Review: Pat and Mike (1952)

* * * 1/2
Director: George Cukor
Starring: Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy

I watched Pat and Mike thinking it would be a romantic comedy with a little bit of sports, but found that it is instead a sports movie with a little bit of romance – and quite a good sports movie, too. Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn star in their usual battle of the sexes story, one that rises above a few predictable plot points on the strength of their amazing chemistry.

Pat Pemberton (Hepburn) is engaged to Collier Weld (William Ching), a University colleague with whom she is accustomed to downplaying her natural athletic ability. After a round of golf with a perspective benefactor, Pat snaps and decides to let everyone know just how good she is. She enters a tournament and comes in second place, in the process catching the eye of sports manager/promoter Mike (Tracy). When she boasts to Mike of her prowess in sports other than golf, he tries her out in various arenas and settles on tennis. Things go well until Pat chokes during an important match and she goes back to golf, where she may have to throw the game due to Mike’s mob connections.

The thing I really liked about this movie is that it’s very much about a woman trying to balance her abilities against what she knows the men around her expect and want of her. Collier, certainly, doesn’t want her to be good at sports and every time she chokes – be it at golf or tennis – it’s because she’s looked over at the audience and seen him watching her. His presence reminds her that there’s a cultural expectation that athleticism is a masculine trait and that women, if they want to be attractive to men, should look good rather than be good. Her competitor in the tennis match is an Anna Kornicova-esque player who seems to concentrate more on posing for the photographers than her game, which she wins only after Pat catches sight of Collier and her mind begins playing tricks on her. Every time she takes a shot the net seems to get higher and higher, her opponent’s racket gets bigger, and her own gets smaller.

Mike picks up on the effect that Collier has on Pat and banishes him, which has as much to do with his effect on Pat’s game as it does with the fact that Mike is starting to fall for her. However, despite the fact that Mike appreciates and celebrates Pat’s abilities, they eventually encounter the same problems as Pat has with Collier. When Mike refuses to let Pat throw the game so that his mob connections can make a buck off of her, they decide to teach him a lesson by roughing him up. Pat comes to his rescue by literally grabbing one of the mobsters (Charles Bronson) by the ankles and upending him, succeeding in saving Mike but also in emasculating him. Now she has to find a way to put the balance back in their relationship.

Pat and Mike is a really great movie that defies expectations in a lot of ways. As a romantic comedy, it isn’t about one person always being right and another always being wrong, but about two people who want to be equals and who celebrate the fact that they are. As a sports movie, it isn’t about whether or not Pat wins the big game, but about whether Pat can overcome her greatest competitor – herself.

Review: Woman of the Year (1942)

* *
Director: George Stevens
Starring: Katherine Hepburn, Spencer Tracy

I should start by stating that I have mixed feelings about this movie. There are parts of it that are so good and other parts that are so frustrating. This is the first film in which Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy starred together and the chemistry between them is immediately apparent. Watching them together is a delight - it’s the story that drags it down. The beginning is great, the ending is fine, but the middle is incredibly problematic.

Sam Craig (Tracy) is a sports writer who finds himself in a war of words with fellow columnist Tess Harding (Hepburn) after she makes some disparaging remarks about sports. When the two finally meet in person, the spark is instant. After a quick courtship they marry, but Tess’ way of life proves incompatible with Sam’s and soon the marriage is suffering under the strain. Just as Tess is named Woman of the Year for her professional achievements, her personal life collapses from underneath her and she must find a way to prove to Sam that what they have is worth saving.

From the beginning, there are signs that the relationship between Sam and Tess is going to be troubled. For one thing, Sam doesn’t really fit in with Tess’ high class friends. For another, Tess is always busy, running around from place to place as a foreign affairs correspondent with barely a moment for Sam. Once they marry, their problems are exacerbated by the fact that Tess’ busy schedule tends to marginalize Sam and, for lack of a better term, turns him into the “wife” in the marriage. Later, and without consulting Sam, Tess adopts a Greek refuge named Chris, mostly in an effort to further inflate her Everywoman image. The way that Tess relates to both Sam and Chris prompts Sam to declare that she’s “no kind of woman” and leave her.

I’m in no way going to argue that Tess isn’t a selfish and inconsiderate character, because she most certainly is (especially during the Chris subplot). However, the film goes out of its way to suggest that these character defects are a symptom of her feminist leanings, and that’s where the film begins to lose me. Tess is intelligent and driven and ambitious. I think these are all admirable traits but the film, obviously, does not – at least as far as women are concerned. Tess’ aunt (Fay Bainter) is a famous and celebrated suffragette but when she finally gets married, she tells Tess that she would have traded it all for a traditional life. Feminism as depicted here is selfish and empty.

In her attempt to win Sam back, Tess tries to get in touch with her womanly “roots” by making him breakfast. This sequence, which I liked in spite of myself, accidentally reveals the real problem with Tess. Only a person who has lived a privileged life survives well into their thirties without having learned how to make themselves a simple cup of coffee and an even simpler piece of toast (hell, I know how to make coffee and I don’t even drink coffee). The problem with Tess isn’t that she`s a feminist; it's that she’s a spoiled brat.

The breakfast sequence won me over a little, but then quickly lost me again. Sam tells Tess that he doesn’t want her to be just “Mrs. Craig,” he just wants there to be room for him in Tess Harding’s life. That’s fine (it’s great, in fact, albeit as another example of how Sam is always right and Tess is always wrong), but the film itself consistently tells us that to be a Tess Harding is a bad thing, something which can only lead to unhappiness. By having Sam tell Tess that he doesn’t want her to change, the film is trying to have it both ways and that just doesn’t work.

Woman of the Year isn’t a bad movie, but it’s a movie that frustrated me enough that I can’t quite bring myself to call it good. It did give me cause to reflect, though, on how Hepburn is often held up as a kind of feminist icon despite the fact that she consistently played strong women who get put in their “place.”

100 Days, 100 Movies: Bad Day At Black Rock (1955)

Director: John Sturges
Starring: Spencer Tracy, Robert Ryan

A train runs down a track dividing nothing from nothing – on either side is barren land. It stops at Black Rock, a town so small it’s little more than a speck on the landscape. The tightly knit (and almost entirely male) community is stunned – the train hasn’t stopped at Black Rock in four years. John Macreedy (Spencer Tracy) steps off the train and begins enquiring about accommodations; he intends to stay the night. The residents are suspicious. Who is this one-armed stranger, and what does he want in Black Rock? More importantly, why does he keep asking questions?

So begins Bad Day At Black Rock, which spans the course of one day and one night in a town with a shared secret and a desperate desire to keep it. Macreedy is immediately aware of how unwanted he is – the local gang, who take their cues from Reno Smith (Robert Ryan), first hint at it, then come right out and say it, and then decide that Macreedy knows too much and can’t be allowed to leave alive. Macreedy hasn’t come to town for the reason these locals think, but his matter is related, and the questions he asks hit too close to home. Macreedy is looking for a Japanese farmer named Komoko who lives on the outskirts of town… or at least, he did. He’s disappeared and his farm is in ruins.

The town is divided into two halves: those who want to keep the circumstances of the farmer’s disappearance a secret (Reno Smith, his henchmen played by Ernest Borgnine and Lee Marvin, the local hotel proprietor and his sister, who has a thing for Reno) and those who want to loosen the stranglehold that the gang has on the town (the drunken Sheriff played by Dean Jagger, the doctor played by Walter Brennan). Everyone knows what happened to Komoko, who was killed in a senseless, hateful crime. Smith, whom the army rejected from service in World War II, initiated the attack, channelling his inability to fight a declared/legitimate enemy (Japan) into a strike against the harmless farmer, and whipping half the town into such a frenzy that the event escalated and resulted in death. At the end of the film Macreedy reveals that he came to town to find Komoko in order to give him his son’s medal – a medal he earned when he saved Macreedy’s life while fighting in the Pacific. It’s a pertinent reminder of the lunacy of racially based violence, the fervour against difference, and knee-jerk patriotism.

Over the course of the film’s day, we watch Macreedy’s evolution. He enters the story a broken man - there’s some suggestion that after he’s taken care of this last bit of business, he’ll commit suicide. With just one arm, he doesn’t feel that he’s good for anything anymore. We watch as he lets himself get pushed around by the local tough guys. And then we watch as he finally has enough and starts pushing back. There is a fight scene in this film that, once you’ve seen it, you’ll wonder how you ever went so long without having seen it, when one-armed Spencer Tracy completely and definitively kicks Ernest Borgnine’s ass. Despite his disability and his age, Macreedy has the edge because he isn’t relying simply on brawn – he has the brains to outsmart the whole gang. They know it; that’s why they need to kill him.

The film is a western played at the pitch of a thriller. Black Rock is like the last outpost of the wild, lawless west where various and sundry misfits and gunslingers come together to run out their days. In an early confrontation, Macreedy asks Smith what he’s afraid Macreedy is looking for. “I don’t know,” says Smith, “Somebody’s always looking for something in this part of the West. To the historian it’s the Old West, to the book writer it’s the Wild West, to the businessman it’s the Undeveloped West. They say we’re all poor and backward, and I guess we are. We don’t even have enough water. But to us, this place is our West, and I wish they’d leave us alone.” The film makes a point of stressing male passivity – Macreedy’s at the beginning; Pete, the hotel manager who wants to come clean but is bullied by the rest of the gang into keeping quiet; Smith, with regards to his inability to fight in the war; and finally the passivity of the town itself, which is predominantly male (in fact, we only ever meet one woman, Liz, Pete’s sister). As Smith points out, Black Rock is a town constantly defined by other people’s standards, and it’s this lack of subjectivity that runs underneath the town, eventually exploding in violence as with the attack on Komoko, and the various attacks on Macreedy.

This is a film that’s strong on every level – the story, the pace, the tone, the way that it’s filmed – but the element working most in its favour is the acting. I’m not sure that any film has ever had more Oscar winners per capita (Spencer Tracy won two, Walter Brennan won three, and Jagger, Borgnine and Marvin each won one). It’s a treat to get to see a group of such talented actors, each at the top of their game, playing off of each other, and it makes for a riveting viewing experience.

100 Days, 100 Movies: Inherit The Wind (1960)

Director: Stanley Kramer
Starring: Spencer Tracy, Frederic March

Generally speaking, Stanley Kramer is a filmmaker who always just falls short for me. His films always have their hearts in the right place, and they always have ideas, but the problem is that rather than dramatize those ideas, his films often explain them, and do so in a way that’s so intensely didactic that it verges on overbearing and patronizing. Inherit The Wind is the exception, perhaps because it’s a courtroom drama and therefore more easily and naturally suited to his less than subtle style of preaching.

The film is based on the Scopes trial where Clarence Darrow and William Jennings Bryan fought it out over the teaching of evolution in public schools. Spencer Tracy plays Henry Drummond, the defence attorney based on Darrow, and Frederic March is Matthew Harrison Brady, the prosecutor based on Bryan. Dick York is Bertram T. Cates, the teacher on trial, and Gene Kelly is E.K. Hornbeck, a reporter for the paper funding Cates’ defence. Kelly is good as the cynical and sarcastic reporter, and York does what he can with a role that is essentially part of the scenery. This is really Tracy and March’s film where they face off on a number of different occasions, in different sets of circumstances and with different outcomes.

Kramer makes his own position, and the opposing position of the local community, apparent immediately. The local population is clearly on the side of Brady and Creationist theory – they harass Cates when he’s locked in his cell, they throw Brady a parade, and they generally think the trial itself is a waste of time. The film, however, places itself clearly on the other side, and the viewer has little choice but to follow when the community is shown to be bigoted, reactionary and anti-intellectual. What saves this from being a “big city thinker” versus “backwoods hicks” fight is the character of Drummond himself, who isn’t arguing for the validity of one way of thinking over another, but rather for the right of a person to decide for themselves what they think. In one of the many great speeches that Tracy must have relished, Drummond sums his argument up thusly: “If you take a law like evolution and you make it a crime to teach it in the public schools, tomorrow you can make it a crime to teach it in the private schools. And tomorrow you may make it a crime to read about it. And soon you may ban books and newspapers… And soon, with banners flying and with drums beating, we’ll be marching backward - backward - through the glorious ages of that Sixteenth Century when bigots burned the man who dared bring enlightenment and intelligence to the human mind.” To Drummond this is not the moral issue that it’s been framed as; it’s an issue of intellectual freedom, and of the responsibility of every human being to think for his or herself.

Brady gets to make speeches too, but is always one-upped by Drummond’s retorts. What’s interesting about the way Kramer presents the story is that, even though Brady is on the other side of the argument and even though he’s characterized as impeding intellectual progress, he isn’t the villain. It’s the community that is villanized, not just by the way that they treat Cates and Drummond, but by the way that they treat Brady as well. The most tragic moment in the film is not the verdict, which inevitably finds Cates guilty, it’s the moment when Brady realizes that he’s lost his audience, that those people who were so quick to give him a parade could turn on him with equal quickness the second they realized that he, too, is just another imperfect human being. He stands in the court, attempting to make a speech while the people who once listened to him with rapt attention turn on him in disgust and the only person listening anymore is Drummond. Whether you agree with Brady or not, it’s difficult not to feel for him at this moment.

The court room scenes are the best in the film – alternately funny, frustrating and heartbreaking – but there are also quieter, more private moments that are very moving. Brady and Drummond, though adversaries in the court, have a long and friendly history outside of it. There’s the suggestion that Drummond harbours an unrequited love for Brady’s wife who is, perhaps, a little in love with him, too, though she’s devoted to her husband. And there’s a conversation between Drummond and Brady where they set out their basic arguments and it feels more like two old friends in a healthy debate than it does like mortal enemies poised to destroy each other’s world view. These scenes are important because they make the characters more human, rather than broadly letting them be painted as “Good Guy” and “Bad Guy.”

I can’t stress enough how good this movie is, especially from an acting standpoint. Tracy is solid and dependable as always, bringing his special combination of gravitas and lightness to the role, and March – an actor who is under-rated perhaps because he’s such a chameleon that you don’t always realize that it’s him (watch this film, The Best Years of Our Lives and The Sign of the Cross and you’ll get what I mean) – is equally great. It’s their movie, their showcase, and it’s a wonder to behold.