One of my favorite film proposals is from Without Love. Based on Philip Barry's play, Katharine Hepburn, who starred in the show on Broadway, recruited her off-screen sweetheart Spencer Tracy to act in the film adaptation. They play intellectual patriots-he's a government scientist and she's his assistant-who get along quite nicely as friends but aren't interested in romance. Because of logistics during wartime, Kate gets the bright idea that it would be easier if they married so he can continue his important experiments, and she gives a hilarious nervous monologue proposing a marriage "without love".
The Hays Code didn't allow an unmarried couple to lay down next to one another; one person's feet had to be always on the ground. Without Love was pretty daring for its time, since it stretched the boundaries and filmed some pretty risqué bedroom scenes using the excuse that Spencer Tracy's character was a chronic sleepwalker. To modern audiences, those scenes might seem a little silly, but try and imagine how it felt seeing them in 1945!
While this isn't my favorite Tracy-Hepburn pairing-that award goes to Adam's Rib and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner-it's definitely worth watching. They're awfully cute together in this one, and the romance doesn't include constant bickering like some of their other films. It's nice to see them actually get along, plus Felix Bressart, Kennan Wynn, Gloria Grahame, and Lucille Ball round out the supporting cast nicely.
The Hays Code didn't allow an unmarried couple to lay down next to one another; one person's feet had to be always on the ground. Without Love was pretty daring for its time, since it stretched the boundaries and filmed some pretty risqué bedroom scenes using the excuse that Spencer Tracy's character was a chronic sleepwalker. To modern audiences, those scenes might seem a little silly, but try and imagine how it felt seeing them in 1945!
While this isn't my favorite Tracy-Hepburn pairing-that award goes to Adam's Rib and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner-it's definitely worth watching. They're awfully cute together in this one, and the romance doesn't include constant bickering like some of their other films. It's nice to see them actually get along, plus Felix Bressart, Kennan Wynn, Gloria Grahame, and Lucille Ball round out the supporting cast nicely.