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 piqué 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.