From lust to sex, the first glance that Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn exchange in Woman of the Year suggests everything that can happen physically between two people who are attracted to each other.

He starts by taking in the contours of her legs and then glides his eyes appreciatively up to her smiling face. She's taller than he is so she does the reverse and looks him over from his smiling face down. They are so frank in their appraisal of each other and so obvious in their mutual approval that the look is striking, even to a contemporary viewer accustomed to displays in movies of undisguised desire. To an audience in 1942 it must have been startling, a reminder of a time before censors suppressed the sexuality in a medium that once smoldered with the likes of Louise Brooks and Clara Bow.

That look between Hepburn and Tracy launched one of the most celebrated screen pairings in history. After Woman of the Year, they made seven movies together: Pat and Mike, which is probably their best; Adam's Rib; State of the Union; Without Love; Keeper of the Flame; Desk Set and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. I haven't seen Without Love, but each of the others is worth watching, except Keeper of the Flame, a shrill piece of anti-fascist agitprop.

In Woman of the Year, Tracy is a sports writer at a major New York City daily newspaper and Hepburn is the paper's distinguished international columnist. She speaks several languages; he speaks sports. They have nothing in common so of course they fall in love. And then there are complications before the happy ending.

Fay Bainter brings dignity and wisdom to her role as Hepburn's aunt. And William Bendix puts endearing enthusiasm into his part as a bartender eager to tell anyone who will listen about his glorious past as a boxer. But it is the stars that make this movie, and Hepburn and Tracy make it a delight.

The screenplay by Ring Lardner, Jr., and Michael Kanin is amusing, but it doesn't have many lines that plant themselves in the memory. The humor comes more from the chemistry between the actors. There are, for example, a fish-out-of-water scene in which Hepburn attends her first baseball game and a scene in which Tracy awkwardly traps himself on a stage in an auditorium full of women. What is said during these scenes is less entertaining than how the actors say it and how they infuse their performances with their considerable charm and deft comic timing.

Hepburn's character is clearly the smarter one. She is able to become part of Tracy's sports-oriented world much more easily than he is able to make himself comfortable in her crowd of international movers and shakers. A scene at a cocktail party where Tracy is the only person who can speak only English suggests the intellectual and cultural limitations of Tracy's character without being cruel to him. Sadly, he is not as gracious when he makes a joke about a man in a turban.

But emotionally, Hepburn is presented as the limited one. She is so caught up in her career, for example, that she doesn't have time for a boy she adopts. Her character grows out of her self-absorption, of course, but the presentation of it is more heavy-handed than anything to which Tracy's character is subjected.

Woman of the Year's ending is remembered by many as being painfully sexist. Someone I know recently said Hepburn's character is "ground into the dust" and that was a fair reflection of my memory of it as well. I was wrong. The United States was still getting used to women who worked outside the home, and the movie's conclusion suggests the nation is going to have to get used to much more than that. And then it did. In a way, Lardner's and Kanin's script is prescient.

It is true that it is Hepburn who is expected to make the sacrifices to make their marriage work. This is because ... well, she's the woman. But the movie's reflection of the society's subordination of women is not as grating as it could have been. Yes, she is the butt of an extended visual joke because she's a klutz in the kitchen, and it is unnerving that her character views her culinary clumsiness as evidence of some sort of a serious character flaw.

But ultimately she decides to keep both her career and her name while she also tries to establish a family with Tracy. Her decisions to add his last name to hers and to make theirs a two-paycheck family could be seen as almost revolutionary in a time when it was virtually demanded that a woman take on her husband's name at the expense of hers and that she become nothing more than a happy homemaker.

The women's movement lost much of its energy in the 1980s when women who chose to work in the home felt that feminists did not properly respect the value of such choices. Four decades earlier, Hepburn's character arrives at a compromise that would have prevented much of that dispute. Opportunities for women in 1942 were quite limited, but Hepburn's character would never make disparaging remarks about women who stand by their man like Tammy Wynette.

Despite the reputation its ending has, Woman of the Year is far less sexist than those awful Radio Shack commercials on television in which macho Howie Long always has the upper hand over perky Terry Hatcher.

And Woman of the Year is much more entertaining. Admittedly that's not saying much, so it is fortunate that the movie's charms and its stars speak so well for themselves.



Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS