General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

Adam's Rib

Adam's Rib is a 1949 American screwball comedy directed by George Cukor, in which married lawyers Adam Bonner (Spencer Tracy) and Amanda Bonner (Katharine Hepburn) find themselves on opposite sides of a courtroom when a wife, Doris Attinger (Judy Holliday), is charged with attempting to murder her unfaithful husband. Written by the husband-and-wife team of Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin and produced by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, it was released on 18 November 1949 with a running time of 101 minutes.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	18 November 1949, Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (Loew's Inc.); 101 minutes, black and white¹
Director and writers	George Cukor; screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garson Kanin, a married writing team¹
Leads	Spencer Tracy as Assistant D.A. Adam Bonner; Katharine Hepburn as defense attorney Amanda Bonner; Judy Holliday as Doris Attinger; Tom Ewell as Warren Attinger³
Tracy-Hepburn pairing	The sixth of nine M-G-M films in which Hepburn and Tracy were teamed¹
Real-life basis	The story drew on Ruth Gordon's friends Dorothy and William Dwight Whitney, lawyers who opposed each other in the divorce of actor Raymond Massey and each married a client¹^•⁴
Recognition	Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay; inducted into the National Film Registry in 1992¹^•⁵
Reception	Rotten Tomatoes Tomatometer score of 96%; IMDb user rating 7.4/10⁶^•⁷

Spoilers

Plot

Doris Attinger follows her husband Warren, discovers him with his mistress Beryl Caighn, and takes a shot at them. Assistant district attorney Adam Bonner receives the case, which he regards as straightforward: the facts are not in dispute, and Doris fired at her husband after catching him with his girlfriend. His wife Amanda, also a lawyer, decides to defend Doris, arguing that women are treated differently from men in the courts and that Doris should be set free; she claims that if the sexes were reversed, the defendant would go free.²^•⁸

The legal battle spills into the marriage. Amanda uses every opportunity to enlarge the case into a feminist issue while Adam tries to cut it down to size, and frayed nerves leave the lawyers nearly as estranged as their clients.⁸ As the trial progresses, the two find they cannot confine the battle to the courtroom, because the issues of sexual equality extend into their home.⁹ Amanda wins the case, but the film's ending has Adam pressing her to admit that there is some difference between a man and a woman, a reconciliation that scholars have read as leaving a still patriarchal model of marriage in place despite the courtroom victory.¹⁰

Production

The film went through two working titles, Love Is Legal and Man and Wife, before production settled on its final name early in shooting. The character names changed too: Tracy's role was first written as Ned and became Adam, and Hepburn's was originally Madeline. Cole Porter, who was persuaded to write a song for David Wayne's songwriter character Kip Lurie to sing to Amanda, at first refused because he could neither abide nor rhyme the name Madeline; the character was renamed Amanda and the song became "Farewell, Amanda," whose sales profits Porter and M-G-M donated to the Runyon Cancer Fund.¹

Casting Holliday. Garson Kanin had directed Judy Holliday in the play Born Yesterday, but Columbia studio head Harry Cohn had rejected the idea of her starring in the film version, even a screen test. Hepburn's idea was to make Adam's Rib the test Cohn denied, tailoring the role of Doris to Holliday's talents. Modern sources indicate that Hepburn deliberately let Holliday dominate the scenes they shared so that Columbia executives could see her ability; Holliday did star in Born Yesterday and won the Academy Award for Best Actress for it. Holliday herself initially turned down the role because her character is called "fatso" in the script.¹

M-G-M paid the Kanins $175,000 for the rights to their original screenplay. Filming ran from 31 May to mid-July 1949, mostly on MGM's Culver City stages, with location work in New York City including the Women's House of Detention at Greenwich Avenue and Tenth Street, and at the Kanins' farm in Newton, Connecticut. The film marked the screen debut of Jean Hagen and returned Polly Moran to movies after nearly a decade.¹^•¹¹ The courtroom exterior shown in the film is the Criminal Courts Building at 100 Centre Street in Manhattan, known as "The Tombs."

Title and sources

M-G-M purchased the rights to the title from Paramount, which had used it for an unrelated 1923 Cecil B. DeMille drama starring Milton Sills.¹^•¹² According to an article Kanin wrote in 1989, the story was based on the lives of Ruth Gordon's friends Dorothy and William Dwight Whitney and actor Raymond Massey: the Whitneys were once-married lawyers who took opposite sides in the divorce proceedings of Massey and Adrianne Allen, and when the trial ended, each divorced and married a respective client.¹^•⁴

Themes and interpretation

The film is often classified as a screwball comedy, and scholars have read it as a comic study of sex role stereotyping carried to the logical conclusion of the marriage-career formula.¹³^•¹⁴ In the courtroom, Amanda attempts to reread and reshape the law to reflect progressive values, while Adam treats her action as an assault on the law itself, telling her, "Contempt for the law, that's what you've got. It's a disease, a spreading disease."¹³ Film scholarship notes that although Amanda wins the case, she loses the private argument with her husband, and the ending offers a reconciled but still patriarchal model of marriage.¹⁰ Other readings emphasize that a mainstream Hollywood film putting feminist politics into a satirical comedy was a daring move in 1949, a period when women were being encouraged to leave the wartime workplace.⁸

Director George Cukor's staging drew particular attention from critics. In the dressing-for-dinner scene and the jailhouse scene in which Holliday fully establishes Doris, the camera stays still and lets the performances carry the sequence; Cukor explained that the jailhouse scene was shot full on Holliday with a three-quarter view of Hepburn's back because that was how the text indicated it should be played.⁸

Reception and legacy

Contemporary and later critics rated the film highly. Variety called it "a bright comedy success," and the Associated Press called it one of the smartest comedies in years; the film holds a 96% Tomatometer score on Rotten Tomatoes.⁶ David Ehrenstein, writing in The Criterion Collection's magazine, called it the best of all the Tracy-Hepburn comedies and noted that none of the eight other films the pair made together contrasts and complements their playing styles as well.⁸ Many critics consider it the best film of the pair's collaborations, which also include Woman of the Year (1942) and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967).⁴

The film received an Academy Award nomination for Best Original Screenplay and won a Photoplay Award as one of the best pictures of the month in January 1950. In 1992 it was added to the National Film Registry of the Library of Congress. Its story formula inspired a 1973 ABC television series of the same name, starring Ken Howard and Blythe Danner as the husband-and-wife lawyers, which ran 13 episodes from September to December 1973.¹^•⁵^•¹⁵

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Comedy and romantic films (individual works) › Comedies of the 1940s

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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