George Cukor’s Adam’s Rib is the smoothest of
Hollywood comedies, flowing along as seemingly effortlessly and gracefully as
any movie, its stars Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn in perfect sync
whether flirting or feuding: a single-take scene of them preparing an impromptu
dinner embodies the film’s seductive flow (albeit there’s some major cheating
in how quickly the meal comes together). The plot has Assistant D.A. Adam
Bonner prosecuting the high-profile case of a woman (the fascinatingly singular
Judy Holliday) who shot her cheating husband, with his wife Amanda Bonner taking
on the defence, a set-up based in contrasting views of the law, morality, and of
their own relationship. Amanda bases her defence in equal rights, in the
premise that a man who defended his home, even violently, would be viewed as a
hero, and that a woman’s actions should be assessed comparably; given though
that the crime was committed far outside the home, after the woman stalked her
husband to the apartment of his presumed mistress, the intriguing implication
might be that a woman’s legitimate zone of “home” interest extends further than
a man’s, that it’s as much a moral or emotional construct as a physical one; an
implication nicely complicated in the final scenes when Adam seems to be the
more invested of the two in their country home, and demonstrates how he can
turn on tears at will (it’s a shame though that the closing line wasn’t
stronger than a vague celebration of the “small differences” between men and
women). Of course, the film is a work of its time, the relationship being of
the kind where Adam demonstrates his thoughtfulness by buying his wife a new hat, in which even when things are in full flow she’s seen to be “managing”
him, facilitating his crustiness in a way that needn’t be reciprocated. Still,
it’s skillful enough that the dated certainties of other films register here as
stimulating ambiguities.
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