She (Amanda Bonner, Katherine Hepburn) drives him (Adam Bonner, Spencer Tracy) to work (Adam’s Rib, directed by George Cukor, scripted Ruth Gordon)
Dear friends and readers,
This time I am half-a-century belated (Adam’s Rib was in moviehouses in 1949); or, if you date the time to have watched when an acknowledged understanding that there was something feminist about it to Jeanine Basinger’s A woman’s View: How Hollywood Spoke to Women, 1930-1960 (published 1995), which on Women Writers through the Ages we read together (in 2008), I am a mere 10 or 5 years. It’s a flawed significant movie today because domestic violence, specially men beating women, is a prevailing problem in marriages. When a woman accuses a man of rape, she’s sullied, disbelieved, the man often being let off with impunity What’s more when a woman fights back, she is punished. We know today a woman in Florida is threatened with 60 years in prison for shooting at a wall to frighten a violently abusive man. She is black and the DA is getting back at her for refusing to plea bargain (go to jail for a mere 10 years): he is warning other people caught up in our increasingly utterly unjust criminal justice system: plea bargain or you’ll regret it.
If you read about Adam’s Rib in most places, you’ll read about the central or top couple, Hepburn and Spencer Tracy who are lawyers who make a great deal of money, Amanda and Adam Bonner. They are privileged upper class people in supposed conflict, and Jeanine Basinger dismisses the movie as after all just about a “feisty” upper class woman. The conflicts are transient and part of the couple’s subtext: they last as long as the case the two take on lasts: he takes the side of a husband and she a wife. So (child-like this) he is on the side of “men” and she of “women.” For a time what occurs in court and their on-screen always good-natured quarrels outside, result in separation and divorce proceedings, but these are halted as they are really too much in love, too alike, to much in harmony, to part. They do talk and listen to one another.
She wins the case and we are never told why; he is given a judgeship and again we are never told why. He closes the curtain stating he knows men and women are not the same (the supposed argument of the movie is whether men and women are the same, are “equal”): we can see they are about to have sex and the feel is on his terms whatever these are – though clearly loving and fully allowed.
We have an upper class couple whose relationship affirms the goodness of the institution of marriage which holds the two together by joint ownership, habits, apartments and memories, continually greased by money and upper class manners and wit. The value is a nuanced presentation rich with innuendo which could be watched numerous times without quite plumbing all that’s there.
It is also distanced. Filmically what is interesting about the film are all the intertitle cards and framing. As each phase of the movie passes we get an artificial framing again and a card moves away as if we are seeing a fairy story. so this happy story is filmically seen to be a fairy tale. At the close when the pair move to make love, he pulls the card over the screen. This distancing through also put us at a far away angle from the other couple.
The opening of the movie — and this proscenium returns repeatedly
A typical introduction to one of the Bonner sequences
What has been forgotten, what is equally, probably more important, is the lower-class couple, the “downstairs” pair who do not live downstairs, are not servants; rather the husband has a hard 9-to-5 job and she 3 children she is struggling to bring up. It’s the back- or sub-story (ignored in much of the writing about it) that is not trivial. They are not presented with intertitles or picturesque framings at the edge of the screen.
Judy, overdressed, following the supercilious self-satisfied Tom reading the newspaper as the important person he is through a glass
When the movie opens, we do not begin with the Bonners but with Doris Attinger (July Holliday) nervously, anxiously, and oddly unaggressively, stalking her husband, Warren (Tom Ewell); she is clearly in distress, and follows him to and then breaks into an apartment where he is with an overdressed (absurdly glamorized) “mistress,” Jean Hagan as Beryl Caign (Beryl was a name given mistresses). Judy has a gun and tries to kill Tom (this is a movie where we never forget the actors inside the respected presences) and then Beryl. As the story unfolds we learn the man was physically abusive and continually sexually unfaithful, often allowing the wife no money to live on, continually insulting and jeering at her. She (fool) it seems meant to kill the mistress (she says) so she could have this lout back. Admittedly Holliday is dressed in the usual doll outfit I’ve seen her wear before (e.g., Born Yesterday) and her high voice used to make her absurd.
Doris-Judy has no job, no income, no resource beyond her dense lout of an unfeeling husband. The point is — to put it in the terms it would have been understood then, these are the real Ralph Kramdens (remember Jackie Gleason and Alice Meadows a few years later on TV). I do not mention the Kramdens coincidentally. Cukor and Gordon have quietly put before us a case of marital abuse but they have also caricatured them. Warren really is an egregious lout, shamelessly making fun of Doris as fat, useless, lazy, stupid; and she cries and weeps, seems not to understand simple statements, is more than slightly ridiculous if pathetic. He calls her fat, stupid, and silly — she is seen to be silly and stupid. She wants him back and we can’t understand why. She does get him back: when last seen they are being photographed as a lovey-dovey couple for the newspapers.
This matching or parallel — better contrasting couple’s relationship is meant to show that marriage as presently experienced by ordinary (not upper class people) often does not work because the norms offered the man and woman make for misery.
Holliday telling Hepburn about her marriage
There are more flaws than those I’ve pointed to. The argument that is said to describe what the case is about generalizes its content out of reach and erases the abuse. Ruth Gordon’s script makes the case into one where Hepburn seeks to win by proving women are equal to men. Hepburn takes the situation to show that the wife counts, and literally to argue that Doris has as much right to have an affair as Warren, and partly because she didn’t, the right to get back when he hurts her — even shoot to kill. Adam is quite right when he says this is an argument that won’t do.
Hepburn’s “case” depends on her bringing into court three career women who are presented as successful but sexless and desperate: the third does somersaults in a circus and performs them in court. How this relates to a husband’s violence to his wife, her need to defend herself, her home, her income and retaliate is unclear. Nowhere in the case, in the courtroom, in the Bonners’ discussions about the case is the abuse highlighted. To say this case is about the principle of equality and how men and women are the same is to avoid the particulars of the case and what it’s about.
Then there’s considerable slapstick. At one point Amanda seems about to take as her lover a man who is a singer, performer and their best friend; Adam chases her with a gun, but when it comes to shooting her, it turns out to be licorice and he eats it as candy. It’s a parody of the central Attinger gunning scene: what he was gunning Amanda down for was a suspected affair. This is still not allowed today – women in movies today do not have affairs with other men than their husband and remain admired heroines.
They also massage one another. These scenes were used for promotional shots and the trailer:
She slaps him and he her. Now that I’ve had a massage (once, in a Korean spa) I realize it’s a sybarite process of luxury, and it made me very uncomfortable on behalf of the woman paid to come so close to my body and “work it over.” Probably the movie-makers wanted me to envy them. While watching I did not notice the Tracy and Hepburn calling one another these “coy” names of Pinky and Pinkie. Good thing: it would have grated on me as upper class “fey” relaxation.
A friend suggested to me the movie is ultimately about how far a woman can go to challenge her husband, only so far. I know that’s what Basinger says most of the movies where Hollywood spoke to women end up doing or being about. I admit I don’t see that in this one. Mainly because Hepburn didn’t. The couple’s temporary estrangement is engendered by the two of them. She didn’t have an affair. She did not defy any rules — she worked within the system, took the silly idea of men and women being the same as the principle she’d argue for and remained in an adoring respectful posture to Tracy throughout — that’s why the word “feisty:” a feisty woman is one who merely makes a lot of noise but does not mean any serious rebellion.
On-line there are also absurd statements about the film being about civil rights (what?). Or, who wears the pants in the family? he does, and he gets to close the curtain at the end. So what? What matters in the film is class. What the movie is is a telling muddle. The Attingers are miserable as much and more from their daily lower middle lives as from gender provocation and sexual exploitation. We are deflected from seeing this by fantasy elaboration of the results in candylike wrapping. The licorice gun is apt.
The movie makes the lower class man despicable, a clown and also at moments the wife. It shows but does not bring out into the discussably open that the upper classness of the privileged couple makes them happy: her high education, womanly (yet not oversexed) clothes, wit, job flatters his self-respect and his equal education, intelligence, manly bearing (and job) flatters her sense of her place in the world as his wife. Its best moments are fleeting glimpses of film noir (through Holliday’s presence).
By contrast Hepburn is just so wholesome. I admit the movie could be worth re-watching for the intriguing vignettes, dialogues, moments between Hepburn and Tracy.
A breakfast-morning image
They did make a number of movies together and it might be rewarding to watch these in a row (see comments). Ruth Gordon is someone whose name recurs as a script writer in the 1940s and it could be interesting to see some of her other scripts — her co-writer in this one was her husband, Garson Kanin. George Cukor is known for trying to bring women as interesting characters before the public in movies, for his originality — and nowadays gayness and it could be interesting to compare this one to his other movies.
Ellen
Ellen And Jim Have A Blog, Two 
As to Basinger’s book, here are a few comments from postings written over a five week period.
From Chapter 1: I too watched many movies when young. I agree with her though didn’t realize it at the time that movies were making visible what no one discussed and open up before us much experience we can’t get anywhere else. Less positively, this is called its voyeurism because it also allows for irresponsibility. We need not do anything about what’s happening; more ominously yet, as she herself says, the movies allow a very different interpretation to come forth, one which far from critiquing the way society is organized and woman’s choices, endorses them, and allows us to see each movie (and book too, this goes for many books) as a specific case, an instance, we are not to generalize from. That said, yes, I was fascinated and learned about life from watching older movies on Channel 9.
I like a couple of her appercus very much: that most of these women’s films have plots no one could take seriously, that sensible talk is never allowed to break through and make all right (except at the very end when we are having our coda), that oddball events pile up, and that the stories allow women to step outside the rules this way and liberate the woman watcher.
The way to think about something though is to produce a counter example. There are women’s films where realism is kept up: Brief Encounter is a stunner because we can take the action seriously, nothing oddball occurs and we end up with sensible talk. Where perhaps it is fantasy is that the couple doesn’t just go to bed and then forget about it: the intense romance at the center and the kindly husband at the end are the fantasies.
I like the idea the woman’s movie asked “what should a woman do with her life?” I think most movies ask us what kind of life do we want to lead — well intelligent movies, and is this it?
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Judy G in response:
I especially like Basinger’s point that the ending isn’t necessarily the point we should remember – and her comparison with gangster films, where the pious warnings at the beginning and the end can’t possibly outweigh the drama which comes in between, or make an audience glad to see the man they’ve been following breathlessly for 90 minutes shot dead by faceless police at the end. I do agree there are strong similarities with a woman’s film where the woman is shown leading her own unpredictable life all the way through and then tidied away in a “happy” ending, giving up her career for a fade-out clinch. In both cases, what the audience remembers is the film as a whole, not just the ending.
Having said that, I do think the ending can leave such a bad taste that it’s difficult to enjoy the rest of the film in retrospect – one example of this is the Tracy/Hepburn movie Woman of the Year, where there is a ludicrous, humiliating ending where world-famous journalist Katharine Hepburn gets into a terrible stew because she can’t prepare her husband’s breakfast perfectly.
Another interesting Tracy/Hepburn movie is the Western The Sea of Grass, directed by Elia Kazan, where they play a married couple whose marriage collapses under the strain of Tracy’s domineering behaviour and uncompromising political views. I found this film unusual because Hepburn is a woman who has an adulterous relationship and leaves her husband and children, and yet she is still portrayed sympathetically. I’m not sure if this and some of the other Tracy/Hepburn movies would count as women’s pictures – but from Basinger I’m getting the impression that there is a lot of crossover between this genre and others in any case.
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From Leslie R:
One criticism I would make of Basinger’s book (which I’ve already finished because I enjoyed reading it so much) is her inadequate acknowledgment of the problem of censorship. By the mid-30s, a film that was overtly critical of women’s roles in society was forbidden by the Production Code, as administered by the extremely conservative, piously Catholic (and viciously anti-Semitic) Joseph Breen. And even when he was prepared to let a script through, there were a number of
activist priests and groups advocating what would now be called “family values” policing him. Censorship of film wasn’t just about keeping bad things out (sex, violence, non-conservative political views); it was also about putting the right things in, making popular films into advocates for respect for government, appropriate gender roles, and “Christian values.” A filmmaker could get away with showing a corrupt politician or judge, but only if he was shown as a bad apple, a surprising exception; the American political and judicial systems could never be shown as corrupt but as shining examples of goodness that punished and cast out the bad guy. Similarly, a filmmaker could get away with showing a bad woman (e.g. one who had sex outside of marriage), but only if she was appropriately punished (usually by dying–she couldn’t be redeemed and married off because that would be a reward for her corruption). A woman could voice transgressive opinions and attempt to live by them (e.g. that women should work and control their own money) but only if there was another character given sufficient screen time to voice the “right” attitudes to counter her and if the independent woman eventually admitted the error of her ways (and was punished if she persisted in them). Thus
films could teach “right” values to the American people, according to the censors.
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Me again on another aspect of the portrayal of women (from Basinger’s later chapters):
It would appear that the last thing movies between 1920 and the 1930s showed about motherhood was the experience itself. Rather the topics were unwed motherhood where a woman was given the choice of giving the child away or marry a rich upper class and often noble Englishman. Tertium non est.
Then there are the perfect, the sacrificial, and the destructive mothers. In just about every case described and catalogues, a real childhood and mother are not the issue, but a grown child who we are to see the mother has given up all for or destroyed in some peculiarly pernicious way. The perfect mother is there too as a kind of emblem in the background.
Now Voyager is used to show how it combines the motifs of vicious mother with all those about women Basinger has presented before, and at the end Betty Davies adopts her lover’s child (not taken good care of by the man’s bad wife) and shows by contrast how she will be to the girl what her mother was not. But we don’t see any real interaction or growing up.
From the friend who suggested I watch the movie:
“I very much enjoyed the blog on Adam’s Rib. It occurred to me that some of the upper/upper middle class female frustrations (the lens we see the movie through) with lower class women have not changed in more than half a century: why do “they” do things that seem so patently absurd, like fighting to keep an abusive husband? At least now, to a small extent, some push exists to view the world through their lenses. Rather than portray the working class wife as ridiculous and pathetic, it would have been interesting to see the world through her eyes.
Some sense of a normative morality doesn’t seem like a terrible idea–and as people have pointed out, can be questioned and undermined, while being “upheld.” And people find the literature that speaks their mind: I think of Gone with the Wind, probably as popular for depicting a woman who challenged
femininity norms as for being a good read. (The irony of Scarlett
being an idiot largely lost.)
I think too of the film Father of the Bride–I watched the 1940s version and the 1990s version back to back once and one difference that jumps out is the scene where the parents of the bride meet the parents of the groom: in the 1940s movie, the bride’s parents are concerned about being acceptable to the
groom’s parents; in the 90s version, the bride’s parents are only concerned about whether they will like the groom’s parents and could care less what the parents think of them: a complete flip. Of course, despite being constantly told we are more fragmented, there is still a discourse today that’s normative and the interesting issue is how it has changed (and hasn’t).”
I had not thought about why Doris-Judy might want to hold onto her awful (to me) husband. She’s so vulnerable in this system, he’s a help.