Woman of the Year
George Stevens (1942)
The comedy in Woman of the Year comes and goes. It seems to be gone a long time while the title character Tess Harding is taught a lesson – what it means to be a true woman and a good wife. Tess is a celebrity journalist; Sam Craig is a sportswriter on the same New York newspaper. The first scene, with Sam and his pals in a bar listening to Tess on the radio, sets up her cavalier, brainy, East Coast self-confidence against his mid-West lack of pretension and working man’s wit. (Tess immediately invites suspicion when she proudly admits to the radio interviewer that she knows nothing about sport.) This opening, full of cracking, funny dialogue and swift, incisive characterisation, is terrific. Subsequent sequences conceived as comic highlights – as when Sam takes Tess to her first baseball game – also prove to be just that (although I could have done with less of the long scene when the couple’s respective networks invade their wedding night). But the first surprise of the picture, produced by Joseph Mankiewicz and with an Oscar-winning screenplay by Ring Lardner Jr and Michael Kanin, is how quickly Tess and Sam take a shine to each other: this isn’t a romantic comedy which sees the gradual erosion of the leads’ hostility and prejudices against each other. Once they decide to marry, you wonder if Tess has fallen in love so deeply that she’ll turn into a housewife – and if tension will return when she gets bored and wants to revert to her old life. Instead, the pair get wed and they both expect to be happy carrying on as they were before. This isn’t only unconvincing: it means that Woman of the Year loses momentum and seems to be going nowhere until Tess’s self-serving behaviour gets beyond the pale.
The picture was first released six weeks after Pearl Harbor. Because of that timing and because the script includes many references to the war in Europe, it’s hard not to see Woman of the Year in terms of propaganda for the American war effort – in that context it could be seen too as a reminder of the traditionally supportive role of women in wartime. What’s striking, however, is that Tess is a political journalist and commentator, with a taste for dramatic humanitarian gestures – as when she adopts a young Greek boy, a refugee. You might have thought that awareness of the international political situation of the time and its human consequences might be treated as commendable, that Tess would be more reprehensible if she were professionally ambitious and successful in a different, supposedly more frivolous field of journalism – as, say, a gossip columnist or a fashion writer. But the film’s view is that the latter kinds of specialty would be more fitting for a woman: Tess is condemned not just because she’s self-centred and lacking in natural feeling – she shows not a shred of real affection or sensitivity towards Chris, the young refugee – but because she’s an intellectual.
The taking-down-a-peg-or-two has a particular and disagreeable resonance when the woman on the receiving end is played by Katharine Hepburn. By the late 1930s, audiences (and studios) had fallen out of love with her – in part because of Hepburn’s independent woman tag offscreen. Her regaining favour seems to have involved doing penance for this. Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, the role which got Hepburn’s career back on track a couple of years before Woman of the Year, is also required to see the error of her selfish ways, although the comic tone of the Philip Barry material is so securely sustained that the effect is very different. (Besides, Tracy Lord doesn’t seem to carry the same weight of gender representation as Tess Harding.) This later film’s idea of irony is centred on its title: Tess receives a ‘Woman of the Year’ award on the evening she shows herself most blatantly lacking in uxorial and maternal qualities.
The welcome irony of Woman of the Year is that, although the script is structured so that Tess learns to be a good, supportive wife, Katharine Hepburn remains unassailably extraordinary. The internationally hyperactive Tess is fluent in several languages but when Hepburn bursts briefly into French or Russian or Italian or Greek she does so little to modify her distinctive voice patterns that the language she’s speaking always sounds to be Hepburnese. She’s one of cinema’s greatest weepers – or, at least, one of the best at making her eyes fill up with tears; although when she does so here, as Tess witnesses her widowed father’s marriage to her aunt and absorbs the true meaning of the wedding service, even Hepburn struggles to make you believe in the moral-of-the- scene. The film is largely redeemed by its last ten minutes when, after Tess and Sam have split up, she returns to him and attempts hopelessly to cook breakfast for him. However much you might resent the idea of this sequence, it’s perfectly directed by George Stevens (with a funny soundtrack of the food and coffee on the hob making untoward noises) and brilliantly played by Hepburn – she’s comically aware but she makes you laugh because she plays the domestic ineptitude so straight, with complete physical and mental involvement. You end up feeling that you’re witnessing not domestic ineptitude but superlative acting.
Spencer Tracy is hugely expert – his relaxed naturalism seems ahead of its time – and the easy intimacy that he and Hepburn have in the more tender moments here is a marvel. It’s not Tracy’s fault that the script so approves of Sam that an aura of smugness starts to gather round him. Fay Bainter is a good actress but isn’t remotely convincing as the feminist heroine, much admired by her niece Tess, Ellen Whitcomb is supposed to be: Ellen too comes to understand real values when she marries Tess’s father (Minor Watson), a high-ranking diplomat who works closely with FDR but who’s lonely without a wife. Fay Bainter looks throughout as if she’s waiting for this conversion to happen in order to understand why she was cast in the role. Stevens handles the cast pretty impeccably: Reginald Owen is the newspaper editor; Sam’s retinue from the paper includes William Bendix, Gladys Blake, Roscoe Karns and William Tannen; Dan Tobin has a nicely controlled oily suavity as Tess’s secretary Gerald. George Kezas (who, according to IMDB, never acted again) is affecting as Chris – and Spencer Tracy wonderful in his scenes with the little boy. In 1999 Woman of the Year was selected for preservation in the US National Film Registry by the Library of Congress for being ‘culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant’. It is significant in all three respects because it marked the start of the screen partnership of Hepburn and Tracy. But in itself it’s a patchy, not very likeable film.
4 February 2010