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.