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| PAT AND MIKE (1952) |
A Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Picture
B&W, 95 minutes
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CAST
Mike Conovan: Spencer Tracy
Pat Pemberton: Katharine Hepburn
David Hucko: Aldo Ray
Collier Weld: William Ching
Barney Grau: Sammy White
Spec Cauley: George Matthews
Mr. Beminger: Lori Smith
Mrs. Beminger: Phyllis Povah
Hank Tasling: Charles Buchinski (Charles Bronson)
Sam Garsell: Frank Richards
Charles Barry: Jim Backus
Police Captain: Chuck Connors
Gibby: Joseph E. Bernard
Harry MacWade: Owen McGiveney
Waiter: Lou Lubin
Bus Boy: Carl Switzer
Pat's Caddy: William Self
Caddies: Billy McLean, Frankie Darro, Paul Brinegar, "Tiny" Jimmie Kelly
Women Golfers: Mae Clarke, Helen Eby-Rock, Elizabeth Holmes
Commentator: Hank Weaver
Sportscaster: Tom Harmon
Line Judge, Tennis Court: Charlie Murray
Themselves: Gussie Moran, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, Don Budge, Alice Marble, Frank Parker, Betty Hicks, Beverly Hanson, Helen Dettwiler
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CREDITS
Director: George Cukor
Producer: Lawrence Weingarten
Scenarists: Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin
Based on an original story by: Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin
Photographer: William Daniels
Art Director: Cedric Gibbons
Associate Art Director: Urie McCleary
Set Decorator: Edwin B. Willis
Associate Set Decorator: Hugh Hunt
Editor: George Boemler
Sound Recorder: Douglas Shearer
Musical Score: David Raskin
Miss Hepburn's Wardrobe by Orry-Kelly
Makeup Artist: William Tuttle
Special Effects: Warren Newcombe
Montage: Peter Ballbusch
Assistant Director: Jack Greenwood
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SYNOPSIS
Pat Pemberton, a college physical education teacher, is signed as an all-round professional athlete by Mike Conovan, a smooth, fast-talking sports promoter. When it comes to golf, however, Pat just cannot reach the top of her game when her fiancé, Collier Weld, is watching her. This situation gives bright ideas to a pair of petty racketeers, who own part of her contract. It seems they want her to throw a golf tournament.
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CRITIQUES
"Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy, who lost their amateur standing years ago so far as their popular rating as theatrical entertainers goes, are proving themselves equally able as a couple of professional sports in Pat and Mike....Miss Hepburn has always been an actress whose competence with a line or with a tensile dramatic situation has been well above the margin of surprise. But this is the first time she has shown us - at least, on the motion-picture screen - that she can swing a golf club or tennis racquet as adroitly as she can sling an epigram."
- Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, 1952
"Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy play together so expertly that their previous films seem like warmups. The script, by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, isn't up to the best of Adam's Rib (1949), but the stars have achieved such teamwork that their sparring is more beautiful than punch lines. Hepburn plays a phenomenal all-around athlete, and in the course of the picture she takes on Gussie Moran, Babe Didrikson Zaharias, and other professionals, touching off the comic possibilities in various sports with grace and ease. Tracy, who plays a sports promoter (with a streets-of-the-big-city accent - 'cherce' for 'choice') has a lighter, funnier tone than in the other Tracy-Hepburn pictures. George Cukor directed - beautifully. It's as close to perfect as you'd want it to be."
- Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
"Written, like several other Cukor films of the period, by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, and charting the conflict between what Carlos Clarens called 'the redneck paternalism of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn's outraged liberal sensibilities', this is a lazy, episodic, conventional but strangely charming variation on the old comedy formula of initially hostile misfits falling in love (here platonic). Hepburn gets to show off her considerable athletic talents as the bright, upper middle class sporting all-rounder; Tracy gets to be gruffly loveable as the rough-diamond promoter-manager who finally becomes her protector. There are far too many shots featuring real-life sports stars, but the sparring leads, and Ray's dim boxer, work superbly together under Cukor's deceptively effortless, always elegant direction."
- Geoff Andrew, Time Out
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COMMENTARY TRACK
"That time of making Adam's Rib and Pat and Mike was a very creative and very exciting period. Spencer never used to join those conferences we had, George [Cukor] and Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon - who wrote the scripts. We'd meet on the weekends, and Spencer would make a general comment on what he'd heard. During the reading of Pat and Mike, Spencer sat in a corner of the room when we had a reading of the script one night at George's house. But he didn't join in. They were written and very intimately discussed between us all, which I think was an enormous help to everyone concerned. It was very 'ensemble' in spirit. And things we didn't like, or which irritated one, or you didn't understand, you were able to state it, which one doesn't always get an opportunity to do in this business. It was not just friendship, but an artistic collaboration."
- Katharine Hepburn, interview with John Kobal, 1979
"The reason this comedy, and its predecessor Adam's Rib, worked was that none of us took ourselves very seriously during the writing and preparation. We batted ideas around like tennis balls, we all felt the lines and situations without any kind of ghastly solemnity. If we all laughed, a line went in. I remember there was a scene in which Spencer massaged Kate's leg. No sex implied, but it was very sexy. You sensed the empathy between these two. We had wonderful fun working out that scene."
- George Cukor
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Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn
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Katharine Hepburn
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Aldo Ray, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn
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On the set: Spencer Tracy, Ruth Gordon, Garson Kanin, Katharine Hepburn
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On the set: Katharine Hepburn, Aldo Ray, George Cukor
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On the set: George Cukor, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn
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Watch the trailer
