Pat and Mike (1952)

This frothy Spencer Tracy/Katharine Hepburn vehicle makes perhaps the best use ever of the actress' athletic prowess. It also makes pretty great use of the offscreen couple's well-known onscreen chemistry, resulting in a delightful sports comedy that puts the emphasis on the laughs while also rendering the scenes of Hepburn putting and volleying enjoyable -- even to those who abhor athletics. With her brittle East Coast persona, it's hard to stomach Hepburn as a California outdoorswoman, but if you can forget verisimilitude (hey, maybe she's a transplant), then the picture's a lightweight winner. From the hilarious early scene where a flustered Hepburn tells off a matronly golf aficionado by spitting out insults and strutting her stuff on the driving range to the extended sequence where she transforms Tracy into a damsel in distress, Pat and Mike is full of first-rate humor that plays off the actors' images while also injecting some novelty into the formula. A by-the-books subplot involving gangsters at least drives the plot and provides some laughs; but Aldo Ray's character, a dim-witted boxer, was a dried-up joke even in 1952. Still, Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin provide a remarkably economical script that fits celebrity cameos, sports footage, slowly dawning romance, and feminist dignity into a short (by today's standards) 95 minutes. Director George Cukor impressively fuses romantic comedy briskness with sports journalism and slapstick, even veering off into a memorable scene that plays like a bad acid trip on the tennis court. Adam's Rib may be regarded as the zenith of the Hepburn/Tracy union, but Pat and Mike ranks up there, too. ~ Brian J. Dillard, All Movie Guide