Pat and Mike (MGM, 1952)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2020 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After Tomorrow Is Another Day Turner Classic Movies announced that the next movie on their schedule was the 1952 film Pat and Mike, yet another battle-of-the-sexes comedy between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn (their comedies together are great fun but their serious dramas like Keeper of the Flame and The Sea of Grass are almost unwatchable -- though I like Frank Capra’s State of the Union quite a bit and never could stand Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?). Charles recalled one social-media post that had asked people to respond with their all-time favorite incident in a golf game, and Charles is so relentlessly uninterested in golf his choice wasn’t a real shot but the one Hepburn, playing all-around woman athlete Pat Pemberton (she’s referred to as “Mrs. Pemberton” throughout the movie but explains that she’s a widow), takes to hit her ball out of a water trap and get it onto the green in one of this movie’s opening scenes. Hepburn’s character is the director of Women’s Athletics at Pacific Tech University, where she’s engaged to the school’s development director, Collier Weld (William Ching, an even more boring actor than the ones who usually got cast as these losers in the battle of the sexes -- Ralph Bellamy, Gig Young or Hepburn’s nominal fiance in The Philadelphia Story, John Howard). Only whenever she’s playing competitive sports she freezes up and becomes incompetent when Collier is around.

She leaves him behind on a train in a very Lubitschesque scene -- it reminded me of Jeanette MacDonald’s exit from a similarly ill-conceived engagement in Monte Carlo -- when she flings out her baggage from the train window and then has to leap off the caboose while the train is picking up speed so she can retrieve her bags. At the behest of a promoter she enters the national women’s golf championship tournament and comes close to winning it against real-life female athlete Babe Didrikson Zaharias (who plays herself in the film -- one irony of this movie is that Hepburn appears in it alongside the real-life model for her character!) until ol’ devil Collier shows up at the 16th hole and sends her performance into a tailspin for the rest of the match. Before the final game of the tournament Pat had been approached by corrupt but endearing sports promoter Mike Conovan (Spencer Tracy, speaking in a lower-class accent than usual) to throw the tournament, but she had insisted on competing honestly. Afterwards he approaches her again and tells her she could have made a lot of money if she’d taken his offer, especially since she lost anyway, but she insists she’ll always play to the best of her ability and Conovan agrees to become her manager on a 50-50 basis (though unbeknownst to her he writes the contract so he gets 51 percent and some of her crooked associates -- one of whom is played by Charles Bronson under his real name, Buchinski -- also get shares).

Pat becomes a professional tennis player and wins a series of exhibition matches culminating in one at the Cow Palace in San Francisco (where I attended a few events and often wondered about the absurdity of the name) in which, you guessed it, Collier shows up and in a marvelous montage his effect on Pat is dramatized by a series of special-effects shots in which the tennis court’s net grows huge, her racket shrinks to tiny size and her opponent serves her not one ball but a whole cluster of them. The finale returns Pat to the world of the golf links and the eve of a big tournament -- only Mike’s crooked “associates” are demanding that he fix the match so either Pat wins or she loses so they’ll know which way to bet. Pat, being a Katharine Hepburn character as well as a professional athlete (and, natch, Hepburn, proud of her real-life athletic ability, did her own stunts), manages to disarm and overcome the baddies even though she gets everyone arrested and the police, while releasing Pat and Mike, bust Mike’s gangland partners for outstanding warrants. In the final scene, Collier shows up just as Pat is about to sink a long shot to the green from a ball trapped at the base of a tree, but she manages to overcome his jinx, the ball makes it into the hole, she wins the tournament and she also ends up with Mike as a romantic partner.

Directed by George Cukor from a script by Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon -- also among the “usual suspects” in Hepburn’s oeuvre, especially the films with Tracy -- Pat and Mike isn’t a patch on Woman of the Year or Adam’s Rib but it is finely honed entertainment in which a couple of old pros give it, and us, their best. Kanin and Gordon were close friends of Tracy and Hepburn off-screen (though Hepburn angrily broke off her friendship with Kanin when he published his book about them, Tracy and Hepburn, in 1974) and they reportedly based their script on Tracy’s and Hepburn’s real-life relationship and particularly how they needled each other whenever they were together. One of the most interesting characters in the film is Davie Hucko (Aldo Ray), a wanna-be boxer in Mike’s management stable who in the film’s most bizarre bit of gender-bending whines that Mike used to come into his hotel room and give him rubdowns, but now he only does that with Pat. I’d usually say about a scene like this that this plays very differently now than it did when it was made, but given that George Cukor was Gay and there have recently been Gay rumors about Spencer Tracy as well, maybe Kanin and Gordon knew whereof they wrote when they created this fascinating scene.