Woman of the Year (1942) - film review

Sam Craig is a down-to-Earth sportswriter on a New York newspaper.  Tess Harding may have a column on the same paper, but she appears to come from another world – a society girl who has become both a prominent political journalist and a torchbearer for feminism.  Tired of Tess’s high and mighty newsprint posturing, Sam decides to confront her – and falls instantly in love with her.  Despite their differences, Tess is also taken with Sam, and the couple soon marry.  It isn’t long, however, before the romance disappears from their relationship and Tess fails to live up to Sam’s expectations of what a wife should be...

Of the many great Hollywood double acts, few come even close to surpassing the legendary pairing of Spencer Tracy with Katharine Hepburn.  They appeared together in nine films in the 1940s and 1950s, the avuncular everyman persona of the former perfectly complementing the exotic svelte allure of the latter.  Both actors are pretty exceptional in their own right but together they form an aggregate that is far more than the sum of its parts.  It was a marriage made in cinema Heaven.

Woman of the Year is the film in which Tracy and Hepburn worked together for the first time.  Its theme is the competing interests of the modern woman – the need to have a fulfilling career balanced against the necessity to hold together a marriage and a family.  The film is ahead of its time, since most women at the time it was made were content to (or were expected to) give up work after marrying and devote themselves to their family.   As the film shows, you can’t have both without some give and take – but that doesn’t mean that a woman can’t be as successful as a man in having a career and a family, providing the husband is there to lend his support.    

The film deservedly won an Oscar for its screenplay, which effectively combines straight drama and quick fire comedy.  The most memorable sequence is the hilarious final scene in which Hepburn, as the clueless housewife, attempts to make breakfast for Tracy in a well-meaning attempt at reconciliation – it’s more disaster movie than happy families.  Woman of the Year is a classic of its kind, a thoughtful mix of morality tale and romantic comedy, in which side-splitting slapstick alternates with moments of sober reflection and heart-wrenching poignancy.

© James Travers 2009

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