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“It’s a movie, not a lifeboat”: Tracy and Hepburn together again for the last time

Started by tomwatson · 1 year ago

Tracy was dying. Everybody working on Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner knew it. His heart was failing, his liver, his lungs. He was 68 years old. Same age Harrison Ford is now. But while Ford moves through Kingdom of the Crystal Skull as if he was 15, 20 years younger, […] ... Continue reading »

99 comments

  • nycweboy

    1 year ago

    Guess is a very important movie to me - I'll get to that in a moment - but I can't let all of Lance's comments go by, either. The "great love story" approach to the Tracy-Hepburn pairing, on and off screen, is in no small part Hepburn's creation. They worked well together and had considerable onscreen chemistry. But she also had a life - and a very full one - without him, and it's not necessarily so clear that a good bit of the "great romance" wasn't something layered on in retrospect. As Lance points out, the relationship was very one way, and was, as Karbo notes, very much about Hepburn caretaking an obvious alcoholic who probably needed treatment, not a nurse. A romance? Not exactly.

    Which is not the worst way to begin examining Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

    I think we forget how little interracial romance there is onscreen, and how virtually none of it depicts a black man and a white woman, never mind positively. I have to be up front and say, this is not theoretical for me: my Dad was black and my Mom is white (um... yes, like Barack Obama... without the cool Africa part), and I yearned then, and now, to see something that showed me them on a movie screen.

    But Guess is frustrating - there's little in the way of physical romance (it is, to Kramer's credit, displayed up front, under the credits... but it's brief). Much of it is conveyed - and well, I'd say - by Houghton's and Poitier's passionate performances... but it only goes so far. There's little physical intimacy, and much of what is - or should be - a romance is subsumed to the politics and the "important idea" of interracial acceptance.

    There's no doubt Tracy gives an amazing performance, even for one assembled in editing; his frailties aren't entirely hidden, but his vigorousness overcomes a lot of the film's flaws. Not the least of which is that he's saddled with a lot of speech-making that overthinks what is, at heart, not that hard. As someone - I can't remember who - pointed out about the absurdity of Guess, she brings home a well known surgeon who's practically ready to win the Nobel Prize... and her parents aren't sure? Come on.

    Which is why , I think, it's Hepburn's movie and why she won the Oscar; though she's there to support Tracy, nothing can stop her from doing some of her best, most subtle work. She's very present, intense, yet she's part of an ensemble (look at how she scales her performance to Houghton's, so that they seem as Mother/Daughter as possible). Look at how much she conveys in glances, or knowing looks. And through it all, the journey of the film - to total acceptance - is really hers: it's not that it's okay to love a black man... it's that her daughter is in love. And it's why she has the film's most bravura sequence, when she dismisses the bigoted Gallery manager Hillary, in an aria of a speech that she takes pain to turn into a gracious, yet firm dismissal. It's Hepburn's value set that makes the film, and gives a preposterous set of circumstances a sense of grounding and of place. She's not perfect... but she's trying. We couldn't ask for more.

    As I said, this is personal... and I looked forward to this entire series because of this film, because I find it one of the most brilliant, maddening examples of sixties cinema: at its best, the films of the period really do break new ground (Poitier playing opposite a white woman in a major commercial release? Unthinkable only a few years prior), and yet, they are often just as remarkably tame, nervous exercises unsure of really taking a stand. 40 years later, and what has Hollywood given us since? Precious little... which is why, perhaps, even Hairspray can seem transgressive casting a major star like Amanda Bynes opposite a black actor. Guess Who's Coming To Dinner is, I think, what we'd all like to think we are... but we're not, and the film, itself, is something of a lie. But that's hard to face, and harder still to fight. Much like the "romance of Tracy and Hepburn" to which we still cling.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Nycweboy, I liked the way Kramer starts the movie with the two of them just being a couple coming home from a fun vacation together. No big to-do over anything. No trying to spring anything on the audience.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    I know that Hepburn romanticized their romance later on. But I still think it was a romance. Seeing it as anything else means seeing Hepburn as a masochistic lunatic or a some kind of saint.
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  • nycweboy

    1 year ago

    Well, there's a couple of ways to go on this; one is that, well, yes, she is pretty much everyone's example of the sturdy, impressive person who succeeds against all odds, changes the world in so many ways, and is a remarkable actress... that's pretty impressive, and pretty close to sainthood before we get to the caretaking part, isn't it? :) More seriously, I think my point is - and others are much harder on her about this - that one has to remember that Hepburn was very, very conscious of her own image and how things looked. And I tend to think she needed that story of the "great love" as much as anyone to explain a certain amount of codependency that, given her history, isn't necessarily surprising (or masochistic, or even saintly). And really, isn't it enough that she liked him, respected him, and felt - as she so often said - that his talent, more than who he was, needed to be taken care of? So if she has strength to spare and she lends some to him... is it saintly, is it self-injuring... or is it just, as she'd say, getting on with it? I admire her for all she did for Spencer Tracy... I'm just not sure calling it a "romance" is healthy... or entirely truthful. But it sure plays into our fantasies... doesn't it?
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Not my fantasies. I hate romance. :) And I think all love affairs are dysfunctional. What matters more here is how well they played married in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. They played courting couples well, but I never bought them as a married couple when they were cast that way, not even in Adam's Rib.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    She was pretty up front later in life about how she was far from a feminist heroine, because she'd lived a lot of her life to accommodate others.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    On your point about how far we haven't come...how many actresses would have died to play the love interest opposite Denzel Washington in his prime...or even now that's he become more stolidly middle-aged?
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  • nycweboy

    1 year ago

    Washington's resistance to interracial parts is especially frustrating - I mean, it would do nothing to his reputation (Will Smith, at least, has tried to get out of the box in any number of ways - not just white women, but Anthony Michael Hall in Six Degrees of Separation), and a lot of white women - like my Mom - give him credit for tremendous sex appeal. But Hollywood is still so skittish about this stuff.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    Julia Roberts, maybe, but they made an entire movie together where it never seemed to occur to either of their characters that the person they were facing death with was a member of the opposite sex.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    I'm cringing at the thought of what they're going to do with the scenes between Will Smith and Charlize Theron in Hancock.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    Great comment weboy...
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  • 1butch1

    1 year ago

    I thought the opening comments about Tracy is some of the most perceptive, best writing about this particular actor that I have ever seen.
    I have been a lifelong Tracy fan. Yet I had mixed feelings about this discussion. I knew there would be some blockheads who just don't get it, don't get Tracy. Maybe you have to be Irish but I'm sure he had a lot of nonIrish fans.
    The scene in which he baits Robert Ryan with questions in "Bad Day at Black Rock" is some of the best acting I have ever seen.
    It is forgotten now but during their careers Tracy was much more popular than Hepburn. MGM even got complaints asking why they were always paired. Tracy from the late 1930s until the early 1950s usually made the list of top ten box office stars as picked by exhibitors.
    I think the average man knew he wasn't as good looking as Gary Cooper or as charming as Cary Grant but he knew he was down to earth, focused and humorous like Spence.
    So the speech at the end was shot over several days. I didn't know that. Tracy films often had long speeches by the star. Stanley and Livingstone, Judgment at Nuremburg, Boom Town, Inherit the Wind, etc.
    Did he lose it? Was he not as good in his later films? I don't see it.
    Which of his contemporaries could have replaced him in his big roles and made as good of an impression?
    Tracy's boyhood buddy was Pat O'Brien, who, of course was excellent when teamed with Cagney. And O'Brien, like Tracy, played priests. But imagine how inept O'Brien would have been in "Guess Who Is Coming to Dinner?" Or any of the other great ones.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    He and O'Brien did a beautiful job together in Last Hurrah. One of my favorite things about that movie was the way it assembled the John Ford stock company together one last time.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Like I said, The Last Hurrah is my sentimental favorite of all Tracy's films. And, oh, how it chokes me up watching Ditto with his new hat there at the end.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    butch,

    Have you read Mark Harris' Pictures at a Revolution? He does a scary job of depicting Tracy's deterioration during the shooting of Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. It shocked me to find out that Tracy lasted several months after the movie wrapped. He was that sick.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    But it's amazing to realize that a lot of what we're seeing on screen is the result of just one or two takes.
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  • lylee65

    1 year ago

    Did everyone go to bed? (West Coaster here.) Well, I'll post a couple of thoughts anyway.

    Someone want to offer thoughts on the "ice cream" scene? Is it supposed to be some kind of foreshadowing? - i.e., that daddy dearest can get used to something new that he initially finds unpalatable?

    I'll admit I was actually rather pleasantly surprised by GWCTD overall. I came into it expecting to hate it, and I didn't, though it definitely has problems. I even teared up at the end, esp when Tracy looks over at Hepburn. But I'm sure I wasn't the only one who winced when he follows up that lovely speech with that line to Tilly ordering her to get dinner ready, or something to that effect. Was it intended that that be the last line of the movie?
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    I'm still here, lylee. Glad you could make it. Some one of these days I'm going to schedule one of these shindigs for the convenience of the West Coasters instead of for us here in the East.
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  • lylee65

    1 year ago

    Ah, thanks. The Siren led me here, and I love that you're having these discussions (although the Mark Harris book is still sitting on my desk). Much pleasanter than the work I have to do that I'm currently procrastinating...

    I'll have to sign off soon, too, though. I'm getting the weird security warnings as well.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Tilly's a strange character and she occupies a strange place in the script.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    Well, you have to remember, Tilly (as much as her reasons were much more honorable) had taken on herself to gatekeep their relationship just as much as Mrs. Olson did.
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  • lylee65

    1 year ago

    It grates, though. It really grates. She is possibly the most dated element of the movie.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    I see what you mean. It is offputting, particularly since it's Isabel Sanford, who's stuck in my mind as one of the vanishingly few adult characters on TV when I was a kid.

    I think she's meant to inject class issues into the situation, but I admit it was clumsy.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    I think there's some foreshadowing with the ice cream, but when I watched it today I was more struck by how Matt expects the carhop to care about his opinions and he completely misses how bored and uninterested she is in what he thinks about the sherbert. So the scene cuts both ways. Yes, he can learn to accept new things, but first he has to realize that his opinions don't carry the weight they once carried. The world belongs to the kids now.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Matt keeps saying he's worried about the problems Joey and John will have to face. It never occurs to him that they might be up to the challenge. He still thinks of himself and his generation as the problem-solvers.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Didn't seem like a product of its time. It was *about* its time.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    Woman of the Year has some problems, but the scene in the cab (Even when I'm sober? Even when you're brilliant) up until he walks out on her while she's changing into something more comfortable is incredibly hot.

    There's a lot about Guess Who's Coming to Dinner that's dated, but I think it earned its wings just for the scene where Katherine Hepburn is giving Mrs. Olson detailed instructions about how to get her racist ass out of their lives with all deliberate speed.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Jmhm,

    I watched it with my 15 year old. He loved that scene, mainly because it took him a bit to figure out that what he hoped was happening was in fact happening.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    That clip's linked above...
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    that scene definitely kicks the movie back into life.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    Some clips:

    Trailer
    Hepburn confronts racism, boots her friend
    Poitier and father have it out

    Can't seem to locate any good Tracy, alas....
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Good evening, one and all.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    Wonderful post - thoroughly enjoyed it.

    Tracy was truly great, but - and this won't be popular - it seems to me his career kind of flattened out a bit. Health in the 60s limited his work (though Nuremberg is a great one) and the 50s, I dunno, Black Rock is wonderful, but...in some ways, it's almost DeNiro-like, if you look at the list.

    My favorite Tracy is the stuff like Northwest Passage and the 30 Seconds Over Tokyo, and even Boys Town.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    My favorite is The Last Hurrah, but that's purely a sentimental favorite.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    I think I'd have to take Grant, Stewart, Bogie and Fonda over Tracy...especially the first two.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Me too. But that's also partly to do with Tracy's never having made a truly iconographic film. There's no North By Northwest, His Girl Friday, It's A Wonderful Life, Rear Window, Casablanca, Maltese Falcon, Grapes of Wrath, or My Darling Clementine on his resume.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    Phew, that's a list of my faves right there.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    I guess we'll have to agree to disagree about Captain's Courageous.

    And for that matter Boy's Town.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Shame on me for a bad Catholic, but I've never seen Boy's Town all the way through.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    Mickey Rooney is the best thing in it. I swear.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    It's way better than you'd think it would be. They both are (and so is Devil at 4 O'Clock, which by all rights should really suck).

    He had a real talent for grabbing you in what should have been laughable material.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    Hey, what about Adam's Rib?
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Good movie, but no Philadelphia Story, which Tracy played the Jimmy Stewart role in on Broadway, right?
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    No, actually, that was Van Heflin, of all people. Hepburn originally wanted Tracy for the movie, but it fell through.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Van Heflin? Van Heflin?

    VAN HEFLIN???????
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    I know, I like Van Heflin but he totally doesn't seem like the type for the part, does he?
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    Dood. I could not begin to make that up. You could google.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    I trust you. But Van Heflin never seemed like the type for any role he played. I mean...Athos in The Three Musketeers?
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    loved him in Strange Love of Martha Ivers. He was a good fit in his noir roles, also very good in Johnny Eager. But yeah, he would wind up in period stuff where he never quite fit. You should see him in Green Dolphin Street ... or not.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    He was wonderful in Madame Bovary, in a scrape your frontal lobes with brill-o™ kind of way, and in a completely different way in Martha Ivers
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    Yes! he was quite good in Madame Bovary. He didn't have the period aspect down at all but he had the man's essential personality perfectly.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    I am not a huge Tracy person. Certainly he was excellent in a number of excellent movies, but I frequently find him off-putting. Black Rock is his best performance I think, along with Fury; I love Libelled Lady and several others. But I often look at a Tracy performance with him being all Irish and curmudgeonly and gruff and I know I am supposed to be charmed and I'm just not.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Karen Karbo's comparison of Tracy to Russell Crowe is interesting. I'll have to go over Crowe's movies in my head and try to imagine Tracy in them. But I think the real comparison is between Tracy and Gene Hackman.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    I dunno. Hackman doesn't do twinkly. I have this THING about twinkly, it makes my teeth hurt. And Tracy twinkles in things like Boys Town and Father of the Bride.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    Yeah, twinkly - inner amusement at his surroundings, perhaps - also the variation of speaking into the middle distance to no one in particular...
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    I think it bothers me if I suspect it's masking an actual mean s.o.b.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    True, I can't think of a twinkly moment in any of Hackman's movies, but he's got Tracy's normalness down, and he's always spot on, and he's never been the leading man in a single movie I've loved.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    He was twinkly in Postcards from the Edge, in an avuncular way.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Get Shorty. He twinkles sometimes in Get Shorty. But it's part of the reason all the other characters hate him.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    Right, so it's bearable. It's okay to hate him for twinkling. I'm supposed to love Tracy for twinkling.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    And he twinkles as Lex Luthor but it's evil twinkling. Does that count?
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    I was surprised how the movie didn't seem all that dated.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Except for the portrayals of the groovy teenagers.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Hollywood never could get "the kids" right. My favorite ridiculous moment is when Dorothy and the delivery boy dance their way out to his truck. Batman doing the Batusi was cooler.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    ha! I actually love that moment, because it's so frankly surreal, as opposed to the rest of the movie, which is surreal but thinks it's real ...
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    and, incidentally, I am very fond of The Rainmaker.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Didn't you love the vests and the hats on the boys?
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    The kids part feels like 60s TV spliced into a feature film.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    by the way, Tom -- why is Google telling me Newcritics "may harm my computer"? that was disconcerting!
    reply
  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    Yeah, actually, it's taking me four or five clicks to get past warning screens every time I click through something.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    that can't be helping attendance. Although this does feel very chic and exclusive at the mo. :)
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    Whaaaaa?
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    In Firefox and IE, when I typed "newcritics" in Google it came up with a big fat warning screen. I used my link from Self-Styled Siren to get around it. Bizarre.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    Ha - yeah, I'm hardly adept enough to create a malicious site - oh, brother.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    so I wonder what is causing it? I am not nearly adept enough to figure it out. But if I had not posted here before that would definitely have me slinking back to the IMDB boards or whatever.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    It seems pretty pernicious to me - damage your computer, good lord it's a simple blog.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    I just checked it out. That is scary. On the other hand, though, I discovered that the newcritics version of my review of Adrift in Manhattan is on the movie's official web site.

    http://www.adriftinmanhattan.net/press.htm
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    Tom, if you click on the warning screen, it says you can request a review of the site using Google Webmaster Tools. I just asked Mr. C and he has no idea what could be causing it although it's conceivable a third party has added something to the site.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    Yeah, now I've gotta check it out - not so hot at this stuff!
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    I'm not seeing those warnings. What browsers are folks using?
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    I did get a kick out of though when the monsignor quoted The Beatles.
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  • lylee65

    1 year ago

    Glad someone brought this scene up. What the heck is it there for? To show the times, they are a-changin'?
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    It struck me as I was watching that scene and the scene at the drive-in that one of the reasons The Graduate was so popular with kids of that generation is that it wasn't *about* them. Nichols didn't try to be cool and groovy about them and that's why they identified with it. Because no kids of any generation see themselves as products of their own fads. They see themselves as just people
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Hey, you know what scene struck me as really weird? When Dorothy, the hot assistant to Tillie the housekeeper, arrives and Sidney Poitier gives her the eye. It didn't dawn on me till later what that was doing in there. It was the director's way of showing us that John Prentiss doesn't have a thing for white women.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    aha!!! you are right! I never got that scene before, just thought it was Kramer trying to make him less of a plaster saint.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    I have to admit, the They're coming for our women aspect of racism has always been a mystery to me.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Scene has the unfortunate effect of showing up how little sex appeal poor Katharine Houghton had, but as NYCweboy points out below she does do a good job of showing how passionately in love she is with Poitier.
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  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    OK lurkers, de-lurk! Signing up for comments takes 15 seconds....
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    We haven't talked at all about Hepburn or Poitier.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    I am a Katharine Hepburn fan (and she's probably Mr C's favorite actress, he'll watch her in anything). But this one is not Kate at her best. She's so damned deferential to Tracy. Of all their pairings it is the one that seems least like a partnership on screen; but ironically as your post points out it probably reflects what their relationship was like at that point pretty well.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    Oh, but that's why I like Pat and Mike (and to a lesser extent State of the Union). He realizes that she's stronger than he is, and it bothers him, but in the end that's what he wants her for, and she needs him because that's what he wants her for.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    Been a long time since I've seen either Pat and Mike or State of the Union. What I remember most about State of the Union is what a dish the young Angela Lansbury was.

    The other Tracy-Hepburn I need to see again is Keeper of the Flame. I remember that one as being very neurotic.
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  • jmhm

    1 year ago

    Keeper of the Flame is downright weird, I thought, but that whole Watch on the Rhine period of evocative not-quite-being-explicitly-rude-to-Nazis genre of movies kind of creeps me out.

    Angela Lansbury was great in that, at age nineteen. The scene at the beginning where her evil publisher father (Judge Hardy!) passes on the torch of subverting the country to her before he blows his brains out (despite the fact that he never wanted her because she's a female) is chilling.
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  • Campaspe

    1 year ago

    Gentlemen, I am afraid I must turn in! But I will check in tomorrow to see what has happened in the meantime. Be well!
    reply
  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    Me too, alas - an early morning - but the good news is Bonnie & Clyde arrived in the mail today, and I'm pretty pumped for it - just read the B&C page in Nixonland, too, a few days back.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    12:11 AM and all's well. But I have to hit the hay. The thread stays open all on its own though, so it and you don't need me. So if you're just arriving don't feel like you've wandered into the bar at closing time. Hang around, leave your comments, wait for some other night owls. Keep it going. And thanks for stopping by.
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  • Mannion

    1 year ago

    12:11 AM and all's well. But I have to hit the hay. The thread stays open all on its own though, so it and you don't need me. So if you're just arriving don't feel like you've wandered into the bar at closing time. Hang around, leave your comments, wait for some other night owls. Keep it going. And thanks for stopping by.
    reply
  • tomwatson

    1 year ago

    Testing the comments - post-crash. Fingers crossed....
    reply
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