1949 | USA | NR | 101 min.
They just don’t make smart romantic comedies like this any more—but maybe they would if more women wrote them, as Oscar-winner Ruth Gordon (Maude in “Harold and Maude”) did in 1949. Sparkling, sophisticated, and ineffably entertaining, this ultimate battle-of-the-sexes is told with a fiery feminist savvy decades ahead of its time. A prosecutor (Spencer Tracy) finds himself on the opposite side of the aisle from his defense lawyer wife (Katharine Hepburn) when she takes on a client charged with the attempted murder of her philandering husband. The courtroom conflict soon becomes a source of marital discord as the headline-making case turns into a battleground for sexual equality. Hostilities arise, chauvinism is exposed, barbs are traded, and zingers crackle in this very best of the Tracy-Hepburn vehicles. The only thing we’d object to? You missing it.