Adam's Rib - Another old Connecticut custom

ADAM'S RIB (1949):

Starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn
Directed by George Cukor
(100 minutes)
B&W

Hollywood's most popular depictions of love and romance usually run along the magnetic line of "opposites attract", because a relationship in constant friction seems to rub the audience in the right way. Not that you really want to -think- about the opposites who get together by the end of these films -- in most cases, you can't imagine them really living happily ever after. "Adam's Rib" is a comedy about one such couple of opposites, but rather than tell the probably humorous tale of how they got together, it really does think about the relationship and tells us how and why they stay together. Its sometime-dated handling of feminist politics still holds up for the most part, largely due to the acting of Tracy and Hepburn.

Adam (Tracy) is a lawyer in the district attorney's office called to prosecute a woman who shot her philandering husband after catching him in the arms of another woman. Adam believes in the case – not a fan of philandering, he sighs indignantly at the thought of citizens taking armed action into their own hands; going outside the law when it suits their purposes. The law is the law.

Adam's wife Amanda (Hepburn) -- a practicing civil attorney -- believes the gunplay was an unfortunate end to a bad situation; that it was the husband whose own deeds brought about the shooting. To make matters for their own marriage worse, Amanda takes on the case to defend the wife and turns the trial into a showcase of the inequalities foisted on women by men.

This is not really a comedy, but a drama -- with humor coming from our understanding and belief in the characters. The film-in-the-film (an 8mm amateur production celebrating the end of their mortgage) shows what a comedy would be, all mugging and slapstick and cornball plot. David Wayne’s character is the only -true- comedic character here and he’s a perfectly-obnoxious skunk.

This movie does not take sides -- neither Amanda nor Adam is completely in the right. What's "right" here is their marriage, the elements each brings to the partnership and why these two opposites must stay together to be 'whole'.

After all, the rib is not only literally a bar on a cage -- it also protects the heart and allows it to keep pumping along.