Hepburn And Tracy Star Together In Newspaper Film

Auckland Star, Volume LXXII, Issue 283, 29 November 1941, Page 15

Hepburn And Tracy Star Together In Newspaper Film

SPENCER TRACY and Katharine Hepburn are starred together in "Woman of the Year," the screen play by the noted American sports writer Ring Lardner and Michael Kanin, which Miss Hepburn herself sold to M.G.M., writes Thornton Delehanty in the New York HeraldTribune. "Woman of the Year," Miss Hepburn explains, is the story of a marriage rather than a "Front Page" type of thing. Its newspaper background is incidental. The intellectual and highly cultivated female who conducts a column on world affairs has a run-in with the equally intelligent but less intellectually phoney sports writer on the same paper. They marry, and it is their domestic life, with the woman's catspaw tactics and the man's subsequent rebellion, which furnishes the theme of the story. The parts are admirably suited to Tracy and Miss Hepburn, and, from all accounts, the story is written racily and with plenty of room for characterisations. It should be a picture worth anybody's money at the box office. Even Tracy does not seem too pessimistic, a sign that everything augurs well. Tracy, who is known as the champion worrier at M.G.M., usually begins every role in the depths of despair. When we talked to him earlier his concern was not so much with the fate of "Woman of the Year" as it was over the conviction that his gruesome forebodings about "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" had come true. He told us that he had felt pretty bad about the notices at first. So bad, in fact, that he could hardly bring himself to talk or think about anything else. Miss Hepburn helped him get out of it. She bucked him up considerably by reminding him that she had had what she claims to have been the worst notices ever received by any actor or actress on stage, screen or medicine show. Her all-time low, she said, was with Cary Grant in "Sylvia Scarlett." "I was so bad in that," she said, "the audiences wouldn't even go to see Grant." After that Tracy felt better.