Review of Adam's Rib

An obvious Hepburn/Tracy vehicle, riding on the couple's real-life romance, Adam's Rib suffers from a blatant absence of plot and, come to think of it, pretty much anything that makes a good film. Adam and Amanda Bonner, respectively attorney general and lawyer, take sides in a courtroom battle over a woman's case who cooled her husband's adulterous ardour by clumsily trying to shoot him down. Sure enough, the legal joust spills over into the counsels' private life, with Hepburn making a case for women's rights and Tracy trying to compete on traditional, i.e. "manly" legal grounds. What could have been a pacey screwball classic quickly turns into a humdrum romance-cum-esprit playlet deludingly relying on desperately "witty" colloquy and the chemistry between the two stars, foggily directed by an uninspired George Cukor, who must have been crying secretly in between takes. Though Tracey and Hepburn are on cruise control mode, there's only this much anyone could have siphoned out of a virtually non-existing intrigue, and after a somewhat upbeat beginning, it all drifts off into precocious women's lib rhetoric, most of it obstructing any further development of the story. Worst of all, the side plot – the couple's friend, a viscerally annoying wannabe songwriter and singer openly courting Miss Hepburn – is about the patchiest piece of script you've come across, shredding this hapless comedy into bits of fluffy dinner talk and cack-handled situation comedy. The truth of the matter is that, right from the start, Cukor follows the wrong cue, when he decides to stage a gender fight by settling on the obvious option, which is Hepburn siding with the betrayed female and Tracy defending the shot-at husband. This is of course a wild and foolish guess, but Billy Wilder, in his heyday, would have likely tackled the same story by going head first for a reversal of roles, perfidiously casting Tracy as a reluctant champion of the "weaker sex" instead, which in itself could have sparked off a firework of quiproquos and story twists and, incidentally, prevented anyone involved in this weakling from trying to get away with a routine job. For all those tender souls who keep fooling themselves about the grand cinema of olden days, and how everything was so much better in those days, this is shattering proof that futility is timeless.