Pat and Mike (1952) - film review

College physical education instructor Pat Pemberton appears destined for a successful career as an all-round professional sportswoman – at least she would be if it weren’t for her disparaging fiancé, who saps her resolve at every tournament she attends.  At a golfing championship, she is approached by unscrupulous sports promoter Mike Conovan to deliberately lose in the final play off.  She refuses, but after having lost the tournament, she hires Mike as her fulltime manager.  Together, Pat and Mike achieve great things, and, despite everything, they even end up liking one another...

Hollywood’s most dynamic comedy duo Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn join forces with director George Cukor and writers Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin to deliver another hit comedy, repeating the success of this team’s previous Adam’s Rib (1949), and striking several blows for feminism along the way.   As ever, it is a delight to see complete opposites Hepburn and Tracy spar off one another, each relishing every line of the well-crafted screenplay and draining every last drop of comic potential from each scene. 

Most memorable is the sequence where Hepburn’s tennis match turns into an expressionistic nightmare, her opponent’s racket attaining a monstrous proportion whilst hers shrinks to the size of a lollypop as her confidence dwindles under the beady gaze of her fiancé.  We’ve all been there.  The scene in which Hepburn disarms and virtually maims a group of mobsters is also pretty hilarious too.  From the sporting prowess that Hepburn shows in this film (slicing golf balls in much the same way that she slices her dialogue), you’d be convinced she was a pro.  Several professional sportsmen and women appear in the film, notably Don Budge, Betty Hicks and Alice Marble, and actor Charles Bronson makes one of his earliest film appearances, here credited as Charles Buchinski.

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