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.