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.