Adam's Rib

I hadn't thought of Spencer Tracy as a comedic actor. All the movies I've seen him in - Inherit the Wind, Malaya, Bad Day at Black Rock - were pretty serious. I laughed at his beatdown of Ernest Borgnine in Bad Day, but it wasn't really meant to be funny. That being said, I was pleasantly surprised at Adam's Rib, though there are a lot of people in that film who need a punch in the face, Actually, I think everyone, including Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, probably deserved at least one during the film.

A woman trails her husband from his office to the apartment of another woman he's fooling around with. The wife then barges in on them and tries to shoot them, managing to wing her husband. She's put on trial. Tracy is Adam Bonner, assistant district attorney, assigned to prosecute. Hepburn is Amanda Bonner, defense attorney, married to Adam, who takes it upon herself to defend the woman.

Her argument is that if a man barged in on his wife with another man and shot at them, he would be (and has been in the past) acquitted. As she stridently believes men and women are equal, Amanda argues Mrs. Attinger should also be acquitted. Which is the sort of argument a lawyer would make. "Because past juries were filled with imbeciles who make poor decisions, you should follow their example and make an equally poor decision!"

Being on opposite sides of the case quickly starts to harm the Bonners' marriage, which seemed to be a very good one. They're both loving, Amanda seems a little flighty, but Adam is kind of absent-minded and gruff, so they balance each other well. But Adam doesn't really approve of how Amanda is going about defending her client, especially as it includes a couple of occasions where she publicly humiliates him.

Adam made two mistakes: He underestimated her, and also overestimated the intelligence of jurors. She knows his weak points, how to prod him into losing composure, while at the same time making her point about the equality of women. So she takes full advantage, making him lose trains of thought, fumble his words as he does when he gets angry, and so on. Meanwhile, Tracy figures it's incredibly obvious Doris Attinger is guilty, so he relies on the facts to make the verdict self-evident, not realizing that Amanda is working the jury emotionally very effectively. He really shouldn't have let her end every question she put to Mr. Attinger with 'Tell the truth'. That's prejudicial as hell, I'm pretty sure Adam could have objected. He gets his revenge later on, but it looked like he destroyed his marriage in the process. But, if he's telling the truth at the very end, he pulled one over on her again to fix things. Pity he didn't show those wiles in the courtroom, he'd have gotten that conviction he was after.

David Wayne plays Kip, an incredibly annoying songwriter/piano player who clearly has designs on Amanda and everything he does makes me want to punch him in the face. He's like a prototype of the character Charlie Sheen played on Two and a Half Men. I just hope it was more of a stretch for Wayne than it was for Sheen. Mr. Attinger really did have what he got coming, but Doris and the other woman weren't exactly prizes either. Amanda pulls some stunts that probably ought to have gotten her thrown out of court, and Adam says some really stupid, sometimes patronizing stuff to Amanda at home. So yes, everyone deserved a good sock in the jaw at some point. Which I suppose means they're fairly human characters. Most real people deserve to get punched at some point in their life.