Watchingwell         

 Curated classic films

                                       

Heroines

     I read somewhere that The Awful Truth (1937, Columbia Pictures), starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant, and directed by Leo McCarey, is really about a woman battling a patriarchal society. Although I find this and other interpretations interesting and it forces me to look at the film again, it is also true that my original, overall impression of the film holds up. I probably saw the film for the first time on television when I was a child or a very young person. At the time, I believe I had a kind of unconscious meter which measured the way women were portrayed. Either I was able to enjoy the film without reservation or there was something which prevented me from doing so, something which made me uncomfortable. 

      As much as I enjoyed the Katherine Hepburn-Spencer Tracy film partnership, for example, I never liked Adam’s Rib (1949, Metro Goldwyn Mayer). As an adult, I can see what it was that bothered me, but as a child, I would not have known necessarily why it was that this particular film, in a long list of films in which these two actors appeared together, would strike me as off-key.

      In the film, which was written by the husband-and-wife team of Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, Hepburn and Tracy play a married couple, both of whom are lawyers. In the beginning, all seems very modern – the couple is the model of equality, even their nicknames for each other are the same, only his “Pinky” is spelled with an “i” at the end. Hepburn’s character explains this to a male friend of the couple who flirts shamelessly with her, much to her husband’s annoyance. This annoyance, by the way, is a tip-off that this is going to lead to trouble down the line, and, more important, the Tracy character is being set up to act the fool. 

   

      Trouble comes into their lives in the form of clients on opposite sides of a case of attempted murder. Hepburn’s character, Amanda, takes on the defense of a woman that her husband, Adam, played by Tracy, is prosecuting for attempting to shoot her philandering husband. Amanda takes the case without consulting Adam and when he finds out, he is annoyed, but, since he feels that his case is open and shut, he seems mostly to be annoyed because his wife will surely lose. After he sees the way she plans to present the case for the defense, he becomes angry and accuses her of making a mockery of the courtroom because she employs some theatrical tactics in trying to win the jury’s sympathy for her client. Since one might be under the impression that a lawyer is ethically obliged to do just that, his self-righteous defense of courtroom proprieties (that seems to suggest the screenwriters believe he is correct), is not very convincing. 

       Neither is it convincing when his anger escalates, the professional conflict invades their home life (a bad sign to professional women), and he packs his bags and moves out. Married people are quick to move out in comedies, and they’re not running off with another woman or man, they are playing people who are so injured that they cannot stay if they are to maintain self-respect. Watching this as a child, however, the Tracy character did not win my sympathy. I felt at the time that he was being unreasonable although we were supposed to think that he was the rational one of the two and Amanda was, for all her professional experience, an emotional woman.

    

     This is a popular film with critics, directed by George Cukor, and with a witty script and first-class cast, including Tom Ewell, Judy Holliday and Jean Hagen. I think most believe that this is comedy and fun is being made of all of the characters, and that nothing insidious is to be made of the fact that the husband-lawyer and the husband-philanderer are representing the law and the wife-lawyer and the wife-defendant are guilty of the crime and the defense, itself. I’m not so sure that intent that is not insidious always means the results are not.

     When I began to re-examine the other Hepburn-Tracy films, I realized that there are several where these same kind of roles are involved – he has the reasonable, almost wise part, and she is the bright, but flawed, almost silly character. In one of their most well-regarded pairings, the 1942 film, Woman of the Year (Metro Goldwyn Mayer), we are given the same, basic division, except that in this case the Hepburn role is worse than silly, she is every terrible cliché about career women – driven, selfish and incapable of even the most basic skills on the home front. As if this were not enough, she is made to seem downright diabolical by bringing home a war orphan as a good deed, without revealing the slightest emotional connection to the event. It is Tracy’s character who makes this connection with the child and returns him to the home where the audience is convinced that he will be better off. It is Tracy who leaves (as the injured party), convinced the marriage can’t work. In the end, Hepburn’s character, having just accepted the “Woman of the Year” award for outstanding achievement in her profession, must renounce her competence outside the home and show Tracy that she can make breakfast in order to prove herself truly worthwhile, and so win him back.

     In the disastrous scene in the kitchen, she has no idea how anything works and is made to look foolish. Only in that state, can she be sympathetic. Even her clothes are unsuitable for the kitchen – her fashionable career outfit keeps slipping off her shoulders when she needs both hands free. A clearer message could not have been sent than the one of this misfit struggling in alien territory: This is what happens when women become outstanding outside the home. Tracy’s character does tell her as he surveys the wreck she had made of the kitchen that she does not have to be a housewife to suit him, that, in effect, all she needs to do is to stop trying to be too outstanding. But, the viewer knows the lesson that has been learned. The title of the film, “Woman of the Year”, is clearly ironic.

     It is a mistake to lump all the Hepburn-Tracy films together, however, even though it seems that they are playing the same roles over and over. It seems that way because they play off of each other in the same way, the chemistry is the same, and they rarely play against type. As expert actors, they knew how to make the words seem to fit their personalities, but the words make all the difference. 

    One of the more interesting films that they made together is the 1952 film, Pat and Mike (Metro Goldwyn Mayer), also written by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon. For some reason, being out of the nineteen-forties had a liberating effect for Hepburn, judging from her roles, even though the fifties were thought to be rather stultifying as decades go. In Pat and Mike, she plays a character, loosely based on Babe Zaharias, the greatest female athlete of her time. Hepburn is superbly talented at several sports, and turns pro with the help of a less-than successful manager played by Tracy. She is high society, he is a streetwise promoter, but they find a common ground in that she needs him to help her become successful and he needs a winner. They agree on a formula for working together and splitting the profits – “five-oh/five-oh”.

She is a business commodity to him, but at the same time, he realizes that she outclasses him as he compares her to a thoroughbred racehorse. He does not discourage her career; he pushes it, as it will be profitable for him. On the other hand, she has a fiancé. The fiancé is not particularly supportive of her career, in fact, he is patronizing at times. To make it worse, when her fiancé watches her play, she falls apart. Tracy’s character, appalled at the thought of his ticket to fame and fortune being jeopardized, keeps them apart.

     

     In the end, it is Tracy’s character that she chooses as a life partner, because a real partnership is possible with him. Not that the Tracy character has no adjustments to make. At one point, his male pride is put to the test when Hepburn rescues him from some gangster types with a display of ju-jitsu that draws the applause of onlookers. His character, as written and as interpreted by Tracy, is willing to look foolish and yet come to terms with the fact that he loves this superior woman, a very different message than the one from Woman of the Year or Adam’s Rib.

     Other films Hepburn made with Tracy in the forties, Keeper of the Flame (1942, Metro Goldwyn Mayer), Without Love (1945, Metro Goldwyn Mayer), Sea of Grass (1947, Metro Goldwyn Mayer), State of the Union (1948, Liberty Films), are serious dramas and the chemistry is slightly different, a tribute to their acting abilities. The plots of these films require that they relate differently. However, whether as a wife, a widow, or a career woman playing opposite the formidable screen presence of Spencer Tracy, Hepburn is never overshadowed. Nor was she when she was playing opposite any of the major stars, like Cary Grant (three films), James Stewart, Fred MacMurray, or John Barrymore. This is true even though her career spanned sixty years and many different historical and cultural contexts in which to portray women. Watching her as a child, I didn’t have this perspective, and so didn’t really see her in that tradition as a strong woman. Even though she played an intrepid aviatrix in Christopher Strong (1933, RKO Radio Pictures), her films of the thirties were about strong-minded, but feminine, and sometimes insecure, women.

     Probably, my favorite Katherine Hepburn film is Bringing Up Baby (1938, RKO Radio Pictures), the quintessential screwball comedy. Actually, it is one of

my favorite films in which Katherine Hepburn happens to star. Directed by Howard Hawks, co-starring Cary Grant, it works so well as a film that my childhood comfort meter did not register any offense at the scatterbrained character played by Hepburn. I thought it was funny and I think we tend to judge comedies first by whether they make us laugh. On the other hand, when they offend me, they are not funny. 

     But the thing about Katherine Hepburn which commands respect, even when she is playing an idiot (or is she?) like the character in Bringing Up Baby is that she has the look of a patrician. She operates with ease in a summer frock or a Chinese costume, complete with coolie hat, in an evening gown or golf togs, dealing with servants, driving cars, and generally getting her way. When she plays tennis or golf on film, we get the impression that she really plays tennis and golf. There is a confidence in the way she wears clothes, including trousers, which along with the Bryn Mawr accent, tells us that she may act the scatterbrain, but that is an assumed persona, that she is definitely in charge of her life.

     These images had greater weight with me when I was young, I think, than the dialogue. For example, what could be more independent than the working woman as portrayed by Hollywood in the nineteen thirties? She was practical, capable, and nobody’s fool. She wore a smart, little hat and had an envelope clutch tucked under her arm, and although, this might have been the fashion of the day, it forever symbolized for me what independence looked like.

     As a child I was inspired by the scripts that made Jean Arthur‘s character smarter than James Stewart’s in Mr. Smith Goes To Washington (1939, Columbia Pictures), and Myrna Loy’s Nora in The Thin Man (1934, Metro GoldwynMayer) the equal of her husband played by William Powell, but the images that Ginger Rogers presented on the screen of a woman who needed to work for a living, even if her chosen career was in show business, were also influential. Even when she was in a glamorous evening gown, dancing with Fred Astaire, we had already been made to understand that this was not her normal attire. Strangely, Astaire’s character was always in formal clothes, but Rogers only wore formal clothes when she danced. This accentuated her working class status, compared to the guy in white tie and tails. She was the serious one, whereas, he was casual, she was disciplined, he was often unreliable. But despite Astaire’s higher class status in their films, Rogers played characters who would not stand for any nonsense. Astaire’s character had to reform in order to win her heart. 

     Whereas in the thirties, the working heroine was “plucky” or had “spunk”, the career woman of the nineteen-forties had to be a little more cynical. Compare the wardrobe of Ginger Rogers in her light summer dresses of the

thirties with the wardrobe of Barbara Stanwyck in Meet John Doe (1941, Frank Capra Productions) with dark-painted fingernails, a serious hat on her head, and padded shoulders in her coat. This was the picture of a feisty woman dressed for business, someone who does what she has to do to succeed. This is a dark film, with a foreboding of world events. Stanwyck’s character has a hard edge and her clothes have hard edges. She played a writer again in Christmas in Connecticut (1945, Warner Bros.) and devises an 

elaborate scheme in order to keep a mink coat that she has

purchased in the beginning of the film, an item she clearly cannot afford.  Here is a woman who not only has to work for a living, but has to plot and scheme to get ahead.  In the end of both of these films, she trades her ambition for love, thus instructing us about the perils of getting too ambitious. I don’t remember if this was the reason, but I preferred other Stanwyck films like The Lady Eve (1941, Paramount Pictures),Ball of Fire (1941, 

Samuel Goldwyn Company), Golden Boy (1939, Columbia Pictures), and

The Mad Miss Manton (1938, RKO Radio Pictures). In these films, Stanwyck’s characters didn’t trade anything; they moved the plot, and the others, including the male co-star, had to adjust to her.

     The grim events of war time did not prevent some lighter comedies from being made about the career woman and few female stars handled these roles as convincingly as Rosalind Russell. Even though she played an aviatrix, very similar to Amelia Earhart in Flight for Freedom (1943, RKO Radio Pictures), and the crusading nurse in Sister Kenny (1946, RKO Radio Pictures), the roles I liked best were the sophisticated and witty women who could always outsmart her opponents. Her wardrobe and her physical stature matched the strong roles she played: a judge in Tell it to the Judge (1949, Columbia Pictures), an executive in Take a Letter, Darling (1942, Paramount Pictures) and the fast-talking newspaperwoman in His Girl Friday (1940, Columbia Pictures).

     In this great Howard Hawks comedy, Russell, as reporter, Hildy Johnson, trades some of the fastest dialogue ever filmed with Cary Grant, the newspaper editor, Walter Burns. Russell’s story of getting married and leaving the newspaper game is paralleled by the story of Roy Williams, who is about to be hanged for murder. At the beginning of the story, Hildy is dressed smartly for a visit to the newsroom to say goodbye. By the end, her outfit is wrinkled; her hat is smashed and turned around, all in the service of getting the story. At all times, she is one step ahead of her slightly dishonest and scheming boss, at one point tearing up the story she has just written, which everyone acknowledges was a great piece of writing, because Burns reneged on their agreement. This is an exercise of so much power that we are shocked. At the end of the film, when Hildy and Walter are standing together, sighing in relief that they have avoided a serious predicament, they are casual and relaxed. They look like equals. Russell was tall and her stature was a nice alternative to the dainty female figures that one usually saw on the screen.

     Possibly, because so many films were made in the decades before 1950, there seems to be more variety of female roles and appearance. When I saw these films, they were already outside the era in which they were created, and so I saw them out of any context. For some reason, the films of the thirties and forties were more enchanting to me. They were so far from my reality that they were true escapism. But they presented such novel images of women that they gave me ideas about style and elegance that never left me. They were as influential on me as the images I saw in the neighborhood theater.