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Battle of the Sexes-sp

Most of you may know about the story of the tennis match between Billie Jean King and Bobby Riggs in 1993. We have memories of the time and the famous event that took place. However this movie does capture more than a battle between a talented, skillful female tennis champion standing up to an older male, retired professional tennis player who was a male chauvinistic showman who thought he could laugh his way to making money and putting down women. This story and this well-done film shows us the beginning of the Women’s Movement and also the glimmer that eventually grew to a shining light where gay women could eventually be themselves. This goal still had a long way to go in the 1970s when this story took place.

Emma Stone was excellent as Billie Jean King and Steve Carell could not have been better as the clueless self-proclaimed, “Man” of the hour. Andrea Riseborough was very good as Billie Jean’s intimate confidant and hair dresser. The excellent supporting casts included Nathalie Morales, Bill Pullman, Elizabeth Shue, Alan Cumming and Eric Olsen. The movie was directed by Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris with the screen play by Simon Beaufoy. The dramatic tennis matches which were shown in the film may have used actual archived footage, which certainly added to the excitement of the movie. This story deserved to be told and we are sure that it will have an important place in cinematic history about the role of women in sports and in American culture as well as memorializing an exciting key moment in time. (2017)

*****

Adam’s Rib- nf.  Every once and awhile we like to go back and view a well acclaimed classic film. We do it for enjoyment but also to  try to figure out what is that makes it so great and so enduring. We chose one the 10 best films of all time according to the American Film Institute. The magnificent screenplay by Ruth Gordon and Garsen Karnin, nominated for an Academy Award puts a comedic spin on the age old battle of the sexes which really foreshadows the Women’s Movement and Women’s Liberation which was still 20 years away. The story opens as a woman (Judy Holiday) secretly follows her husband (Tom Ewell) to the apartment of a woman with whom he is having an affair. Quite distraught, she pulls out a revolver and tries to shoot the couple injuring her husband. The following day over breakfast, in a beautiful Manhattan apartment, another husband and wife are reading about the impending trial of this woman. The man who happens to be an Assistant District Attorney (Spencer Tracy) feels that this woman deserves to be fully punished for her terrible deed. His wife, a high powered attorney (Katherine Hepburn), isn’t so sure about that and believes that if the shooter were a man finding his wife having an affair, there would be much more sympathy the perpetrator. Wouldn’t you know it, the husband is assigned to be the prosecutor and the wife has independently decided she would offer to defend the shooter. The trial becomes the vehicle for a hilarious but penetrating analysis of society’s attitude towards women. All the arguments and counter arguments get played out in the courtroom during the day and then in Mr. and Mrs. Bonner’s (Tracy and Hepburn) apartment in the evening. Throughout the film each time one of the characters would seemingly make the winning point in the  male-female conflict, the other would seem to find a way to swing the pendulum in the other direction. The chemistry between these two people is quite palpable. Not only are they great actors but it is well known that they also had a real life romance over many years although never married to each other. The icing on the cake for this movie is that it also introduced an unforgettable Cole Porter song Farewell Amanda which is weaved into the story as it is sung by one of the characters (David Wayne) accompanying himself on the piano, reprised by the voice of Frank Sinatra on the radio, whistled by Katherine Hepburn and sung a cappella by Spencer Tracy. So put together a top notch story with a contemporary social issue that everyone can relate, add well timed comedy, two very well liked actors who have something special between themselves and a hummable musical theme and voila – you have an American classic film ! (1949)