The longest-running of Hollywood’s great romantic duos, Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn made nine films between 1942 (George Stevens’ “Woman of the Year”) and 1967 (Stanley Kramer’s “Look Who’s Coming to Dinner,” released after Tracy’s death).
This quarter-century legacy of these off-screen lovers is collected in “Tracy and Hepburn: The Definitive Collecion,” out today from Warner Home Video, which offers not only all six of their MGM titles controlled by Warner for the first time — but also includes the
Universal-owned “State of the Union” (complete with post-MGM reissue credits that misspell Hepburn’s first name) as well as the later titles licensed from Fox (“Desk Set”) and Sony (“Dinner”).
I’m going to focus on the two new-to-DVD titles in the set, which WHV is thoughtfully making available individually at retail, where standalone DVD releases of classic titles from the major studios have become increasingly rare.
George Cukor’s “Keeper of the Flame,” the new team’s dramatic followup to the comic “Woman” released earlier in 1942, has often been compared to “Citizen Kane” from the previous year because they both center on a recently deceased, powerful millionaires businessman with questionable motives. In this case, he’s only glimpsed in a “Kane”-like newsreel following an ominous opening where his car plunges off a collapsed bridge during a thunderstorm.
Tracy plays a war correspondent just returned from Europe, determined to interview the great man’s widow, played by Hepburn. After the funeral, she hides from the press behind the high walls of her Xanadu-like estate.
But Tracy finds a way in thanks to the grief-stricken son (Darryl Hickman) of the groundskeeper (Howard da Silva). Tracy sneaks into the house, but the widow doesn’t eject him because it turns out she, like her late husband, is a fan of Tracy’s work.
Her late husband’s suspiciously-acting assistant (director-to-be Richard Whorf) convinces Hepburn to cooperate with Tracy’s planned biography of the great man, who the journalist reveres as a national hero.
But Tracy and the audience quickly deduce that not only are Hepburn and the assistant hiding a terrible secret about the deceased, but that Hepburn has her very own guilty secret. Let’s just say that like another 1941 classic, Frank Capra’s “Meet John Doe,” Cukor’s film is a still-timely cautionary tale about how populist movements (hello, Tea Party!) can be corrupted by cynical rich men toward corrupt ends.
Tautly directed by Cukor — Hepburn’s favorite director, though she deliberately kept him off “Woman of the Year” because she thought it required Stevens’ more macho directorial touch — “Keeper of the Flame” did well on its release in December 1942 despite the most downbeat ending of another of the team’s movies.
This was not the case with the other newbie in the set, the heavy-going western soap opera “The Sea of Grass,”which flopped on release in 1947, two years after the team’s third collaboration, the second-rank comedy “Without Love.”
Hepburn is a spinster from a genteel, well-to-do St. Louis family who arrives in New Mexico to marry Tracy. She learns immediately upon her arrival that he’s a much-feared cattle baron who ruthlessly deals with homesteading farmers.
After the birth of their daughter and Tracy’s cruelty toward her only friend, Hepburn flees the homestead in the company of a lawyer (Melvyn Douglas) who will become a federal judge opposing her husband. She returns to Tracy to give birth to the lawyer’s
illegitimate son, who Tracy offers to raise as his own after she agrees to leave again without either of the children.
Tracy and Hepburn are separated for most of the long second half of this very long 123-minute movie, highlighted by a 20-minute appearance by third-billed Robert Walker (who has no scenes at all with Hepburn; she played Clara Schumann to his Brahms in “Song Of Love,” released the same year). Here he plays Hepburn and Douglas’ trouble-prone grown son, troubled by rumors about his parentage. Phyllis Thaxter is cast as the almost equally unhappy adult version of his older sister.
Conspicously absent from Fox’s otherwise comprehensive Elia Kazan box set last fall, “Sea of Grass” was Kazan’s second film, made between “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” and “Boomerang!” Later in his career, Kazan accused MGM of interference and disowned the film. This rather stagebound western with an unconvincing happy ending is still interesting because of the director’s skill with actors (including Tracy in perhaps his most unsymapthetic role ever) and for the parental conflict theme that Kazan would more successful develop in “East of Eden.”
Capra’s political satire “State of the Union” (1948) was also made at MGM with an in-house crew and released (initially) by them, but as an independent production by the short-lived Liberty Films (whose only other production was Capra’s “It’s a Wonderful Life.”) Tracy is excellent as a Republican presidential candidate married to Hepburn but Angela Lansbury has the juicier female role.
The team peaked with their last two films for MGM, both popular comedies directed by Cukor and written by the husband-and-wife team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin. I think Hepburn gives her all-time best performance as a feminist lawyer defending a woman (Judy Holliday) accused of shooting her philandering husband (Tom Ewell) being prosecuted by her husband, Tracy, in the hilarious “Adam’s Rib” (1949), the team’s most enduring work (with David Wayne especially memorable as Hepburn’s sexually ambiguous admirer). “Pat and Mike” (1952) their last MGM film, is also quite good, with Hepburn as a professional athlete being promoted by Tracy.
Walter Lang’s “Desk Set” (1956), adapted from a popular play and their first as a team in color and widescreen, casts Hepburn as the tradition-bound chief librarian at a TV network and Tracy as an efficiency expert brought in to assess her operation. Besides their still potent romantic chemistry, this one is interesting for its depiction of early, room-size computers.
The team had one last encore a decade later with “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner” (1967) with Hepburn and an ill-looking Tracy as a married couple whose liberalism is tested when their daughter (Katharine Hougton, Hepburn’s niece) announces her engagement to a doctor who’s what was then referred to as a Negro (Sidney Poitier). Released after Tracy’s death, this became their most popular film though this rather preachy comedy-drama is far from their best.
“Tracy and Hepburn: The Definitive Collection” includes “The Spencer Tracy Legacy: A Tribute by Katharine Hepburn,” a star-filled, 86-minute PBS special from 1986 that was also included in WHV’s earlier, three-title Tracy/Hepburn Signature Collection.
Today’s new offerings at the Warner Archive Collection on-demand service include “Vitaphone Varieties,” a four-disc set containing 60 extremely rare early talkie shorts — musicals, comedy and drama — released between 1926 and 1930. They’ve been found and restored in a collaboration with the UCLA Film and Television Archive, the Library of Congress and The Vitaphone Project. Aside from a couple of museum screenings, these haven’t been seen anywhere in more than 80 years, never released on video or shown on television.
Also new to DVD are Mervyn LeRoy’s 1954 version of the musical “Rose Marie” starring Howard Keel and Ann Blyth with a deleted musical number with Bert Lahr and Marjorie Main that previously appeared as an extra feature on “That’s Entertainment!”; and Roy Rowland’s “Meet Me in Las Vegas” (1956) starring Dan Dailey and Cyd Charisse with lots of guest stars, plus pair of deleted musical numbers featuring Lena Horne and George Chakiris.
Also on today’s WAC list are a pair from director Ken Russell: the much requested Busby Berkeley homage “The Boy Friend” (1971) with Twiggy in a role played by Julie Andrews on Broadway (with a vintage making-of featurette) and “Savage Messiah” (1972) starring Dorothy Tutin, Scott Antony and a very young Helen Mirren as a suffragette. Hopefully, Warner’s suits will work up the courage to allow the release of Russell’s most controverial movie, “The Devils” (1970), which was yanked a couple of days after it was made available on iTunes last year.
On the retail front, VCI continues mining the J. Arthur Rank library to come up with the U.S. DVD debut for Ralph Thomas’ 1959 remake of Alfred Hitchcock’s “The 39 Steps” starring Kenneth Moore and Taina Elg on May 17.
