Review of Woman of the Year (1942) by Edith N — 15 Feb 2007
Let me first compliment the performance of Gladys Blake as Flo Peters, the boxer's wife. She had literally dozens of uncredited performances in her career, and indeed I'd never heard of her. Her role here is small, but it has real heart--she's the one who finds out the newly-wed Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn (in their first movie together) [i]are[/i] newlyweds and gets everyone out of the apartment so they can be alone.
So okay. Towards the end, Spencer Tracy says he didn't want to be married to Tess Harding. So why on Earth did he marry her in the first place? He knew what her job entailed. He knew what her friends were like. He knew that she would not drop everything to devote herself to him, and indeed, he didn't want her to. I really don't think he gets to complain when she's busy.
Yeah, okay, she made mistakes, too. Plenty. For one, he's right--you don't just bring home a Greek refugee without asking. That's really the sort of thing you discuss, and it [i]would[/i] be awfully lonely to be in a household where hardly anyone speaks the same language you do. (She also really needed to arrange for a babysitter if the kid was going to be alone in the apartment for four hours. He wasn't [i]that[/i] old.) For another . . . .
Okay. You know what? Spencer Tracy's a sports writer in this. Frankly, it [i]is[/i] an unimportant job. Katherine Hepburn is more international; she reports actual news. However, that's not the sort of thing you say to score points in an argument. I think "he stayed at home with the baby" is a perfectly legitimate excuse as to why your husband didn't go see you win an award, though again, this is why babysitters exist.
In the end, his solution is quite sensible, provided he's willing to compromise, too--and I've never seen that he isn't. Spencer Tracy is an eminently supportive man in this. He wants his wife to be who she is, mostly; he just wants her to be his wife as well. I suspect he just worded himself badly. I guess the best way to put it would be that [i]he[/i] didn't want to be the one sitting at home with the baby while she ran off having adventures any more than she would want it the other way around.
He didn't want a housewife. He wanted a partner. Isn't that amazing, for a film from 1942?
This review of Woman of the Year (1942) was written by Edith N on 15 Feb 2007.
Woman of the Year has generally received positive reviews.
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