Woman Of The Year

Despite a very presentable pedigree with Joseph L. Mankiewicz as producer, Ring Lardner Jr. and Michael Kanin providing an Oscar-winning screen play and George Stevens directing, Woman of the Year is a largely tedious affair that has an appealing premise but which only gets interesting in its latter stages

In the first of nine films Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy starred in together they play Tess Harding and Sam Craig, columnists for a New York City newspaper. He’s a sportswriter and one-of-the boys, she's a internationally known political commentator and a multi-lingual  socialite from a privileged background. Though they have never met they engage in a low brow vs high brow public row in their respective columns. They meet for the first time when the paper’s owner calls them into his office in order to broker a truce. The earth moves. You know the rest.

Hepburn is spiffy in her designer pant suits and in fine form playing a liberated woman of the day but Tracy (who was only 42 at the time, 7 years older than Hepburn) is a big square teddy bear in his earnest desire for Tess whom he is convinced he can turn on to the delights of being one of the common people, going to baseball games and eating hot-dogs and so on.  The film only gets interesting when Tess pursues her career as a beacon for woman everywhere (she has won the award which gives the film its title, indicating that the “women’s movement” was already a recognized reality) and Sam finds himself sidelined as a sort of plebian Norman Maine.  He can’t take it and splits in high dudgeon.

The presence of Fay Banter who here plays Tess’s Aunt Ellen is always the portent of sentimental self-righteousness and sure enough at the wedding ceremony when she marries Tess’s Dad (Reginald Owen) Tess breaks down and resolves to be the kind of wife Sam wants her to be - pregnant and in the kitchen, just like his Mum who has thoughtfully sent Tess her cookbook with Sam's favourite recipes marked..

Whilst there is an amusing bit of business which sees Tess in her fashionable duds trying to make waffles for her lord and master, the film ends with Sam having the last word, offering her a hyphenated compromise on her career,which she accepts with tearful gratitude, then proceeding, as his good mate, a bar-tendiing slugger named PInkie (William Bendix) would have done, to knock out Tess’s precious male secretary who has been annoying him since Day 1, thereby letting Tess and the audience know just who really wears the pants.

It’s an ending that today no-one would regard as "happy" yet presumably it was precisely because of its defence of the marital ideal and its shoddy populism that the film was a commercial and critical success.

FYI:  Tracy and Hepburn hit the jackpot again playing a squabbling married couple in Adam’s Rib (1949) and yet again in Pat And Mike (1952) both directed by George Cukor.

 

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