Pat and Mike reunites stars Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy with director George Cukor and screenwriters Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon, the team that make Adam's Rib such a success three years earlier. Like Adam's Rib, Pat and Mike seeks to explore the inequality of the sexes in midcentury America while retaining its credentials as a light romantic comedy.
This time out, Hepburn plays a college instructor with a hidden talent for sports. She catches the mercenary eye of Tracy, a Runyonesque sports promoter whose other clients are a filly and a punch-drunk heavyweight (Aldo Ray). In no time she's competing nationally (she almost beats Babe Didrikson Zaharias), and such an athletic polymath that she plays both golf and tennis with equal professionalism -- unless her jinx of a fiance (William Ching) happens to be nearby. Inevitably, of course, the Tracy-Hepburn pairing prevails, squeezing out the bland interloper.
Alas, the usually sure-footed Cukor hobbles through the episodic script. A whiz at sophisticated comedies of manners, he's ill at east in the raffish sports milieu, staging the various tournaments either like pageants or as slapstick. (He also resorts to cutsey camera tricks -- like superimposing Hepburn's puss on the nag's head -- which already looked gimmicky in Adam's Rib.)
The leads, in the fifth of their seven collaborations, fail to generate the romantic voltage that suffused Adam's Rib and their first teaming in Woman of the Year (where you could pinpoint the very frame in which they fell in off-screen love). The same can be said of the screenplay: Despite a sprinkling of good lines, it lacks sparkle and punch. Too fanciful to be a good sports movie, Pat and Mike ends up neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring, either. Basically, it's a vehicle calculated to capitalize on bankable elements from earlier hits. But Pat and Mike misses.
This time out, Hepburn plays a college instructor with a hidden talent for sports. She catches the mercenary eye of Tracy, a Runyonesque sports promoter whose other clients are a filly and a punch-drunk heavyweight (Aldo Ray). In no time she's competing nationally (she almost beats Babe Didrikson Zaharias), and such an athletic polymath that she plays both golf and tennis with equal professionalism -- unless her jinx of a fiance (William Ching) happens to be nearby. Inevitably, of course, the Tracy-Hepburn pairing prevails, squeezing out the bland interloper.
Alas, the usually sure-footed Cukor hobbles through the episodic script. A whiz at sophisticated comedies of manners, he's ill at east in the raffish sports milieu, staging the various tournaments either like pageants or as slapstick. (He also resorts to cutsey camera tricks -- like superimposing Hepburn's puss on the nag's head -- which already looked gimmicky in Adam's Rib.)
The leads, in the fifth of their seven collaborations, fail to generate the romantic voltage that suffused Adam's Rib and their first teaming in Woman of the Year (where you could pinpoint the very frame in which they fell in off-screen love). The same can be said of the screenplay: Despite a sprinkling of good lines, it lacks sparkle and punch. Too fanciful to be a good sports movie, Pat and Mike ends up neither fish nor fowl nor good red herring, either. Basically, it's a vehicle calculated to capitalize on bankable elements from earlier hits. But Pat and Mike misses.