After dwindling into a wife in The Philadelphia Story Hepburn made her most overtly feminist movies with Spen­cer Tracy, her sometime companion who was enlisted to “cut her down to size.” As if anyone could. Yet there was something reassuring in his low-key, meat-and-po­tatoes masculinity that created a kind of comfort zone for her bristling ambition. She gave him a little leading-man sex appeal and he gave her desirability at a time when most actresses are finished as romantic partners. This delicate equilib­rium finds explicit expression in the great Hepburn-Tracy vehicles written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and directed by Cukor. Pat and Mike displays Hep­burn’s athletic skills and the ego-erosion that comes with being attracted to the wrong man – before Tracy becomes her coach.

In this film, Adam and Amanda Bon­ner, two successful lawyers in mid-career, find themselves in opposition: Hepburn in one of her few explicitly feminist roles, defends a woman accused of shooting her philandering husband, pointing out the difference in public opinion (and the legal implications) if a man had com­mitted the act. The second couple, a hi­larious yet touching Judy Holliday and Tom Ewell, form a kind alternate model of marriage, a none-too-bright mid­dle-class couple with kids, and with no real option but to remain married.

As in most Hepburn movies (and screwball comedies generally), there are no children to complicate matters. But their absence within the context of a rich relationship suggests subliminally that it is possible to have a complete marriage without them. Hepburn’s impassioned speeches about the double standard are buttressed by hilarious courtroom she­nanigans, bringing the ever-patient Tracy to a boil. There’s real tension along with the charm. Threaded through the Miklós Rózsa score is the sweetly ironic Cole Por­ter song (and earworm) Farewell Aman­da, played and sung by David Wayne, the couple’s gaymate, but also hummed quite tunefully by the two leads.

Molly Haskell