WOMAN OF THE YEAR
A film review by Louis Proyect
Copyright 1997 Louis Proyect
Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn made a number of popular movies in the 1930s and 40s written specifically as vehicles for the two. He starred as a blunt, homespun, no-nonsense sort of guy while she was sophisticated, aristocratic and somewhat aloof. The plot centered on their clashing characters and inevitably involved his struggle to break through her formidable exterior and win her heart.
"Woman of The Year" was one such movie and it has the rather odd distinction of being a propaganda piece, if ambivalent one, for the August 1939 Stalin-Hitler non-aggression pact. Hollywood Ten screenwriter Ring Lardner Jr. wrote it in collaboration with Michael Kanin. It is produced and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz and George Stevens. While the film was released in 1942, the evidence is clear that it retains the isolationist orientation of the prior year when Hitler and Stalin had tenuously peaceful relations.
The Stalin-Hitler pact lasted until June 1941 when the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union. Communists around the world, including those on the payrolls of Hollywood studios, cheered every foreign policy initiative of the Soviet Union. When the Kremlin called for international solidarity on behalf of the Spanish Popular Front, Communists around the world rallied around the flag. But all of a sudden in 1939, the Kremlin called off the crusade against fascism and a new non-interventionist, if not isolationist, attitude became politically correct. The Almanac Singers, led by Pete Seeger and Woody Guthrie, sang songs like "Washington Breakdown":
"Franklin D., listen to me, You ain't gonna send me across the sea, 'Cross the sea, 'cross the sea. You may say its for defense, It's that kind of talk I'm against..."
Sam Craig, played by Tracy, is a sportswriter at a New York daily and Hepburn is Tess Harding, an international reporter at the same paper. While not exactly a defender of the Stalin-Hitler pact, he does articulate the sort of isolationist mood that the treaty fostered in the Communist milieu. Tess Harding, on the other hand, is a tireless defender of antifascist struggle. Not only does she use her column to denounce Hitler, she devotes many non-working hours to speaking at anti-Nazi rallies. In addition to her strong antifascist convictions, she is a feminist. At a rally sponsored by a feminist group, she tells the audience that the best way they can celebrate the suffrage victory of two decades ago is by joining an international campaign to stop fascism.
One day after work Sam Craig is at a saloon with some newspaper pals and overhears Tess Harding on a radio quiz show. She fails to answer a baseball question correctly. Then she excuses her error by making a dismissive remark about baseball. In face of the burning questions of war and peace, she wonders why people would fill their heads with useless knowledge about children's games. Sam takes offense at her snobbery and attacks her in his sports column. She counterattacks and before long a full-scale flame war is taking place between the paper's two star columnists.
The editor intervenes and summons the two into his office to call for a truce. Sam takes one look at her and falls head over heels in love. He asks her for a date and they go to watch a ball game. In a classic Tracy- Hepburn scene she misunderstands all the rules and he fails to explain them despite his best efforts.
Their next date produces another communication failure. She invites him to her apartment and he arrives expecting the two of them to be alone. Instead he walks into a cocktail party at full tilt. It is a gathering of her mostly foreign antifascist friends and allies. Most appear upper- class and wear formal clothing. Sam feels out of place as he wanders from group to group trying to have a conversation in English. His ears pick up one such conversation and he tries to participate. The others immediately start speaking in Spanish in a deliberate attempt to exclude him. As he sits forlornly by himself on the sofa, a man in a turban takes a seat nearby. Again Sam tries to have a conversation but the turbaned man answers every question of Sam's with a bemused "Yes?". It soon becomes obvious to Sam that his companion speaks no English. As Sam walks off in disgust, he makes a rude comment about the "towel" on the man's head. This is a jarring note in a progressive film.
A day later Tess figures out that Sam didn't fit in and is remorseful. She wants to make it up to him and so asks him for another date. This time the two begin to show signs that they are falling in love. A few months pass and they decide to marry.
Their marriage fails to solve the same compatibility issues that haunted them at their first meetings. Her life revolves around her political commitments, particularly the need to rouse humanity against fascism. He simply wants her to be a housewife and resents all the time she spends globetrotting, or going from meeting to meeting. He doesn't understand her need to get mixed up with other people's problems. His isolationism does not speak of "America first" but of "family first." Spencer Tracy's ability to project warmth and humanity makes Sam Craig easier to accept than if someone like Clark Gable had played opposite Hepburn but the character is at the outward bounds of likeability, especially for a contemporary audience.
Even when they start a family, the bothersome issues of war and peace get in the way. She informs him out of the blue one day that they are going to have a child. He assumes that she has become pregnant but learns that instead she had made the unilateral decision to adopt a Greek boy. The boy is the orphaned child of parents who are the victims of some sort of political violence. He speaks no English, another disappointment for the long-suffering Sam Craig.
He makes the decision to leave her since he feels she is incapable of change. He doesn't want to the husband of a movement figure any longer. He has decided that Tess cares more about humanity than their own family and will leave her to this suffering, non-English speaking humanity with all its strange clothing and customs. He will stick with baseball and other familiar icons of American life.
The movie's tone changes abruptly after their separation. The insouciant comic scenes give way to somber portrayals of the two on their own. They miss each other desperately but seem unable to overcome the differences that set them apart.
The pain of their separation in some ways must reflect the uneasiness that the Hollywood left felt in the two year period of the Hitler-Stalin pact. By 1939, the Communist intelligentsia had established a certain intimacy with the American New Deal liberal establishment. Someone like Tess Harding was clearly a stand-in for Eleanor Roosevelt who had exactly the same sort of antifascist and feminist attitudes. By the time of the 1939 non-aggression pact, you had to assume that screenwriters like Ring Lardner Jr. still retained a great deal of affection for figures like the Roosevelts despite the newly acquired anti-antifascist loyalties of the top party hacks.
It is just such clashing loyalties that gives the film dramatic tension. Lardner simply lacks the sort of emotional distance toward the Hepburn character that would have caused her to be written one-dimensionally. No matter how much Lardner might have felt his "assignment" was to ridicule Tess Harding, what came out was an affectionate portrait. You can see Sam Craig's mixed feelings for Tess Harding as a projection of the divided loyalties of Lardner, who like most Communists of the era, probably thought of themselves as much as New Dealers as Reds.
Speaking metaphorically, Sam Craig and Tess Harding were reunited in June 1941 as the Nazis invaded the USSR. The Kremlin found new allies in England and the United States and Communist screenwriters started to turn out mindless wartime propaganda like "Action in the North Atlantic." "Woman of the Year" with its troubled and ambivalent mood holds up much better than the flag-waving films that followed it after everybody in Hollywood became fashionably antifascist, including John Wayne and Ronald Reagan.
Louis Proyect
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