Adam’s Rib

This movie was way better than I thought it was going to be.  While I was aware of the fruitful partnership of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, their films together never received the recognition from modern critics necessary to be enshrined as bonafide classics from the golden age of cinema.  Hepburn was able to do that on her own, with comedies no less, with movies like Philadelphia Story and Bringing Up Baby.  Together Hepburn and Tracy gained recognition, and an AFI Top 100 mention, for Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, but that came very late in their careers after the golden age was over.

With all that in mind, I came in expecting a dated comedy that, as long as it didn’t veer too far into misogyny, would still be entertaining although nothing terribly special.  Suffice to say, this film blew my expectations away. Adam’s Rib is, for the most part, a surprisingly nuanced dramatic comedy that tackles the issues of gender equality both at home and under the eyes of the law.

The central conflict of the movie centers around Tracy and Hepburn, as husband and wife, on opposite sides of a court case.  Tracy has, at the behest of the district attorney, reluctantly taken on the task of prosecuting a woman for attempting to murder her husband and Hepburn has decided to defend her as a platform on which to argue against the injustices women face in the legal system.

On the surface, the movie can be read as a rather simplistic female liberation film pushing against the male dominated system.  Women are given ample opportunity to show their capabilities are equal to those of the men within the narrative. However, the movie can also be read as a rather simplistic tale of a woman who takes on a bad case to champion an agenda rather than serve a defendant, and in the process denigrates not just the law as it is practiced (perhaps unjustly) but the very concept of the legal process itself.  In that dual interpretation lies what I believe is the movie’s strength. It isn’t simplistic at all.

If you are willing to approach it more open-minded, it actually forces you to interrogate your preconceptions about gender equality, even as a modern viewer.  When Hepburn slaps Tracy playfully nothing is thought much of it. When, in the same scene under almost identical circumstances, Tracy slaps Hepburn playfully she, and the audience I saw the movie with, were immediately taken aback.  Why?  No one got hurt. Nothing was done in malice. Why was one OK and the other not? Especially in the considerations of equality. Why do we react to the scenes with Hepburn crying differently than the scenes where Tracy does? Hepburn is righteous in her desire for equal treatment by the courts, but Tracy isn’t wrong when he calls her out for using tactics that make a mockery of the law.

Also, to be clear, the nuance I’m talking about here isn’t so much taking a stance of thoughtless compromise or succumbing to the golden mean fallacy; it isn’t insinuating that women’s liberation is good but only some of the time, or within certain limits.  Tracy’s character isn’t a counterpoint to women’s empowerment. Instead, Tracy and Hepburn’s back and forths serve to explore the grey area of what equality really means, rather than whether it should exist at all.

The only thing I didn’t like about this exploration of gender politics was the one monologue where Tracy’s character loses it and goes on a very traditionalist “men’s roles are this, women’s roles are that” type rant.  Not only is it fairly out of character from the way we see him interact with his own wife most of the time, but its inclusion undermines the otherwise clever writing by, however briefly, removing the nuance from one of the two halves of the central dichotomy.

The original tagline of the movie was some tripe about answering the age old question of who wears the pants.  This line has little to do with the actual content of the film, but I can say that, from a modern perspective, the movie makes a remarkably good case that it doesn’t really matter.  Women and men are different in ways we can’t deny, but we are also all human: capable of great and terrible things, of winning important court cases and turning on the water works to win sympathy from a significant other.  Not as fun as a pure comedy like Desk Set, nor as pointed and poignant as Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Adam’s Rib sits somewhere comfortably in the middle.  In that sense, it reminded me of the wave of high quality indie comedy dramas in the 2000s, which for 1949 is pretty damn impressive.

Would Recommend: If you are willing and able to watch with an open mind and a desire to look past the surface.

Would Not Recommend: If John Grisham novels are your bar for legal realism in storytelling.