This year's two-week JazzWax Film Festival opens with Woman of the Year, a favorite romantic comedy of mine and one of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy's best. Directed by George Stevens, this was the first of the couple's nine films between 1942 and 1967.
Hepburn plays Tess Harding, a high-brow but tough scoop-getting foreign affairs correspondent whose reputation and access to foreign leaders earns her the title of "Woman of the Year." Tracy plays Sam Craig, a sports columnist. Both write for the same New York newspaper.
Garson Kanin had developed the script for Hepburn, a friend, and she ran it by Joseph L. Mankiewicz at MGM and won him over. Kanin was serving in the Armed Forces by then, so his brother, Michael, and Ring Lardner Jr. finished it. The quick-witted repartee between Hepburn and Tracy in this film would cement their relationship on-screen and off.
An early women's lib film or so it would seem, Woman of the Year includes one of the most fascinating wordless scenes in comedy-film history as Hepburn, clueless in the kitchen, tries her best for more than five silent minutes to fix Tracy breakfast. This ending was imposed on the film by Mayer, producer Mankiewicz and Stevens, with the new ending being written uncredited by John Lee Mahin. According to Ring Lardner Jr., in 2000, the original ending didn't go over well when tested with a live audience, so the MGM boss, the producer and director felt Tess "had to get her comeuppance for being too strong in a man's world, so they wrote a scene where she tried to fix breakfast ... and gets everything wrong."
Despite the absurd reasoning for the scene's inclusion, it remains a study in Hepburn's exceptional acting ability in both drama and comedy.
Michael Kanin and Ring Lardner Jr. won an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, and Katharine Hepburn was nominated for Best Actress. In 1999, the film was selected for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry by the Library of Congress. [Photo above of Michael Kanin]
Here's Woman of the Year, which was released just months after America entered World War II...
