Without Love *** (1945, Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, Keenan Wynn) – Classic Movie Review 3856

Director Harold S Bucquet’s 1945 comedy is a less well-known and lesser pairing of the screen and real-life team of Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn, based on a play by Philip Barry, author of the Broadway hit The Philadelphia Story, a previous success for Hepburn. The screenplay is written by Donald Ogden Stewart, who won the Best Screenplay Oscar for the movie of The Philadelphia Story (1940).

It has the old World War Two wartime standby plot of an odd couple moving in and bunking up together because of the dearth of accommodation in Washington. Tracy  plays s a misogynist boffin and Hepburn plays a man-hating war widow.

Oddly, the film damps some of the clever fun of the original Broadway stage version that also starred Hepburn. But it is still agreeable, often witty entertainment. Tracy has to work hard to keep up with Hepburn’s sparkling performance, while the expert comedy turns from old reliables Lucille Ball, Keenan Wynn, Carl Esmond, Felix Bressart, Gloria Grahame and Patricia Morison help to jolly it along very nicely.

Also in the cast are Emily Massey, George Davis, George Chandler, Clancy Cooper, Wally Clark, Donald Curtis, Charles Arnt, Eddie Acuff, Clarence Muse, William Forrest, Joe Devlin and James Flavin.

Hepburn starred in the Broadway play of Without Love, which opened at the St James Theatre in New York on 10 November 1942 and ran for 113 performances.

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© Derek Winnert 2016 Classic Movie Review 3856

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