Adam’s Rib, showing tonight at the Walker’s Summer Music and Movies in Loring Park.
Tonight, when you go see Adam’s Rib, pay close attention to Judy Holliday, would you? Judy Holliday, the not-so-bright blonde, butt of jokes, with the fluttery voice and look of kindness and near-despair. She’s a fool, no doubt about it. The dopey girl who has to quickly thumb through a manual to fire a gun at her no-good husband. Who talks like a Brooklynite in the worst way. Judy Holliday, playing the poor gal who seems lost on the witness stand, but firm in her love of her family. Judy Holliday, who picks up this fantastic film and hoists it on her narrow shoulders. Make no mistake about it: while Kate Hepburn and Spencer Tracy have never been better, while they’re the brains of this marvel, Judy Holliday is its beating heart, is its pained soul.
Rumor has it that Kate and Rib director George Cukor and writer Garson Kanin conspired to cast Holliday in the role of the dopey blonde to show Columbia mogul Harry Cohn that she was just right to play the lead in the movie version of the play Born Yesterday. She won an Oscar for that role, which put her on the map. Unfortunately, the map was Ditzville, a role she couldn’t escape… for a time.
But Holliday was smart. Compare her to Jean Hagen, the gal Holliday’s husband is running around on. Now I like Jean Hagen–she’s screechy and wicked and perfect in Singin’ in the Rain–but she’s one note, very simple. Holliday is simply brilliant. Watch her in the first interview with Kate Hepburn in Adam’s Rib, the way she is confused and yet confident within herself, correcting Hepburn on a number of occasions.
When Hollywood, in its brilliance, thought to keep her pigeonholed as the ditz, Holliday went back to Broadway and started again, taking on more ambitious roles, flexing her muscles.
Then breast cancer took her at age 43. So instead of a career that might have taken off in a variety of strange angles (who knows what the following decades and directors would have done for her?), Judy Holliday was gone. Too soon.
So tonight, if you decide to visit Loring Park to watch this sweet little picture, pay attention to Judy Holliday. She is still staring at us, imploring us to pay attention to her character’s plight, still drawing our attention away from the circus in the courtroom, to the woman who has to go home to her kids each night.
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