Monthly Archives: May 2016

  • Woman of the Year

    Old YorkerFilm review

    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

  • Pat and Mike

    Old YorkerFilm review

    George Cukor (1952)

    The BFI’s print wasn’t great and I probably wasn’t in the mood.  Anyway, there’s no point pretending I enjoyed it – I was getting irritated and wanting it to end a good half-hour before it did (and it runs only ninety-five minutes).  Pat and Mike is widely regarded by some as one of the very best Hepburn-Tracey comedies but the gulf between their talents and what they’re given to do is chasmal.  Even though the names on the screenplay – Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon – are legendary too, the proceedings are too innocuous and emotionally mild.  Hepburn plays Pat Pemberton, a multi-talented sportswoman, and Tracy is Mike Conovan, the slightly dodgy sports promoter who takes charge of her career – and, eventually, her heart, as she does his.  The plot doesn’t seem eventful enough, given the lack of twists and turns in the relationship between Pat and Mike.  The chemistry between Hepburn and Tracy sees them safely through in the romance department but it’s thanks to the stars themselves rather than to situations they’re faced with in the story.

    It starts promisingly, as Pat, a college games mistress, dashes from the gym and into her fiancé’s car – he’s Collier Weld, a senior member of faculty and anxious to make a good impression on Mr and Mrs E H Beminger, the coarse philanthropists he and Pat are off to play a golf foursome with.   In her very first scene in her very first picture (A Bill of Divorcement), Katharine Hepburn came running down a flight of stairs at breakneck speed; her athleticism, and the fact that she stays in character at the same time as she’s being athletic, are what’s most enjoyable about Pat and Mike.  Playing a sporting champion realises Hepburn’s physical distinction in a satisfying comic way – her high-strung wiriness makes her all the more convincing in the role.  In one of the film’s best and best-known lines, perfectly delivered by Spencer Tracy (he doesn’t quite throw it away), Mike comments that, ‘There’s not much meat on her but what’s there is cherce [choice]’.  Hepburn is splendid in the opening scenes, losing her temper with the stupidly shrill Mrs Beminger and whacking off a row of golf balls to get the anger out of her system (the rapid firing of the balls makes it feel like two sports at the same time – although it’s shooting with murderous intent rather than target practice).  But Collier, played by an actor called William Ching, is just too boring – it’s impossible to believe he and Pat would ever have got together.  He’s not even infuriatingly decent:  he’s a pompous creep – but not enough for this to be entertaining.    The running joke is that, whenever Pat sees Collier watching her golfing or playing tennis, she goes to pieces.  The idea isn’t much more than serviceable although Hepburn’s exasperated imitation of and reactions to the pressurising look are funny.  But the fiancé character becomes a drag in the wrong way:  he obviously has to be got rid of but the script isn’t inventive in how that’s to be achieved.

    Mike’s business operations float around the margins of the underworld and the BFI programme note for Pat and Mike included an interview between George Cukor and Gavin Lambert which referred to the gangster parts being written ‘with a nod to Damon Runyon’.  Maybe that was my problem with these characters – when it comes to funny hoods, I find a little goes a long way.  I love Guys and Dolls but it’s thanks to the songs and to Brando and Sinatra’s alchemical readings of the Runyon dialogue.  The same is true here of Spencer Tracy, who is infinitely expert as Mike:  he does the character perfectly, even if you’re always aware that he’s doing a character.    On the way to that opening golf match, Pat – at Collier’s request – changes in the back of the car from trousers into a skirt.  At various points of the story, both the men in her life make clear that they think they own her – personally and/or professionally.  By the end and free of Collier, Pat wins a golf championship wearing trousers and suggests in her closing exchange with Mike that she’ll wear them in their relationship too.  This outcome came as something of a relief after seeing Woman of the Year a fortnight earlier yet the film as it progresses still seems to reduce Katharine Hepburn.    After the debacle of the foursome with the Bemingers, Pat sits in the clubhouse bar, trying to collect herself.  She talks about being ‘frazzled’ and needing to get ‘unfrazzled’.   One of Hepburn’s hallmarks is her whirring emotional complexity – her feelings are in perpetual motion.  She’s marvellous in this sequence but the unfrazzling process detracts from some of her greatest qualities.

    Aldo Ray is eventually winning, in both senses of the word, as one of the lesser lights in Mike’s stable, a dumb boxer who keeps losing until he’s pep-talked by Pat.   Charles Bronson stands out among the gangsters and the Bemingers are amusingly played by Loring Smith and Phyllis Povah but, apart from the two leads, the cast of Pat and Mike is most remarkable for a group of sports stars as themselves.   The presence of Babe Didrikson Zaharias, an Olympic hurdles gold medallist before she became a golf champion, gives a nice grain of credibility to Pat’s amazing versatility.  When Pat joins the pro-tennis circuit, she plays mixed doubles with Alice Marble, Donald Budge and Frank Parker and singles against Gussie Moran. It’s interesting to watch the way that (I assume) tennis was actually played in exhibition matches of the time, although the sequences go on a little too long.  I couldn’t see anything very special in the humorous fantasy that takes over the Pat-Gussie Moran head-to-head – once Pat spies Collier in the crowd, she finds Gussie’s racquet head magnifying and her own shrinking and the net rising to an impossible height.  (Perhaps I found the imagery too familiar:  you often hear tennis players talking about how, when they’re playing well, they see the ball the size of a football.)  I did quite like George Cukor’s other extravagant visual gag, when Mike is beginning to realise how much Pat means to him, he looks at a photograph of her, and sees the face of his other favourite girl, a racehorse called Little Nell, superimposed on Hepburn’s.  The jaunty music, which gets a bit tedious, is by David Raksin.

    18 February 2010

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