The New Pictures

Woman of the Year(Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) was made to order for bold Katharine Hepburn. She saw to it that it was: she helped edit the script (authored by two comparatively unknown Hollywood-sprites: Ring Lardner Jr. and Michael Kanin) sold it to Metro for an unprecedented $100.000, demanded and got her own leading man (Spencer Tracy) and (from a rival studio) her favorite director (George Stevens).

The result is not so form-fitting as her last made-to-order picture (The Philadelphia Story), but it is an adroit and amusing comedy, with an appetizing dash of social satire.

As Tess Harding, China-born, Swiss-schooled daughter of a U.S. diplomat, Miss Hepburn is easily recognizable in her role of highfalutin' female newspaper columnist. Spoiled, selfish, intellectual, well-informed, too busy to be feminine, she thinks nothing of advocating (by radio) the abolition of baseball for the duration of the war. She is promptly dusted off by another columnist: Sam Craig (Mr. Tracy), sportswriter, of her own paper. The tone of his piece, which calls her "the Calamity Jane of the fast international set," is less politely echoed by one of his colleagues: "Women should be kept illiterate and clean, like canaries."

From that point, Woman is the story of a speedy courtship and a rocky marriage. Tracy takes Tess to her first baseball game. She sits in the press box, observing that it is silly for her paper to have two men to cover a game when it has only one man in Vichy. For anyone remotely familiar with baseball, her painful introduction to America's favorite sport is Grade-A comedy.

By the time Tess has acquired a small Greek refugee and the title "Outstanding Woman of the Year," Husband Tracy is not sure whether he is married to a woman or a teletype machine. He leaves to find out, observing: "Do I look like the outstanding husband of the outstanding woman of the year?" Tess eventually lures him back by promising to be just an outstanding wife.

Actors Hepburn and Tracy have a fine old time in Woman of the Year. They take turns playing straight for each other, act one superbly directed love scene, succeed in turning several batches of cinematic corn into passable moonshine. As a lady columnist, she is just right; as a working reporter, he is practically perfect. For once, strident Katharine Hepburn is properly subdued. When she met her leading man for the first time, before shooting began, she observed: "I'm afraid I am a little tall for you, Mr. Tracy." Said he: "Don't worry, Miss Hepburn, I'll cut you down to my size."

It is anything but standard Hollywood practice for a star to select her own director, and few would have the nerve to try it. But Katharine Hepburn has a way of getting what she wants. Her reason for choosing George Stevens was as direct as her own personality: "Because he's the best director in Hollywood."

Miss Hepburn's high regard for her favorite director is well founded--and mutual. He is one of the best in the business, and he brought his admirer back from obscurity seven years ago with Alice Adams. That picture, his first try at an A production, also made his name. The script was bad, and he made up many of the scenes himself. The love scenes were the first he had ever directed.

George Cooper Stevens is an unassuming, long-jawed, rugged roughneck with an innate intelligence (uninfluenced by formal education), an extreme sensitivity and a fine flow of good humor. He was raised in show business. His father, Landers Stevens, oldtime Shakespearean actor, was proprietor of a popular Pacific Coast stock company.

When Stevens went to Hollywood at 17 (1921), he had carried many a spear in his father's dramas, had stopped school after a year in high school, failed to make the grade at shortstop with the Oakland Acorns baseball team. Over his father's bitter remonstrances ("A cameraman's no better than a lousy stagehand"), he became the youngest and one of the best cameramen in motion pictures.

Like many another successful director (Frank Capra, Leo McCarey, William Wyler, etc.), Stevens learned his cinema technique on the roughhouse, two-reel comedy lots, where everyone from prop boy to producer had a hand in the story and no one knew how it was going to end. That is known as "shooting off the cuff," and Stevens does just that today with most of his pictures.

His comedy foundation was solid after he had worked as cameraman on 60 or more Laurel & Hardy and Harry Langdon shorts. One of thorn had an unforgettable sequence: Laurel & Hardy delivering a piano up an impossibly long, steep set of narrow outdoor steps. Says Stevens: "The first theater audience that saw it cheered so hard at the finish that the house had to run the two-reeler over again before the customers would look at the feature."

Hal Roach made Stevens a director (of shorts) in 1929. The 25-year-old cameraman was more than ready. An incident at Universal studios had revealed his true ambitions. The studio sent him upcountry to take some fast-action cattle shots for a Western. It was apple-blossom time and --to a man with an itch to direct--irresistible. When the studio ran the film, it was charmingly interspersed with tender shots of dropping apple blossoms. They almost ran him off the lot.

As the maker of pictures such as Penny Serenade, Vivacious Lady, Annie Oakley, Gunga Din, one of the best Astaire-Rogers musicals (Swing Time), Director Stevens has exhibited a versatile talent, a wide range. He has never consciously tried to make a "great picture." But Columbia, which has him under one of Hollywood's favored producer-director contracts, is betting that he will. At 37 he is one of the youngest good directors in the business.

Actors like to work for him. His air of knowing what he is about puts them at ease; his ability to convey to them precisely what he wants reassures them; his enjoyment of what he is doing stimulates them. But two of Stevens' attributes are beyond the understanding of actors or anyone else. One is his capacity for putting anyone on the defensive at once by tightening his lips, removing all expression from his face and refusing to utter a word. Known to his friends as "the chill," it has been triumphantly successful at making studio executives behave.

The other is his antidote for getting over a bad spot in a picture. He just strides up & down interminably while everyone waits. The late Carole Lombard stood it as long as she could during the filming of Vigil in the Night, finally phoned her agent from her bed at 5 o'clock one morning: "I just thought what that pacing and thoughtful look of Stevens' mean." "What?" asked the sleepy agent. "Not a goddam thing," said she, and went back to sleep.

Joe Smith, American (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer) is the man Hollywood forgot while it was busy glamorizing World War I doughboys. An aircraft factory worker, he is one of the 14 to 20 civilians it takes to keep a modern fighting man in the field. His story is just the kind of propaganda the U.S. would like to have Hollywood make more of. Adult, informative and entertaining, it klieg-lights the new warfare at a most important spot: the armament production line.

Joe Smith (Robert Young) is 30, born in Wisconsin of Norwegian and Austrian parents. He makes $1 an hour (plus overtime) at Atlas Aircraft Corp., where he is a mechanic. He has a wife (Marsha Hunt), whom he loves; a child (Darryl Hickman), whom he spoils, and an FHA-financed home.

Until war hits him, Joe is just another untested American. Selected by his employers to install the new Army bombsight in their aircraft, he is snatched by enemy agents who want a blueprint of the sight. He is tortured, escapes, and his abductors are finally captured.

Without poaching on melodrama, Director Richard Thorpe manages to add triumphant suspense to his mauled hero's removal from the torture hideout by having him, though blindfolded, scratch the door jamb in departing, count the steps going down to the car, recall the turns, a dip in the pavement, a stop-&-go signal, the sound of a calliope, etc. All these well-noted clues come home to roost when he goes over the ground a second time.

The picture (from a story by Paul Gallico) is a credit to all concerned-- especially to Director Thorpe and Producer Jack Chertok, Scenarist Allen Rivkin, pretty Mother Hunt, and Mechanic Young, who plays his Ail-American role with likable, natural, easygoing familiarity. Not a high-powered movie, it is a first-rate die for the new propaganda models which Hollywood is readying for mass production.

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