Pat and Mike (1952)

Dir.: George Cukor
Plot: A talented lady golfer with an unusual performance issue falls in with a shrewd sports agent

If you’re the sort of person who hears about Katharine Hepburn’s real-life sporting prowess and immediately says “Oh yeah? I’ll believe it when I see it!” then this is certainly the film for you. Screenwriters Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, friends of Hepburn’s, were inspired by her talent for athletics as the basis for her fifth cinematic outing with Tracy.


Hepburn plays Pat Pemberton, a college sports instructor who also happens to be a terrific golfer. Her one problem is that she loses her cool whenever she plays in front of her fiancé (William Ching, playing one of those ‘third-wheel boyfriend’ characters who are a delicate combination of boorish and wet). At a low ebb after losing a tournament, she is taken under the wing of amiable shyster Mike (Spence, naturally), an unscrupulous New York sports agent, who vows to make her a household name.

It’s a flimsy premise for a feature film, and in places it shows. Given that Pat only needs to boot her charmless fiancé to solve her woes, the plot doesn’t have much of a road to hoe – instead, scenes alternate pleasantly but rather stagnantly between extended set pieces and gentle back-and-forth.
In fact, a more apt description than a ‘Hepburn-Tracy’ movie might be ‘Hepburn-sport (and some Tracy)’ movie, with roughly equal screentime given to Pat’s sporting endeavours as her burgeoning romance with Mike.

As in most of her pairings with Tracy, we get the impression of a woman who has a firm, sharp-eyed grasp on every area of life except the emotional one, where she can’t help but show arresting glimpses of uncertainty. It’s a winning formula when done right, and by this point Hepburn had fully mastered her exquisite rendering of these accomplished but vulnerable women on the cusp of middle-age.

He may have only been 52 when Pat and Mike hit the screens, but alcoholism had taken its toll on Tracy’s energy and he appears out of his comfort zone as a snappy, Runyonesque wheeler dealer. The younger Tracy of Woman of the Year might have been able to pull it off with aplomb, but by this point he was firmly in his “mellow” stage. Nevertheless, the old chemistry is still there and although the romantic scenes don’t burn with passion, they crackle with a familiar warmth.

Pat and Mike doesn’t have the heartstopping chemistry of Woman of the Year, the breakneck brilliance of Adam’s Rib or the irresistible bonhomie of Desk Set, but it has enough of a whiff of them to make it a pleasing watch. And like the aforementioned trio, Pat and Mike is far less conventional than the average rom-com (including most of today’s, regrettably) in its treatment of gender and romance. How many romantic comedies climax with a scene revolving around the heroine’s need to sink a title-winning putt?