The picture of the year!
Woman of the Year (1942) is the first pairing of the legendary on-screen romcom couple, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. The film poses the question, still relevant today, of how the busy modern woman can manage to combine a career with a happy marriage and home life, and, winning the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, it packs quite a punch.
The story wastes little time in throwing together Sam Craig (Tracy), a hard-headed sports reporter and all-round regular American, and Tess Hardy (Hepburn), a high society sophisticate and international charity worker, fluent in various languages, who writes a column for the same newspaper. Their little literary spat develops into a series of start-stop dates, driven by mutual attraction, but frequently delayed or interrupted by Tess's hectic schedule.
The gulf between their lifestyles is underlined. Sam takes Tess to a baseball game, something which she knows nothing of, but quite enjoys. Tess invites Sam to an evening party at her apartment, but has little time to talk to him. After failing to bond with groups of non-English speaking refugees and diplomats, he slips out early. He travels to sporting events, and hangs out in bars. She travels to conferences and holds open house in the evenings in her uptown apartment. Eventually, they kiss, confess their love for each other, he proposes, she accepts. Cue a happy ending...
But the story does not end there. It goes on, beyond the honeymoon period, itself not without its issues, to examine subsequent married life for such a loving but busy modern couple. It also, very cleverly, examines the issue of the quality of care for very young children in such a setup. So, the question remains till quite late in the story: can they make it work? And will they be able to meet in the middle, or will one have to make unequal compromises?
One has to appreciate the generally modern, progressive view of the sexes, evidenced by the script in the characters of Sam and Tess throughout most of the story. To my mind, the dilemma faced by Tess is never really satisfactorily resolved, but, along the way, Hepburn gets to do a revealingly inept extended comic kitchen routine.
There is real chemistry between Tracy and Hepburn. They both have impeccable comic timing. Tracy is very likeable, so that the male can identify with him, and Hepburn is a fine woman with stunning looks and personality, an aristocrat in the best sense of the word.
- Director: George Stevens
- Writers: Ring Lardner Jr., Michael Kanin, John Lee Mahin, Garson Kanin
- Starring: Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Fay Bainter, Reginald Owen, Minor Watson, William Bendix, Gladys Blake
- Rating: Full price
- When seen: 2 Aug 2011
- Where seen: Home
- More information: IMDB | RottenTomatoes | Wikipedia
Written in WriteRoom, formatted using TextWrangler, posted from my MacBook Pro
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