12 The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 4

Desk Set (1957)
***
Director: Walter Lang

In Desk Set Katharine Hepburn plays Bunny Watson, head of the reference department at a national television network, an all-female department staffed by Hepburn and her three coworkers (Dina Merrill, Sue Randall, and a delightful Joan Blondell). When their territory is invaded by an absent-minded "methods engineer," Richard Sumner (Spencer Tracy), who shows up unannounced one day and begins measuring the office space, Bunny assumes Sumner is some sort of efficiency expert hired to reorganize the layout of the office. But nobody knows for sure what he is up to until twenty minutes or so into the film, when he drops a bombshell. He is actually a computer engineer whose job is to install a giant computer (or "electronic brain," in the jargon of 1957) to store all the information currently held in the department's archives of print sources. Bunny, who has an absolutely retentive memory for all sorts of minutiae organized according to her own idiosyncratic method, is intellectually offended by the prospect of being replaced by a machine. "I'd match my memory any day against any machine," she boasts. The other women in the office have a more practical concern: they can't afford to lose their livelihood.

10 The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 3

Adam's Rib (1949)
****
Director: George Cukor

Tracy and Hepburn reached what is for me their absolute peak in their sixth movie together, in which they play a pair of married New York City lawyers, Adam and Amanda Bonner. He works for the district attorney's office; she has a private practice. When Brooklyn housewife Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday) shoots her two-timing husband (Tom Ewell) in the apartment of his girl friend (Jean Hagen) and is charged with attempted murder, the Bonners find themselves on opposite sides of the case, he as prosecutor and she as attorney for the defense. Amanda sees the case as a question of the social double standard for men and women. She wants to make this the issue and defend her client by painting the shooting as a gender-reversal crime of passion. "Why 'not nice' if he does it," Amanda asks, "and 'something terrible' if she does it?" Adam, on the other hand, sees the case in strictly legal terms and views Amanda's attempt to put society on trial as an underhanded diversion that threatens to subvert the legal system.

7 The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 2

The Sea of Grass (1947)
***
Director: Elia Kazan

The fourth movie Tracy and Hepburn made together is a Western, a nineteenth-century family saga that will remind many of Giant. As the film opens, Lutie Cameron (Hepburn), a young woman from St. Louis, is engaged to Jim Brewton (Tracy), the owner of a huge cattle ranch in New Mexico. When Jim sends a message saying he can't leave the ranch to come to St. Louis for the wedding, that they will have to be married in New Mexico, it's clear where his priorities lie. Once in New Mexico and married, Lutie finds herself in an environment she has trouble adjusting to. Jim is involved in a legal dispute with homesteaders, the kind of conflict that fuels so many Westerns, and is willing to go to any lengths to prevail, even acts of brutality. When his brutality harms a farming couple with whom Lutie has become friendly, forcing them to abandon their homestead, it becomes too much for her and she leaves Jim and her young daughter and goes to Denver.

6 The Films of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, Part 1

Of the many famous screen pairings of the Hollywood studio era, two stand out above all others: Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers and Spencer Tracy-Katharine Hepburn. Astaire and Rogers made ten movies together, Tracy and Hepburn nine. All nine of the Tracy-Hepburn films have now been released by Warner Home Video in Tracy & Hepburn: The Definitive Collection. I decided to observe the release of this collection by watching the only one of their films I had never seen, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, and over the next few weeks offering up my thoughts on their work together.

The thing that sets Tracy and Hepburn apart from most other famous screen teams is their well-documented offscreen romance. Other classic screen pairings were strictly professional, but when the cameras stopped rolling, Tracy and Hepburn's relationship continued in private life. This was not just a fling by two stars thrown together while making a movie, but a deep emotional relationship that lasted twenty-five years, the details of which are well known by lovers of classic cinema. The two never married because Tracy was a Roman Catholic who couldn't bring himself to divorce his wife and leave her and his handicapped son. They did often spend time together at the Malibu estate of their friend and frequent director, George Cukor, though. Tracy, who so often played easygoing, self-confident characters, was actually a profoundly tormented man, an alcoholic depressive who went on drinking binges that lasted several days and afterwards left him virtually paralyzed. The devoted Kate would play the role of his nurse during and after these binges, caring for him until he recovered.

0 1962: Hollywood's Second Greatest Year? Part 2

The Play's the Thing

Lawrence of Arabia, which I wrote about in the previous installment of this series, is based on an original screenplay by Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, which in turn was based on the writings of T. E. Lawrence himself. But two of the other great American movies released in 1962 are film versions of stage plays. One of these is the Nobel Prize-winning playwright Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night (itself the winner of the 1957 Pulitzer Prize for drama), directed by Sidney Lumet. Lumet came to movies from television, where he had worked as a director for nearly ten years before directing his first film, 12 Angry Men (1957).

Running nearly three hours in its unedited version, Journey is possibly the best film version of a stage play I have ever seen. Anyone who has seen it will understand when I say that watching it is an emotionally devastating experience, an experience comparable to watching one of the most emotionally intense films of Ingmar Bergman. By the end of the movie the viewer knows thoroughly the Tyrone family and the deeply flawed relationships of each of its members to the others. And what a family: a tyrannical, obsessively miserly father, a morphine-addicted mother, an alienated, alcoholic older son, and a sensitive younger son dying from tuberculosis.

Credit for the film's powerful impact must go, of course, to O'Neill, but also to director Lumet, who prudently resists the temptation to "open out" the play, keeping it confined to the Tyrone house and to the four members of the family and their maid. In doing this he emphasizes the isolation of the family and their self-created entrapment in despair. In addition, the black-and-white cinematography of Boris Kaufman (Vigo's Zero de Conduite and L'Atalante, On the Waterfront) must be mentioned, with its masterful use of light and shadow within the house, and its capturing of the subtly shifting intensity of light as the day progresses into night, and daylight progresses to lamplight. But above all, credit must go to the ensemble cast—Katharine Hepburn, Ralph Richardson, Jason Robards, and Dean Stockwell. At the Cannes film festival Hepburn was voted Best Actress, and Richardson, Robards, and Stockwell all shared the Best Actor award.

If I had to single out one of these brilliant performances for special recognition, it would be Katharine Hepburn's Oscar-nominated turn as Mary Tyrone. I greatly admire Hepburn's comedy and light dramatic performances, but her straight dramatic performances sometimes strike me as emphasizing her weaknesses as an actress. Her Mary Tyrone, though, is in a class by itself and unlike anything she had done before or has done since. It has none of the overly earnest histrionics or the idiosyncrasies and tics that can diminish the force of her weightier dramatic performances.

Here she poignantly makes you feel all of the pain, disappointment, and years of frustrated expectations that have broken Mary Tyrone and driven her to become a morphine addict. Hepburn constantly makes you see that trapped inside the dope-addled woman is the hopeful, naive girl who married the dashing older actor. Pauline Kael wrote of her performance that "Hepburn's transitions here—the way she can look 18 or 80 at will—seem iridescent." A comparison of her interpretation of Mary Tyrone to that of the British actress Constance Cummings in Laurence Olivier's 1973 television version—where Mary Tyrone is unsympathetically portrayed as rather self-pitying, petulant, and neurotic—shows how profoundly affecting Hepburn, forlorn and vulnerable, really is in this movie. The cumulative effect of her performance on the viewer is not unlike the terror and pity experienced by the viewers of Greek tragedy. As Pauline Kael put it, "[T]he screen's most beautiful comedienne of the 30s and 40s becomes our greatest screen tragedienne."

The other great movie of 1962 adapted from a stage play is The Miracle Worker, adapted by William Gibson from his play about Helen Keller (Patty Duke) and her teacher and lifelong friend Annie Sullivan (Anne Bancroft). The director of The Miracle Worker, Arthur Penn, had like Sidney Lumet come from television, and this was only his second movie.

The Miracle Worker was rightly described in promotional material as "An Emotional Earthquake!" When the movie begins, the nearly blind Sullivan, a graduate of and teacher at the Perkins School for the Blind in Boston, has been hired by Keller's wealthy, genteel Alabama family as governess to an essentially spoiled and untamed creature. Stricken at the age of nineteen months with an illness—possible scarlet fever or meningitis—that left her blind and deaf, Helen has been allowed to develop without any sort of training except for a rudimentary kind of sign language she has been able to acquire spontaneously.

In the early days Helen's reaction to her new governess and teacher alternates unpredictably between co-operation and hostility. Annie succeeds in making limited progress with her pupil only to experience sudden setbacks marked by violent tantrums and physical attacks by Helen. Her greatest success is in teaching Helen to spell with her fingers the names of objects. Yet Annie realizes that Helen is really only mimicking her without grasping the relationship between objects and words. "It's still a finger game to her—no meaning," she tells Helen's mother.

The uneasy relationship between Annie and Helen erupts into all-out conflict one day during the family meal, which as in most traditional Southern households of the time takes place at midday. Helen has never been taught to eat properly, instead roaming around the table while the rest of the family eat and picking bites of food off their plates. Finally Annie can stand this no longer and orders everyone else out of the dining room. What follows is a truly mesmerizing scene lasting nearly ten minutes and containing not a single word of dialogue.

Determined to teach Helen to eat at the table using a plate and spoon, Annie must physically subdue the intractable child. The scene is filled with a relentless physicality that almost borders on brutality on the part of Sullivan. This is in reality less a conflict than a war in which she must conquer her opponent if she is to have any chance of making progress in educating her. The scene occupies less than ten minutes of screen time, but in narrative time it goes on for several hours, until in fact it is time for the next meal of the day. By sheer persistence and force of will Annie does at last succeed at teaching the child to eat properly.

At a loss as to how to proceed with Helen's education beyond this point, Annie finally hits upon a plan to isolate the child from the family and live with her in a cottage on another part of the estate. "I don't think Helen's worst handicap is deafness and blindness," she tells her mother. "I think it's your love and pity." The family reluctantly agree to a two-week trial of the scheme. The two do grow closer as Helen gradually accepts the situation and learns to trust her teacher. But Annie is frustrated in her chief desire, to teach Helen the concept of language. "One word and I can put the world in your hand," she says to Helen in frustration one day.

The two weeks, however, come to an end without this happening, and the family refuse to extend the trial period. At dinner on the first night after their return, things are going badly. Helen is behaving willfully, defying Annie and testing her limits. After she throws a pitcher of water in Annie's face, Annie physically drags her from the dining room in front of the horrified family. Outside at the well Annie tries to force Helen to re-fill the water pitcher using the old-fashioned hand pump. In the unforgettable scene that follows, the breakthrough that Annie has been working for suddenly happens.

Helen's mother has already told Annie that at the age of six months Helen had actually vocalized the word for water, saying "wa-wa." As Helen holds her hand under the stream of water, Annie recognizes in Helen the dawning of awareness of the relationship between objects and words, the birth in Helen's consciousness of the concept of language. Helen, in truth an extraordinarily intelligent child, is somehow able to remember her first experience with language from babyhood and like an unimpaired infant learning her first word, finally vocalizes her first word, "wa-wa." The emotional impact of this scene on the viewer is almost overpowering.

The Miracle Worker has numerous cinematic virtues that make it far more than just a filmed version of a stage play. Repeated images of water throughout the film foreshadow the climactic scene. Penn's use of sound is brilliant. To form a transition between scenes, he frequently overlaps sound and image, beginning the sound from the next scene before the actual cut to it. At the end of the dining room scene, we hear a clock begin to chime; Penn then cuts to the family waiting outside, and the clock finishes chiming. His use of the hand-held camera and of grainy or slightly out-of-focus images superimposed on Annie's face, instead of the conventional flashback, to tell us details about Annie's sad history suggest that Penn had been carefully watching the early films of the French New Wave directors like Alain Resnais and François Truffaut.

But the movie really belongs to Bancroft and Duke. So fully do they inhabit their roles (both had played them in the Broadway production, also directed by Penn) that it is impossible to imagine anyone else playing Annie and Helen. Both were deservedly rewarded with Oscars, Bancroft for best actress and Duke for best supporting actress. Duke became the first child ever to win an Oscar in competition.

The award was a special triumph for Bancroft, who after years spent in Hollywood in the 1950s making cheesy movies like Gorilla at Large, had finally deserted Hollywood for the New York stage, where she won two Tony awards. After The Miracle Worker Bancroft became a bona fide movie star, turning in memorable performances in several other movies, including The Pumpkin Eater (1964), The Graduate (1967), in which she played the iconic Mrs. Robinson, Agnes of God (1985), and 84 Charing Cross Road (1987). In the process she received four more Oscar nominations. For me Bancroft was the pre-eminent American actress of the 1960's.

1 Bringing Up Baby: The Funniest Screwball Comedy

Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and Howard Hawks. A dog, a leopard, and a dinosaur bone. Charlie Ruggles, May Robson, and Barry Fitzgerald. Some of the most hilarious visual and verbal comedy ever put on film. These are the main ingredients of the funniest example of screwball comedy ever made: Bringing Up Baby (1938).

I've written previously of the classic elements of screwball comedy ("An Unsuitable Attachment: The Classic American Screwball Comedy"), and Bringing Up Baby fulfills the definition of the genre in every respect. Cary Grant plays David Huxley, a paleontologist engaged to be married the next day to his assistant Alice Swallow, an unromantic, bossy, and humorless woman ("I see our marriage purely as a dedication to your work," she tells him at the beginning of the movie). David himself is only slightly less rigid and conventional than his fiancée. He is a dedicated careerist who seems less excited by the prospect of his imminent marriage than by the news that the last missing bone of the brontosaurus skeleton he is erecting has been discovered and will arrive shortly.

But first he must meet and play golf with the lawyer who represents a potential benefactor, Elizabeth Random (May Robson), a rich woman who is considering donating one million dollars to David's museum. It is at the golf course that he has his first unfortunate encounter with a scatter-brained and impetuous heiress named Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn), a character for whom the term "madcap" might have been invented. She appropriates his golf ball and his car and wrecks both the car and, at least temporarily, David's chances of getting the donation. Unknown to David, Susan happens to be the niece of Mrs. Random, so it is inevitable that their paths will cross again . . . and again . . . and again. In fact, once he meets her a second time that evening in a night club, where he has gone (carrying with him the box containing his precious dinosaur bone) to meet the lawyer and try to salvage his chances for the donation, he is trapped with her in a hellish and hilarious relationship that lasts for the rest of the movie, a relationship that involves him not only with Susan but with her aunt, her fox terrier George, a pet leopard named Baby, and other assorted eccentric characters including a tipsy gardener (Barry Fitzgerald), a befuddled big-game hunter (Charles Ruggles), a self-important psychiatrist, and an officious small-town sheriff.

In truth, this impromptu relationship is the result of Susan's almost instant decision that she is in love with David and that to get him she will do anything to prevent him from making it to his wedding the next day. (I said she was impetuous, didn't I?) As in many screwball comedies of the 1930's and early 1940's, the man is the reluctant object of romantic desire, and the woman is the single-minded pursuer. In Bringing Up Baby it is inarguable that Susan's determination to snare David is the initial force that sets in motion the machinery of the plot. And the plot of Bringing Up Baby is indeed a complex and finely tuned machine that, once started, hurtles forward at breakneck speed and propels the viewer to everything else that happens in the movie.

What I refer to as everything else is so complicated that it is impossible to summarize briefly. As in the best silent comedies, from a prime situation—here the random encounter at the golf course—the narrative builds in a headlong, unpredictable, and intricate way that defies synopsis or even concise description. Just when you think the inventory of comic conventions has been exhausted, that every conceivable comic complication has been laid on, Hawks piles on yet another one. The film is virtually an encyclopedia of movie comedy. It contains everything: pratfalls—on a slippery Martini olive, into poison ivy, down a hillside, into a river, even from the scaffolding of David's brontosaurus skeleton—verbal miscommunication and talking at cross-purposes, mistaken identity, impersonation, comic deception, even a doppelganger in the form of a second (but feral) leopard. Everything in the movie becomes fodder for comedy: clothing, automobiles, golf, gangsters, circuses, academia, psychiatry, law enforcement. Nothing is too serious or too sacred to be spared Hawks's acerbic, limitlessly inventive imagination. The pace is relentless, leaving the viewer not only breathless but overcome with laughter.

Bringing Up Baby is quite simply the funniest movie I have ever seen. The two long sequences in which David and Susan follow George the dog, trying to find where he buried that crucial dinosaur bone, and in which David and Susan try to capture the escaped leopard using a croquet mallet and a fish-landing net are deliriously funny. And when virtually the entire cast, including the leopard, converges on the local jail and Susan pretends to be the hard-boiled leader of a gang of bank robbers, the movie has so far departed from any semblance of reality, logic, and normal human behavior that it seems to inhabit a universe of its own, not unlike one of the more outlandish Marx Brothers movies or plays of Oscar Wilde: silliness so sublime that it is elevated to art.

You might think that with all these mad plot complications, and with all this hilarious physical and verbal comedy going on, the characters would take a back seat. Yet that is not the case, for the characters of Susan and David as impersonated by Hepburn and Grant are the glue that holds the movie together. They are the force that moves the film from the clever mechanics of comedy to the humanity of an evolving romantic relationship.

In a recent blog ("The Definitive Screwball Comedy") I described how the main characters in another screwball comedy, The Awful Truth, a married couple who separate and then reconcile at the last moment, were ideally suited to each other all along and that their notions of incompatibility are nonsense. In Bringing Up Baby the situation could hardly be more different. In this movie Susan and David are complete opposites and truly seem to be wholly unsuited to each other. Yet it is precisely their opposite temperaments that, paradoxically, make them the ideal match. Susan, like her pet leopard, is untamed, unpredictable, and predatory. (Her pursuit of David might today be referred to as "stalking.") Compared to Susan, David, like his dinosaur, is ossified, without flesh and blood, and lacking animation. She is emotional; he is rational. She is all impulse; he is all control. To put it in Freudian terms, if she is ruled by her id, then he is ruled by his superego. Separately, each is an incomplete personality. Each needs the other to supply the missing parts of his or her temperament, for only together will each become a complete and balanced personality. To accomplish this, Susan has to gain self-control and gravity, and David must learn to loosen his self-control and let himself go.

This is exactly what happens at the end of Bringing Up Baby. Susan applies herself to seriously looking for the missing bone and when she finds it a few days later contritely delivers it to David at the museum. The now subdued Susan tells him that her aunt gave her the million dollars and that she in turn has decided to donate it to the museum herself. And when she apologizes for her behavior, David, who earlier had told her, "Our relationship has been a series of misadventures from beginning to end," finally thaws. "I just discovered that was the best day I had in my whole life," he confesses. "I never had a better time." When the dinosaur skeleton collapses in the last scene and David lifts Susan to the now isolated platform overlooking a pile of dinosaur bones and embraces her, it is more than just another hilarious sight gag. It is the visual evidence that Susan has finally succeeded in her pursuit of David and has now conquered the last remaining rival for his affection—his obsessive devotion to his work.

Regular readers of this blog may well be wondering why, having already named The Awful Truth as the definitive screwball comedy, I am writing about Bringing Up Baby as though that title belonged to it. The truth is that each of these movies is, in its own way, a definitive version of the screwball comedy. But the two films are so different that any consideration of the two movies together results in the proverbial Apples and Oranges situation: yes, they are both fruit, but they are otherwise so unalike that any attempt at comparison would seem impossibly problematic .

One comparison that is possible, though, is that of methods. The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby represent opposite approaches to the same end—the classic screwball comedy dilemma of showing how two people who believe they are unsuited to each other discover that this is not the case at all. The Awful Truth exhibits all the Apollonian virtues. It is controlled, balanced, ordered, and temperate. In contrast Bringing Up Baby exhibits all the characteristics of the Dionysian sensibility. It is spontaneous, chaotic, and anarchic, intoxicated with the passion and excess of its own exuberant absurdism. Each is a perfect exemplar of its chosen approach. The Awful Truth and Bringing Up Baby—for me these are the twin stars around which the galaxy of screwball comedy orbits.

Apples or oranges? I'll have one of each, please.