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
