 Starring: Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, Judy Holliday, David Wayne
Director: George Cukor
Year Of Release: 1949
Plot: Happily married couple Adam and Amanda Bonner are both lawyers, him working for the district attorney and her out defending clients. They end up on either side of a case where a woman tried to shoot her philandering husband and his mistress. Adam argues it’s a clear case of attempted murder, while Amanda tries to get the woman off on grounds of sexual equality, because men always beat the rap if they ‘defend their honour’ and shoot their wife and her lover, but women are convicted if they try to take a wayward husband to task. However the case threatens to spoil the Bonner’s blissful marriage. |
While in film schools they normally use serious movies to show how cinema dealt with the issues of the past, I’ve often thought that if you really want to know about the attitudes of yesteryear, you’ll actually get a better idea from romantic comedies.
Academics generally avoid them, because by their nature they take things to extreme. After all if you took today’s rom com and said this is what life is really like, it would seem ridiculous, but because unlike most old films rom coms deal with ‘normal’ people, they can actually tell you quite a lot about the issues and general attitudes of the past. Adam’s Rib is a good example of this.
While we tend to think of sexual equality as an issue that emerged in the 60s, in 1949 it was obviously already contentious enough that it was worth making an entire, high profile movie about it, full of relatively sophisticated arguments about the rights and wrongs of women’s subservient position in society. Of course this was just after the war, when women had been allowed out of their traditional roles while the men were away and were now expected to go back to how things had been before. Because of this gender roles were big news, but nowadays we tend to think that back then nobody really cared about sexual inequality.
Adam’s Rib is also a good example of how it’s what is not said that can often tells you a lot more about the past than what they do say in a film. For example, the fact Amanda Bonner is a successful and respected lawyer isn’t even an issue. Made in an era where we normally think of women only being housewives and mothers, here’s a film where the main female character is an attorney and it isn’t even seen as unusual. Indeed in the past there were more women doing a lot more diverse, powerful jobs than we normally think, and while was there definitely a huge amount of legal and social inequality that needed to be sorted, it’s wrong to think no woman had a decent job or fought against the restriction society put on her.
More shocking is how the film deals with domestic violence. Adam’s Rib revolves around a woman shooting her unfaithful ass of a husband for cheating on her and this is clearly seen as wrong, with the issue being over how the law treats men and women differently. However it’s barely seen as a problem that both the man and woman also admit to severely beating one another. If anything, the film seems to think domestic abuse is all rather funny, and worth having a few cheap laughs about.
It really is amazing that serious spousal violence could be seen back then as such a trifling matter that it can be reduced to fodder for jokes, and only worth getting upset about if it reaches the point of attempted murder. It’s not even as if it’s presenting it as something that never happens and therefore an almost farcical situation. Nope, it seems to admit spouses sometimes hit one another, but that it’s something of so little note that no one would even think to say it was wrong.
It’s fascinating that a movie that in many ways is so progressive, dealing intelligently with sexual equality decades before we usually think about women striving for real parity with men, can nevertheless treat domestic abuse in a way that seems shocking to us now, but at the time was obviously not something that was even considered an issue. It was just how things were.
Despite these surprising attitudes, you can’t really blame the film, as it was a product of its time and we can now see the error of the way it looks at these things. And if you overlook these oddities, Adam’s Rib is a truly superb movie, and I’d recommend you all go out and watch it now. It was placed at number seven on the AFI’s list of the 10 greatest romantic comedies of all time, and features Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy at their very best. It also shows how socially relevant rom coms can be if they try, and that unlike its modern counterparts, they don’t have to be about wedding and shoes. Not only that, but you’re actually allowed to make them about couples who are happily married, and not just about flighty young things looking for love.
TIM ISAAC
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