Wallace Stevens among Others by Jarraway David R.;

Author:Jarraway, David R.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: MQUP
Published: 2015-04-19T16:00:00+00:00

As a means of teasing out further the implications of Cukor’s both-sides-and-neither approach to filmmaking, and the rather complex treatment of character that its collaborative work entails, I turn now briefly to director George Stevens’s Woman of the Year wherein Hepburn and Tracy made their first screen appearance together seven years prior to their partnership with Cukor. As a way into employing Stevens’s less collaborative brand of filmmaking noted earlier as a distinct foil to Cukor’s own, let me begin with an early scene in Stevens’s film wherein New York Chronicle sports columnist Sam Craig (Spencer Tracy) is seen listening in with his barroom cronies to a radio quiz show featuring Tess Harding (Katharine Hepburn), an op-ed columnist for the same newspaper, and as we learn, a frequent verbal sparring partner for Sam. When asked to identify the most frequently run distance in American sport on the show, the uncomprehending Tess is speechless for a rare moment, and the usually disgruntled Sam is only too happy to bark the correct answer to his buddies: ninety feet, the distance between home plate and first base. But Tess would go much further to enlarge the metaphorical distance between herself and baseball’s home base. By half-mockingly suggesting that the game of baseball be banished entirely from American life, in Amanda Bonner style, she sets herself even more at odds with her sportswriter colleague, who one year after the US entry into the Second World War can only perceive such an outrageous suggestion as but another “threat,” as he says, “to what we call our American way of life.”

Sam’s championing the importance of home life in wartime America opens Stevens’s film to a level of subtext vis-à-vis Cukor’s later 1949 film that would only continue to bulk larger and larger in the Cold War years to follow in other of Stevens’s postwar Hollywood hits including I Remember Mama (1948), A Place in the Sun (1951), Shane (1953), and The Diary of Anne Frank (1959), to mention only a few. Here, I refer to the subtext of gender history alluded to earlier in this chapter, and the purported distance (to go with the baseball metaphor once again) that would now appear to open up between Stevens’s own filmmaking in 1942 and the representation of middle-class men and women in the century preceding that achieves something of the nature of a status quo. Alluding to the 1 March 1942 Life magazine cover featuring two women in white shirts, tailored jackets, and bow ties, Michael Renov offers a citation from the cover story that ostensibly reveals where Stevens’s wartime filmmaking that same year might be headed: “this year, not only the smart dressers but all busy women seem to have discovered the comfort, style-value and well-groomed look of a suit tailored like a man’s” (18).

Yet it is precisely Renov’s view (and Elaine Tyler May’s referenced earlier) that “aggressive females were an aberrant species-women in men’s clothing.” Accordingly, “the vigor of the new woman was most easily contained

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