Chemistry is a tricky thing. You can throw all the money and energy at a film, but if some ineffable magic doesn’t happen between the leads, it will just lay there. Just this past week I saw a big Hollywood comedy which had lots of funny people and some decently scripted banter, but the entire enterprise was built around a comedic pairing that never, ever clicked into place and the result was a film that just sort of lay there.
For a good example of how far chemistry can carry a movie, you need look no further than Woman of the Year, now available through Criterion. While time has not been kind to certain aspects of the film, the central romantic pairing of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn is perfect, palpable, and immediately effective.
Woman of the Year gets right to business, immediately establishing its central characters as dueling stars in opposing sections of the newspaper. Sam (Tracy) is a topnotch columnist on the sports beat while Tess (Hepburn) is a jet-setting, world-hopping political correspondent juggling dozens of concurrent stories pertaining to World War II. An errant comment by Tess on the radio denigrating sports starts a feud between their columns, but this isn’t one of those romantic comedies where two people spend the running time treating each other miserably only to realize that they love one another. Nope, in Woman of the Year the very second that Sam and Tess lay eyes on each other, their squabble evaporates and something very real begins to build between the two of them.
This is where the chemistry is key. Director George Stevens and writers Ring Lardner Jr. and Michael Kanin don’t need to invest extra time in spelling out the mounting affection between Sam and Tess. Tracy and Hepburn sell you on the attraction before either even say a word to each other, and for the rest of the film you are hooked and invested in whether or not these two will make it work.
The big obstacle in their relationship is Tess’s hyper-competence, which brings up the parts of the film which will most likely strike a sour note for modern audiences. See, Tess is a kick-ass, super-busy feminist, and as a kick-ass, super-busy feminist, she doesn’t have a lot of time for Sam or married life, which steadily wears away at Sam until there’s a big blow-up. And while the resolution to this conflict never quite descends into “Get back in the kitchen” overt sexism, it gets reaaaaaaaaaally close, in a way that is discouraging given how smartly much of the film had previously handled this material.
(It turns out there’s a reason for that. Woman of the Year originally had a very different ending, one which would have seen both husband and wife make sacrifices for one another in an almost Gift of the Magi-esque tradeoff. But test audiences reportedly hated the conclusion, demanding that Tess be brought down to size before the end credits rolled. Hepburn and the writers were reportedly aghast at the new ending but had no choice but to do it.)
On a technical level, Woman of the Year still sings. Some of Stevens’ previous films included Fred Astaire pictures, and he uses motion and framing with just as much care to capture the comedy and romance as he would a delicately choreographed dance number. Everything from the heels-first introduction of Hepburn to the way Stevens pushes in on the couple as they lose themselves in one another, it’s a testament to the unobtrusive but carefully maintained control that Stevens has.
The banter may not fly as rapidly as in proper screwball comedies (i.e. My Man Godfrey or His Girl Friday) but this is still one of those old school pictures that is fun to just listen to, to let the rat-a-tat-tat rhythms of rapid fire dialogue wash over you.
And no one, no one, had a better command of that language than Katharine Hepburn. Dear God, that woman. She could fire off a hundred words without stopping to draw a breath, then turn around and communicate entire volumes of dialogue with just a look. Woman of the Year was really Hepburn’s baby, a project she shepherded through development (which makes the film’s ending doubly exasperating), and it’s as canny a movie star turn as I’ve ever seen, every frame of it working in tandem to highlight Hepburn’s wide array of gifts.
She sort of blows Tracy off the screen, but that’s entirely the point. Tracy had a craggy, rumpled quality to him even as a younger man, but Hepburn draws something softer and warmer out of him, which only makes their onscreen coupling all the more appealing.
(To the surprise of presumably no one, Woman of the Year didn’t just kick off a series of films starring Tracy and Hepburn, but the two fell in love and began an extramarital relationship together during filming. Tracy had already been living separately from his wife by that time, and he and Hepburn would remain together until his death.)
Woman of the Year may have been the start of something for Tracy and Hepburn, but it marked the beginning of the end for this era of George Stevens’ career. Stevens, who had been growing restless with his career of musicals, comedies, and adventure films (including Gunga Din), was raring to join the war effort and only remained working in Hollywood because he was under contract. He would complete two Jean Arthur-starring comedies in the next year and then abandon the town to direct all his energies towards films for the war effort. Stevens’ harrowing overseas experiences (detailed extensively in Mark Harris’ phenomenal Five Came Back) would leave him unable to ever return to the expert froth of his early career. The man who returned devoted his energies to dramatic films like Giant, The Diary of Anne Frank, and Shane.
While its gender politics end up on the unfortunate side of regressive, Woman of the Year remains largely delightful, powered by one of the single best onscreen teams in the history of the film industry. The Criterion disc brings the film back to glowing life, and anyone with an interest in this era of filmmaking will do well to snatch it up.
