Another movie review
12-Jul-02
Earlier this week, John and I saw “Adam’s Rib,” a 1940’s movie starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy as husband-wife attorneys who are on opposite sides in a husband shooting case.
First of all, I have to admit to a certain amount of prejudice in favor of Katharine Hepburn. Sorry, but she is a grande dame of the cinema, and very few actors have as much on-screen power as her. Her latest movies, after she began to have that slight palsy, have been weak, largely because of her disability. And yet, what admirable strength to go back on screen, even when it’s hard to speak without a tremble in the voice.
Anyway, back to the movie:
This is a pretty standard courtroom-drama kind of movie. Hepburn plays Amanda Bonner, a female attorney. This in an era when most women did not work, much less work in court. Her husband Adam, played by Spencer Tracy, is an assistant DA, assigned to prosecute a cut-and-dried case of a woman shooting her husband. The details of the case, however, make it intriguing to Amanda– the wife shot her husband in the arms of the husband’s mistress, with whom he had had a long-term affair. They have three children together, 6, 7, and 8 years old. She did not kill him. Amanda’s case revolves around the argument that, had a man committed the crime, he would have been considered to be acting in the defense of his home and family, and would have been found not guilty of attempted murder.
During jury selection, Amanda insists on choosing jurors who believe in equal rights for women. There’s a very charming sequence during the jury selection in which she and her husband flirt with each other underneath their respective tables.
The movie is further enhanced by a bachelor neighbor who spends most of the movie flirting with Amanda, completely without hope. The neighbor writes her a song and essentially treats her as his personal “Beatrice” for his music-making. Adam, however, is not amused.
At the end of the trial, Amanda has proven her case and won, but the cost is, possibly, her marriage, as Adam cannot believe that she truly believes that anyone has the right to shoot someone else. He stages a dramatic moment of walking in on Amanda and the neighbor in a playful embrace, then pretends to shoot them with a gun– made of licorice.
One of the interesting bits of energy throughout this movie is the role of physical abuse between spouses. Amanda and Adam occasionally swat each other on the butt, an act that seems playful until the moment when Adam is giving her a rub-down (there are many such erotically-charged scenes in this movie), and he slaps her fanny hard. Amanda’s reaction is to get up, furious, confront him– “You did that like you meant it! Worse, you did that like you had a right!” and then burst into tears. Honestly, her tears seem to be anger tears, the kind that women often have when they’re so furious they cannot lash out in any other way.
Later, the theme of spousal abuse comes up, both in the trial (both the victim and the defendant seem to have a history of knocking each other around), and in the Bonners (who physically assault each other in minor ways, neither one going so far as to leave bruises).
Hepburn and Tracy’s on-screen chemistry is pretty good, although it doesn’t have the same “feel” as the on-screen chemistry we see today. Off-screen, of course, they carried on a long affair, and we feel as though we are watching a pair who have a long, comfortable relationship– not a new, hot-blooded fire.
One of my husband’s comments about the movie was that it had the feeling of watching a theatrical production, rather than a film. In particular, there’s an argument between Adam, Amanda, and the neighbor shortly after Adam pretends to threaten them with the gun. During the argument, all three characters roam between the two apartments and the elevator, but the scene is shot entirely in the hallway. The largest amount of physical violence, aside from the opening crime, is presented here, in an off-screen brawl conducted in the neighbor’s apartment.
This is a black and white movie, but I was able to see it clearly and follow the story– something I’m not always able to do with b/w films. It’s funny, engaging, and surprisingly liberal for a movie made in 1949. Ultimately, the verdict seems to be equality between the sexes in everything– a man has every right to be as manipulative as a woman, and a woman has every right to be as violent as a man. The message that nobody has the right to be either is made, but somewhat weakly in the licorice-gun scene.