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Adam's Rib
R4 - Australia - Warner Home Video Review written by and copyright: Stevie McCleary and Noor Razzak (29th May 2008). |
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The Film
 I’d often heard about the chemistry between Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn. But shockingly I have no memory to this point of ever actually seeing one of their films, which is surely a travesty of filmic proportions. So how does "Adam’s Rib" (1949) stack up to the pedestal that many have put these two on? We start the film with an attempted murder, a wife shooting her cheating husband, which is how all truly funny films begin. This leads us to the court case that captures the imagination of the town and the eye of a married pair of lawyers. Adam (Tracy) gets the position of prosecutor against the female shooter (played by Judy Holliday) and Adam’s wife, Amanda (Hepburn), is the defense. Surely this isn’t allowed in an actual court of law but it sets up the conflict here from the start, and is the whole basis of the film’s plot, so we’ll let it slide. Amanda takes it upon herself to represent this case for all women, seeing it as a chance to push a feminist agenda-if a man had ‘defended’ his family it would have been okay. Adam simply feels that the law is the law-she broke it, now she has to pay for it. There is also a tiny subplot involving a songwriter that is obsessed with Amanda. He’s a weird guy. He writes a song about her that plays on the radio and that doesn’t help Adam’s state of mind at all. See, he gets kind of frazzled because his wife becomes so obsessed with proving feminine equality that he can’t take it and their marriage suffers as a result. I can’t compare Tracy and Hepburn to their other films, like I said, but wow do these guys hit it out of the park. It may be over fifty years old but the screen just comes alive when they are together. I don’t think it is too much hyperbole to say their electricity crackles. They obviously knew each other very well and enjoyed working together. At least I hope they did. If not, they are probably the greatest actors of any generation. As for the rest of the cast, which does feature a peculiar group of talent, it is pretty much what you’d expect from this era. Many of the performances are either ‘just there’ or just on this side of bizarre. But again, it’s what you’d expect. The writing needs a special mention due to the time it was written in. This is a film which derives itself from feminist ideals but doesn’t manage to make a mockery out of any one side. Just like how Hepburn and Tracy are well-matched equals, so this film gives such gravitas to the subject of equal rights. It is still fairly dated, and some lines are just laughable, but it holds together far better than I was anticipating. Speaking as someone who has seen far too many bad films, this is a quiet delight. Never outrageously fantastic or gut-bustingly funny, but quaint and likable, "Adam’s Rib" hits far more than it misses. I’d give it a try.
Video
Presented in the film's original theatrical ratio of 1.33:1 this full screen transfer does have a bit of grain, especially in darker scenes, some specks can also be seen at time as can a few instance of dirt. But these flaws are only minor when looking at the entire picture, which for a 59-year-old film is very good. The blacks are bold, gray tones are consistent and whites are nice and bright. The image retains a lot of detail and for the most part is relatively clean.
Audio
Three audio tracks are included all of which are in Dolby Digital 1.0 mono, they are in English, French and Italian. For the purposes of this review I chose to view the film with its English soundtrack. This mono track is the film's original audio and it sound very good, there's no drop puts, hiss or other problems normally associated with films of this age. The film is primarily dialogue based so there isn't much in terms of audio complexity when it comes to the mix, the film's music comes across a bit loud but that's typical of film's from this era. Optional subtitles are included in English, English for the hearing impaired, German, Italian, Italian for the hearing impaired, Romanian, Arabic and Dutch.
Extras
The only extra Warner Brothers has included on this disc is the film's original theatrical trailer which runs for 2 minutes 58 seconds.
Overall
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