Pat and Mike
Directed by George Cukor, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (1952)
However charming we find British movies about sportswomen - such as Gregory's Girl, Blonde Fist and Bend It Like Beckham - they are ingenuous, naive and frivolous when set aside tough, realistic, highly professional American productions such as Ida Lupino's Hard, Fast and Beautiful (tennis), Robert Towne's Personal Best (Olympic-class athletics) and Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby (boxing). Arguably the best Hollywood movie about women in sport is George Cukor's Pat and Mike (1952), one of the many collaborations between Katharine Hepburn and her long-time on-screen and off-screen partner, Spencer Tracy.
This undervalued comic masterpiece, scripted by the husband-and-wife team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, would be a fine film even if it didn't try to be funny, which it so successfully does. As usual, Hepburn plays a patrician lady, with Tracy a tough, quizzical, street-wise Irish-American. She's Pat Pemberton, head of physical education at a Californian university; he's Mike Conovan, a New York-based sports promoter, manager and gambler with links to the underworld.
We first see her playing golf with her smug fiance, Collier Weld, the college's vice-president for administration. He attempts to fix the result as the rich couple they're playing with are likely to fund the college's new gymnasium. But she loses as a result of his overbearing conduct. When the would-be benefactor's wife starts patronising Pat after this undeserved victory, Hepburn moves a few steps to a practice tee and rapidly executes nine brilliant drives. It's as startling as Alan Ladd making a quick draw and firing off six deadly bullets to impress the wide-eyed Joey in Shane. Fed up with Collier treating her as 'the little lady', Pat enters a national contest, where she encounters Mike. He attempts unsuccessfully to bribe her to throw the final of the matchplay championship, in which she faces Babe Didrikson Zaharias, one of the film's several real-life sports stars. But when her fiance appears among the crowd, he once again undermines Pat's confidence and she loses.
Impressed and intrigued, Mike offers to manage her. She accepts and, in a wonderful scene, tells him that she's only recently taken up golf and modestly mentions that she's actually better at tennis (at which Hepburn was truly skilled, as she was at golf), as well as shooting, archery, ice hockey and 'a little baseball', not to mention boxing with 16-ounce gloves. So Mike arranges a coast-to-coast tennis tour in which she plays with former Wimbledon champions Donald Budge and Alice Marble. The tennis sequences make those in Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train (released the previous year) look pathetic. But when she plays 'Gorgeous Gussie' Moran, the outstanding tennis celebrity of her day, the presence of her fiance spooks her. In a classic fantasy scene, the ball becomes as big as a globe, the net grows to 10 feet, her racket shrinks to the size of a fly-swatter and Moran's becomes as big as a shrimping net. This sequence was inspired by a conversation Cukor had with his chum 'Big Bill' Tilden, three times Wimbledon champion in the 1920s and Thirties. 'That's the impression you get when you're not playing well,' Tilden told Cukor.
The science of sports psychology, then just burgeoning, kicks in here. As they fall in love, Mike draws Pat away from her fiance. She helps the dim heavyweight (Aldo Ray), whom Mike manages and bullies, to achieve the self-esteem that will make him a winner. In a key sequence, Pat intervenes to save Mike from being beaten up. With a few deft judo moves, she floors a gangster played by Charles Bronson (billed with his original surname, Buchinski). The cop who sorts out this fracas is played by Chuck Connors, a former baseball player for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Chicago Cubs, in his movie debut. The 'five-0, five-0' business partnership between Pat and Mike becomes a 'five-0, five-0' equal relationship of love and respect.
Of this intelligent, unobtrusively feminist movie, New Yorker critic Pauline Kael observed: 'Hepburn and Tracy play together so expertly that their previous films seem like warm-ups ... It's as close to perfect as you'd want it to be.' I agree.
