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A recomposition of the Penny Serenade situation, a reconsideration of the Alice Adams heroine. Lovers are bêtes noires before they meet, the sports columnist (Spencer Tracy) and the political commentator (Katharine Hepburn) spar on newspaper pages until they're introduced in the flesh and the extratext about the two stars falling in love takes over. She's a globetrotter who's "read Huckleberry Finn going down the Yangtze," first a defiant voice in the tavern (Altman remembers the mirror and the radio in Come Back to the Five and Dime, Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean) and then in the office as a stretched-out gam. After the mystery of baseball, the erotic tension of a darkened living room with an elongated portrait on the wall. "Like it?" "It's a little hard to reach." "I'm not." Even more than any film noir, George Stevens' comedy of marriage provides a snapshot of the masculine psyche besieged by the assertive wartime woman—stranded in the international quicksand of a cocktail party, fumbling with curtains at the feminist assembly, locked out of his own honeymoon. The conjugal "patchwork quilt," complete with tiny refugee in sailor suit staring down the unsettled couple. On one side the palooka barkeep (William Bendix) and the obsequious secretary (Dan Tobin) on the other, all part of the shapely welter of contrasts and harmonies. The activist aunt (Fay Bainter) points the way to a truce in the battle of the sexes, still the shrew must be tamed so a kitchen-set castigation is in order, the paragon of sophistication is defeated by the bubbling-hissing-popping apparatus of domesticity. "She'll think there's something funny about it." "At first, but later on she'll see the serious side." Cukor in Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike locates equilibrium. With Reginald Owen, Minor Watson, Gladys Blake, Roscoe Karns, and Ludwig Stössel. In black and white.
--- Fernando F. Croce |