• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 3713 0

Kanins would do certain scenes,” said Cukor, “and we would go to my house and read them and hear how they sounded aloud, then go to the studio where I would stage them kind of roughly with a camera and see how they worked.”

The shooting final was dated February 24, 1949, with a start date set for late May. Tracy finished with Operation Malaya on March 24, and began his customary six-week vacation on April 4. Knowing the caliber of material he had to work with, Cukor lit into preparations and arranged to shoot the setup—an attempted domestic homicide—during two weeks of gritty location work in New York City. Performing these early scenes would be a quartet of young Broadway stage actors, all of whom would be playing their first substantial parts on screen—Tom Ewell, David Wayne, Jean Hagen, and, in the role of the earnest Doris Attinger, the rattlebrained defendant who pulls a Frankie-and-Johnny on her philandering husband, singer-actress Judy Holliday. Gar Kanin had brought Holliday to prominence in his play Born Yesterday (where she replaced, out of town, the show’s original star, Jean Arthur) and was on a campaign to have her re-create the role of Billie Dawn in the film version. Columbia studio head Harry Cohn had already rejected the idea—even the making of a screen test—so it became Kate’s idea to make Love Is Legal the test Cohn denied her by custom-tailoring the role of Doris to Holliday’s very considerable talents.

When Tracy returned to Culver City on May 16, Hepburn was attempting to persuade Cole Porter to write something original for Kip Lurie, David Wayne’s wisecracking songwriter, to sing to her character in the picture. (Kanin had written one, which everyone agreed was lousy.) Porter, at first, declined, maintaining the song’s intended target, Madeline Bonner, had a name he could neither abide nor rhyme. Later, he agreed so long as the name of the character was changed from Madeline to Amanda.3 (“Some of the things Kate goes in and demands!” marveled Cukor. “The Cole Porter song, for instance. Not the crappy sort of star demands. She always wanted something for the show.”) The name of Tracy’s character was similarly changed from Ned to Adam, and soon after the start of production the picture became officially known as Adam’s Rib.

Filming began on May 31, 1949, Tracy and Hepburn settling into their roles with an effortless grace, their ad-libs, their intimacies and parries those of genuine lovers, not actors or movie stars, their scenes together a deft embodiment of what Kenneth Tynan called “a whole tradition of American sophistication,” Tracy, the “placid, sensible panda,” Hepburn, the “gracious, deadpan albatross,” replacing “the crude comedy of flirtation” with the subtler, warmer comedy of marriage as practiced not by ingenues but by seasoned artists well into their forties. The home movie horsing around on the Kanins’ Connecticut farm, the droll courtroom flirtations, the off-screen kiss (by now a trademark of the Tracy-Hepburn combination), the wordless looks.

Cole Porter plays “Farewell, Amanda,” as Tracy and Hepburn listen on the set of Adam’s Rib, 1949. (SUSIE TRACY)

“It was human,” said Cukor. “Comedy isn’t really any good, isn’t really funny, without that. First you’ve got to be funny, and then, to elevate the comedy, you’ve got to be human.”

AMANDA

You were making some noises in the night.

ADAM

(immersed in his paper)

I always do. Don’t I? At least you always say I always do. How do I know?

AMANDA

(without looking up)

You do, but not this kind.

ADAM

What kind?

AMANDA

Can’t remember exactly, naturally, but sort of like ooooo-eehah! ooooo-eegah.

(She emits a series of strange groans and grunts and whistles and wheezes.)

Like that, sort of.

ADAM

You don’t say.

AMANDA

Yes.

ADAM

Fascinating.

AMANDA

(She looks at him.)

What?

ADAM

I say I sound fascinating.

AMANDA

(her lovely smile shining)

You’ll do.

“I think,” said Katharine Houghton,

that the film