Live Life Team
Genre: Romance
Director: George Cukor
Starring Cast: Spencer Tracy, Katherine Hepburn, Judy Holliday, Tom Ewell
Mr and Mrs Bonner, Adam and Amanda (Tracy and Hepburn) are legal professionals. Each of them lands a new job, which happens to be prosecuting (him) and defending (her) the accused woman in an attempted murder trial. Doris Attinger (Holliday) tried (but failed) to shoot her husband on catching him with a floozy (Hagen). Hepburn makes the trial an equality of the sex’s battle, claiming that the husband, Warren Attinger (Ewell), wouldn’t be found guilty of the same crime. She turns the courtroom into a circus. Husband Adam, already needled by Amanda’s encouragement of an ingratiating suitor (Wayne), finds himself increasingly angry. The Bonner marriage is looking a little strained.
Adam’s Rib was the sixth of nine Tracy and Hepburn pairings, and many consider it to be their best. Their good friends, the scriptwriting Kanins’, had written Adam’s Rib especially for them. Furthermore, all four were so impressed with Judy Holliday’s film debut that they made sure she got the starring role in Born Yesterday (1950). In spite of the intensity of the battle played out here, the Kanins’ point was that there is very little difference between the sexes and as Tracy states at the end, “Viva la difference, and hurrah for that little difference”. And the romance, Well, if the Bonners hadn’t been such a loving couple, there would have been no point in having a fight.
