing team of Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse. Tracy plays Grant Matthews, a self-made millionaire industrialist, and Hepburn his estranged wife Mary. Matthews is having an affair with Kay Thorndyke (Angela Lansbury), a newspaper publisher with a Lady Macbeth complex who wants to use her newspaper empire to promote him to run against Harry Truman as the Republican candidate in the 1948 presidential election. (At the time Truman was considered a sure loser. This is the election remembered for the photo of the triumphant Truman holding up a newspaper with the headline "DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.") Matthews is a political amateur running as an anti-politician with an idealistic message of togetherness and cooperation. (Sound familiar?) As Jim Conover (Adolphe Menjou), the slick political adviser Kay hires to mastermind the campaign, puts it, Matthews has the "rare combination of sincerity and drive the common herd will go for."

When his handlers insist they need his wife and children to create the right image for the campaign, Matthews is persuaded to reconcile with Mary. At first she doesn't understand that the reconciliation is a publicity gimmick. After she does, she stays on board to make sure Grant remains true to his political ideals. Matthews soon finds himself in the middle of a complex tug-of-war. He is caught between his wife and his mistress, both of whom want to be the main influence in his campaign as well as in his personal life. He's also caught between staying true to his principles, as Mary urges him to do, and the pandering to special interests that Kay and his advisers tell him is necessary to get the nomination. Things reach a crisis as Grant appears to have sold out to assure his nomination and the film moves toward its climactic sequence, a national radio-television broadcast in which Grant will lay out the policy platform Kay and company have devised for him. When Grant finally sees the toll the betrayal of his principles has taken on a dismayed Mary, what will he do, and what will be the ultimate state of their own union? Integrity or compromise? Mary or Kay?

It's easy to see what drew Capra to this project. An exploitative press, political chicanery, the corrupting influence of money and power, a main character caught in the conflict between idealism and compromise—these are things found in so many of Capra's movies. The hero, Grant Matthews, is an ordinary man enmeshed in a process he doesn't fully comprehend and can't control; the villains are the pompous, the hypocritical, the humorless, the greedy, and the power-hungry. In Capra's hands this material may become another version of his well-worn populist hokum, but it's impossible to resist. Despite all the references to politicians of the time whom few modern viewers are likely recognize, many things in the movie haven't dated at all. References to subjects like tax rates, inflation, economic depression, the dire state of housing and medical care, defense readiness, globalism, and whispering campaigns still seem surprisingly relevant. And the film's cynical view of politics is right in tune with current attitudes.

Of all the Tracy-Hepburn movies, this one seems the least tailored to their familiar screen personalities. Indeed, neither was Capra's first choice. He wanted either Clark Gable or Gary Cooper for Grant, and Claudette Colbert was actually cast as Mary before a dispute over her contract (she insisted that she not be required to work past 5 p.m.) caused Hepburn to step in just two days before filming began. Yet Tracy and Hepburn do great work for Capra. Tracy's everyman quality is well suited to the self-made man motivated more by the desire to serve than by ambition, and he strikes me as more believable presidential timber than the macho Gable or the impassive Cooper. Hepburn's role is clearly secondary to Tracy's, and she seems content to defer to him for a change. Any of a number of actresses could have handled her part capably, but one thing Hepburn puts across more convincingly than another actress might have done is the enthusiastic idealism of Mary, a quality Hepburn was particularly adept at projecting. The cast is rounded out by Lansbury (22-years old playing 40), Menjou, Van Johnson as a wise-cracking reporter commenting from the sidelines, and in smaller parts familiar faces like Raymond Walburn, Margaret Hamilton, and Charles Lane.

TO BE CONTINUED

The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 1

Of the many famous screen pairings of the Hollywood studio era, two stand out above all others: Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers and Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn. Astaire and Rogers made ten movies together, Tracy and Hepburn nine. All nine of the Tracy-Hepburn films have now been released by Warner Home Video in Tracy & Hepburn: The Definitive Collection. I decided to observe the release of this collection by watching the only one of their films I had never seen, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and over the next few weeks offering up my thoughts on their work together.

The thing that sets Tracy and Hepburn apart from most other famous screen teams is their well-documented offscreen romance. Other classic screen pairings were strictly professional, but when the cameras stopped rolling, Tracy and Hepburn's relationship continued in private life. This was not just a fling by two stars thrown together while making a movie, but a deep emotional relationship that lasted twenty-five years, the details of which are well known by lovers of classic cinema. The two never married because Tracy was a Roman Catholic who couldn't bring himself to divorce his wife and leave her and his handicapped son. They did often spend time together at the Malibu estate of their friend and frequent director, George Cukor, though. Tracy, who so often played easygoing, self-confident characters, was actually a profoundly tormented man, an alcoholic depressive who went on drinking binges that lasted several days and afterwards left him virtually paralyzed. The devoted Kate would play the role of his nurse during and after these binges, caring for him until he recovered.

Kate apparently developed an interest in Tracy before the two ever met based solely on her reaction to his screen personality, and when she returned to Hollywood in 1940 to film The Philadelphia Story wanted him to costar with her. (She wanted him to play Macaulay Connor, the reporter played to perfection by James Stewart. I've never quite been able to picture this myself, seeing him as better suited to the role of her manly soul-mate, C. K. Dexter Haven.) But Tracy was involved in other films (he starred in no less than four movies released in 1940), and it wasn't until Hepburn's next film, Woman of the Year, that they worked together for the first time.

Conceived by Hepburn as a vehicle for Spencer Tracy and herself, this was, like The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn's project. She commissioned the screenplay, sold it to Louis B. Mayer at MGM, and handpicked as director George Stevens, who had directed her in Alice Adams and Quality Street. Woman of the Year won an Oscar for its writers, Michael Kanin and Ring Lardner Jr., and got Kate an Oscar nomination for best actress. (She lost to Greer Garson for Mrs. Miniver.) Its success led to a contract for Hepburn at MGM, where Tracy had been under contract since 1935, and it was for this studio that she and Tracy made their next six films.

The nine movies Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy made together vary in quality as well as in genre. But even the least successful of them is worth watching to see these two great actors and the way they relate to each other onscreen. I guess that's what star power and star teamwork are all about.


Woman of the Year (1942)
***^½
Director: George Stevens

The first Tracy-Hepburn film, a romantic comedy with serious undertones, is a delight, its screenplay a model of the seriocomic romantic movie. Hepburn plays Tess Harding, a political and current affairs columnist at a New York newspaper, and Tracy plays Sam Craig, the sports columnist at the same paper. A disagreement in their columns over the value of baseball leads to a first meeting in which the feuding pair are immediately attracted to each other. Before long they are in love and married. The problems begin after the marriage and revolve around the seeming impossibility of two such opposite personalities—she highly strung, he mellow—to create a life together.

The most important thing in Tess's life is her position as the country's most prominent female intellectual. Everything else, including her marriage, seems to come second. The down-to-earth Sam reacts to Tess's self-centered attitude with patience, thinking that eventually she will find room in her life for him. When Tess adopts a war orphan less out of concern for the child than as a trophy to complete her new image as working wife and mother, Sam reaches the end of his patience. Realizing that she has gone too far and is about to lose him, will Tess be able to make amends in time to save the marriage?

The characters of Sam and Tess are tailor-made for what Tracy and Hepburn did best onscreeen. As she did in Alice Adams and The Philadelphia Story, Hepburn plays an intelligent, willful woman, a perfectionist who needs to be humanized by being shown the oppressive nature of her own ego. Tracy's Sam, a tolerant and unpretentious man, is shrewd enough to realize that to attempt to do this openly would lead to automatic opposition by the headstrong Tess. True change can be accomplished only if she experiences her own epiphany by seeing what her true feelings for him are.

Some detect an anti-feminist message in this picture, but I just don't see that myself. The negative qualities in Tess's personality—her career obsession, her snobbishness, her lack of humility, her inability to empathize with other people—are undesirable ones that alienate others whether the person with those traits is a woman or a man. At the end of the movie, Sam's reaction to Tess's misguided attempt to save their marriage by becoming the perfect "little woman"—her inept efforts to cook Sam a breakfast like his mother used to make end in a series of comic mishaps—shows that this is not the kind of wife Sam wants. He's no macho man out to tame a shrew, just a man who wants an equal partner as aware, and as respectful, of his feelings as she is of her own.


Keeper of the Flame (1943)
**^½
Director: George Cukor

Tracy and Hepburn's next picture was a complete change from Woman of the Year. Shot just a few months after the U.S. entered the Second World War, Keeper of the Flame is a deadly serious political melodrama-mystery. Tracy plays Steven O'Malley, a war correspondent just back from Berlin who wants to write an inspirational biography of a famous political figure and national hero who has just died in a car crash, Robert Forrest. To do so, he needs to enlist the help of the man's widow Christine, played by Hepburn. But Christine and all of Forrest's associates are ensconced inside the fortress-like Forrest estate and aren't cooperating with the press.

When O'Malley finally gets into the estate and meets Christine, he begins to believe that she is concealing something about her late husband and determines to get to the bottom of the secrets being kept about Forrest's life and the suspicious circumstances of his death. Christine does eventually agree to help O'Malley with his book. But the more he learns about Forrest from Christine, the more apparent it becomes that the real man was far from the heroic patriot he made himself out to be in his carefully cultivated public image. Christine finally reveals the dark truth about her late husband to O'Malley in a spectacularly dramatic finale.

Keeper of the Flame, the first of three Tracy-Hepburn movies directed by Kate's friend and mentor George Cukor, is the most curious of the Tracy-Hepburn films. Hepburn gives a bizarrely ambiguous performance. Is she mad, evil, a murderess, a widow faithful to her husband's memory, part of a cover-up conspiracy, a dupe? Her first appearance, dressed in white from head to toe and bearing a bouquet of enormous white dahlias—more like a bride or vestal virgin than a grieving widow—as she glides toward an idealized portrait of her dead husband, borders on the camp. Her long final monologue, in which she reveals the truth about her dead husband to Tracy, is awkwardly declamatory and politically vague. For fans of Tracy and Hepburn, the biggest disappointment of the film is that the melodramatic plot gives the characters they play little opportunity to relate to each other on an emotional level. The movie's cautionary theme of the danger of blind hero worship takes precedence over any real relationship that might have developed between them.

Cukor and cinematographer William Daniels give the movie the full-out Gothic treatment, with obvious allusions to both Citizen Kane and Rebecca. With its high-contrast Citizen Kane-influenced lighting, its sinister atmosphere, its creepy mansion reminiscent of both Xanadu and Manderley, Forrest's mad mother in the dower house, and its hostile and secretive characters (including Richard Whorf as a worshipful male equivalent of Mrs. Danvers), the film is certainly something to behold. But as Cukor himself acknowledged, Keeper of the Flame "isn't very satisfactory as a whole." Only Tracy, who gives a consistently understated performance, and Percy Kilbride, with his incongruous comic turn as a Yankee cab driver, manage to withstand Cukor's ponderous approach. Cukor was far more successful in the two later Tracy-Hepburn films he directed with a decidedly lighter touch.


Without Love (1945)
***
Director: Harold S. Bucquet

In their third film Tracy and Hepburn returned to romantic comedy, and a welcome return it was. Released just before the end of World War II, Without Love concerns the problems of a scientist working for the government, Pat Jamieson, played by Tracy, trying to find a place to live in Washington during the wartime housing shortage. Through his friend Quentin Ladd (Keenan Wynn) he finds the perfect place, the townhouse of Quentin's unmarried cousin Jamie Rowan, played by Hepburn. After her initial coolness toward Pat, Jamie invites him to stay on as a boarder when she finds that he is a scientist like her father was. As the two become better acquainted, Jamie proposes marriage to Pat, but on a strictly platonic basis—a practical marriage "without love." She will be his research assistant while he gets a convenient place to live and work without the messy emotional entanglements of a marriage based on love. "You'd be safe forever from the other side of love," she tells him.

On their wedding night, the two retire to separate adjoining bedrooms. When Jamie prepares for bed with a dreamy expression on her face and the wistful strains of "The Boy Next Door" well up on the soundtrack, we know that for her at least something deeper than platonic feeling is emerging. Before long both Jamie and Pat begin to experience the very things she told him their arrangement would protect them from, emotions like jealousy and possessiveness, and it becomes clear that their feelings for each other have crossed over to the other side of love. When Jamie is pursued by another man, both are finally forced to admit the true nature of their feelings and act on them.

Like Hepburn's Holiday and The Philadelphia Story, Without Love is based on a play written by Philip Barry (Hepburn had appeared in the Broadway production in 1942) and polished for the screen by Donald Ogden Stewart. Like those earlier films, this is what I would call a concept romantic comedy. Although it is great fun, the movie does have its limitations. The concept that drives the action, the unlikeliness of platonic love between a man and woman, doesn't have sufficient heft to give Without Love the resonance of those earlier films. It's a perfectly serviceable device to base the action on and move it forward, but it's never more than a convenient gimmick. Hepburn's character, Jamie, is an appealing one and plainly the dominant character in the film, but Hepburn doesn't seem totally right for it. On the stage she might have been able to carry off the girlish behavior the role requires, but the closeness of the camera makes us aware that she is a bit mature for her character (she was 38-years old the year the film was released), and a bit too intelligent to portray such naiveté with complete believability.

The film is not without its rewards, though. Tracy acts in his customary relaxed style, deferring in the theatrics department to Hepburn, who shows a flair for physical comedy not seen since Bringing Up Baby. She even has a drunk scene—always a surefire audience pleaser—reminiscent of the one in The Philadelphia Story but in a more slapstick vein. Romantic comedies traditionally have a pair of second leads to provide a counterpoint to the romantic couple, and Without Love has a great pair of second leads in Keenan Wynn and Lucille Ball. Fans of Lucy will be especially interested in seeing her play Jamie's attractive, wise-cracking friend Kitty, the kind of role Eve Arden did so well, leaving the broader comedy to Kate. There is even a cute dog, Pat's cairn terrier Dizzy, the same breed as Toto in The Wizard of Oz. And look for a very young Gloria Grahame in the night club scene as a flower girl with hay fever. All in all, a very entertaining if not great movie elevated, as always, by the appeal of Tracy and Hepburn.

TO BE CONTINUED