Putting words in their mouths

Pat and Mike 1952 Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (95 minutes) directed by George Cukor; written by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin.

Romantic comedies starring Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn still entertain movie watchers more than fifty years after they were made. 

Tracy and Hepburn are Hollywood legends, but what makes their movies sing are the words in their mouths, especially in films such as Adam’s Rib and Pat and Mike, written by the great husband-and-wife team Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. 

The Pat and Mike story is formulaic.

Mrs. Patricia Pemberton—Pat (Katharine Hepburn)—is a widow (the Mrs.) on the faculty of a small Western college, an accomplished sportswoman who teaches physical education. She is engaged to Collier Weld (William Ching), a college administrative officer.

The good-looking, athletic Weld is not a bad guy. He is in essence the front man for the college’s fund-raising program. Everything about him says he should be an ideal match for Pat, but the audience—as well as the salty Mike Conovan (Spencer Tracy)—can see he is ‘the wrong jockey for this chick.’

What impresses prospective donors about Weld seems to be the same thing that would baffle and intimidate Pat so much that she chokes when she must perform under his gaze—a curious psychological trope that feels right on the money.

But Pat does not ‘blame’ Coll. She recognizes that she is her own worst enemy. Her problem—and the center of our story—is that she must overcome what makes her feel and act this way.

Enter Mike (Tracy), a rough-edged and slightly shady sports agent with a twinkle in his eye. Mike, who admits that he ‘can’t even speak left-handed English,’ is of course just Pat’s ticket. The two do the dance that Tracy and Hepburn fans know so well in bringing each other around. As Mike’s tag line goes, ‘You’re beauty-ful to watch—in action.’

They both are. But what makes this number more than just a duet is Kanin and Gordon’s polyphony. Tracy and Hepburn take the lead, surrounded by studio character actors who roll the story smoothly forward by tossing in well-timed one-liners from a broad range of registers. This includes everyone in the fun.

Courting prospective donors in a ‘friendly’ game of golf, Collier brings Pat along to play a set with Mr. and Mrs. Beminger (Loring Smith and Phyllis Povah), a gruff self-made millionaire and his daffy, opinionated ‘little woman’—whom Pat’s caddy (William Self) gaily mimics behind her back.

The middle-aged, putty-faced Mrs. Beminger instructs Pat nonstop in her golf swing: ‘You’ve got to tense the gluteal muscles, dear! If you don’t tense the gluteal muscles, why, your whole alignment is off.’

The jig is up at the end of the game when an exasperated Pat says: ‘Mrs. Beminger, if you could possibly lift the needle from that long-playing phonograph you keep in your face!’ Pat—with Hepburn’s signature jaw clenched tighter than ever her butt cheeks—then unceremoniously parks Mrs. Beminger in a chair and drives a line of balls serially true and deep into the course driving range.

The time is ripe for Mike to turn up in the story with his likewise shady associate, Barney Grau (Sammy White). Later we meet his ‘ham-‘n-egg’ palooka heavyweight boxer Davie Hucko (Aldo Ray), Hucko’s hapless trainer Gibby (Joseph E. Bernard) and others. 

‘Davie, talking to you is like taking a ride on a merry-go-round,’ Barney says to the unbelievably goofy Hucko at one point.

‘Gee, the last time I was on a merry-go-round, I threw up,’ Hucko says.

Hucko is jealous of the attention Mike has been giving Pat, but one on one, Pat bucks Hucko up with a shot in the arm of her own medicine about standing up for himself and taking on his worst enemy—himself.

Along the way, Pat and Mike engage, among others, a wise-cracking Manhattan waiter (Lou Lubin) at Lindy’s on Broadway, a wry police captain (Chuck Connors, in his first movie role), and a trio of Damon Runyonesque wise-guys-who-can’t-shoot-straight, including Hank Tasling (Charles Buchinski, who later Americanized his name to Charles Bronson), whom Pat gets the drop on—twice.

Police captain: ‘I hope you fellers have been on the ball here. You could learn something’ [i.e., from Pat, who just dropped Hank a second time while she physically demonstrated to the captain the contretemps that had brought them before him].

Deputy: ‘She’s okay.’

Police captain: ‘Where’d you pick up all that anyway?’

Pat: ‘Oh, I’ve been around physical ed for years.’

Mike: ‘Physical Ed? Who’s he?’

Pat: ‘Ed-yoo-cation.’

The lines come so naturally to Hepburn and Tracy that they seem as though written for them—which of course they were. Gordon and Kanin were good friends with Hepburn and Tracy and their work has the feel of good speechwriting, which is to say, dialog crafted to mimic their natural voices.

They wrote Pat and Mike for them (and not for the studio) with a view to showcasing Hepburn’s athletic ability, an accomplished tennis player and golfer.

In doing this, the film also cameos a number of professional women golfers, including three of the thirteen founding members of the then-new Ladies Professional Golf Association: Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Helen Dettweiler and Betty Hicks. These golfers are among many others who gamely let the show play through as they go about their work.

The great writing makes all the fun and high jinx look easy.

Spencer Tracy, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin and Katharine Hepburn