A Film Canon

This late screwball comedy turns on the complications that ensue when attorney Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn) decides to defend a young woman charged with the attempted murder of her unfaithful husband, despite the fact that her own husband, Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy), is counsel for the prosecution. Although this artfully contains Hepburn's trademark prickliness, it sets up feminism as a straw man - epitomised by Amanda's ridiculous argument that her client's crime would be excused if she were a man - in a manner that tends to preclude the idiosyncratic sexual equality characteristic of the genre - an omission that is even more apparent in that Hepburn and Tracy's rapport, which constantly supervenes the script, exemplifies that equality, exhibiting a mutual respect and understanding that is so deep as to create a kind of unspoken acknowledgment that the mild, cross-nuance that characterises most of their communications is fundamentally illusory, a mere cushioning of some deeper intimacy. The result is a strange transplantation of two screwball sensibilities into a new, non-screwball world, most explicitly in the condensation of those pastoral interludes that tend to suffuse the genre to a home-made silent film, and all its antiquated connotations (as well as the final retreat to the country house depicted in it, which remains in a resolutely hypothetical register, and is presented as an end in itself, rather than a new angle from which to approach urban society), but perhaps most troublingly in Adam's defensive insistence that the law should be an object of obedience or amendment, but never play: "You think the law is something you can get over, or get under, or get around...start with that and you wind up with...well, look at us."