The best movie I saw...

...this weekend was Woman of the Year, starring Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy (no relation). It's a fascinating study of marriage and gender roles, and I absolutely can't believe it was made in 1942.

(The moral of the story for me was, the person you marry is the person you marry, not the one you wish you'd married.)

I kept wondering what men of that era (like my father) thought of Hepburn's character (who seemed a lot like the real-life Hepburn). Tess Harding would have been such a threat to the typical man in the 1940s; she would have scared the hell out of him! And, considering the times, I have to think that most men watching the movie imagined beating a woman like that. (I think that was more common back then than we'd like to admit.) In fact, the last scene of the movie had to be specifically included to satisfy that urge; it implied that Tracy's character beat up another man off-camera (a proxy for his wife). Only then could men in 1942 walk out of theaters with their egos in tact.

Woman of the Year was also the movie in which Tracy and Hepburn first met and began their legendary romance. I'd bet their relationship was very similar to the one on screen. Good flick.