- While watching George Cukor's Adam's Rib, I had to keep reminding myself that American women had only been permitted to vote for 30 years by the time this movie was released. Therefore, it was probably novel and even important for a film to present a successful, competent female lawyer in the person of Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn). So, too, was it significant to center the film's plot around issues of domestic abuse and infidelity. Anytime you see words like "important" and "significant" in a movie review, you know that it's going to be one of those films you should watch rather than one you'd actually want to watch.
- The plot works better as a sentence than as a film: A woman named Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday) shoots her husband (Tom Ewell) in the presence of his mistress (Jean Hagen), and a bickering married couple serves as their opposing legal counsels. Whereas Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy) presents himself as a no-nonsense kind of fellow in the courtroom, Amanda isn't above arranging for a circus strongwoman (Hope Emerson) to lift her husband up in front of the jury. Naturally, their dissimilar approaches to law lead to tension at home, all of which is further exacerbated by their obnoxious neighbor Kip (David Wayne), whose lust for Amanda is barely concealed beneath musical compositions and lousy jokes.
- In many ways, Adam's Rib strongly resembles the first onscreen Tracy-Hepburn pairing, Woman of the Year, in which argumentative spouses with competing careers experience a deteriorating marriage that is miraculously resurrected at the film's end. While their implausbile last-minute resolutions render the two films comedies in a technical sense, much of the tension is serious enough that neither movie is particularly funny to watch. Tracy and Hepburn give their usual fine performances, although Holliday, Ewell, and Hagen (in her first film role) often threaten to upstage them. Wayne's character is both grating and inescapable. The licorice gun is fairly amusing, but nothing else really sticks.
- This was co-written by Ruth Gordon, best known to me as Minnie from Rosemary's Baby.
