Film
Adam's Rib
George Cukor's screwball classic pits Spencer Tracy and Katharine Hepburn as married lawyers who land on opposite sides of an attempted-murder trial, and turns the courtroom into a referendum on their own marriage. It's dazzlingly fast, endlessly quotable, and quietly serious under the banter — a comedy that actually has an argument to make about equality, not just a joke to land.
If you liked this
Woman of the Year1942
The Tracy-Hepburn chemistry that powers Adam's Rib started here, seven years earlier, with the same premise of two brilliant equals figuring out whether marriage can survive competition.
But The gender politics resolve in a way that feels more dated and less generous than Adam's Rib's ending.
His Girl Friday1940
If you loved the machine-gun dialogue and the sense of two sharp people who can't stop sparring or loving each other, this is the fastest, funniest version of that formula ever made.
But Cary Grant's editor is a much more ruthless, self-interested operator than Adam or Amanda — the romance is meaner.
Intolerable Cruelty2003no page yet
A modern-dress descendant: two lawyers on opposing sides of divorce cases, trading legal barbs and falling for each other, with Coen brothers polish and a genuinely great George Clooney performance.
But It's broader and more cynical, with none of Adam's Rib's underlying sincerity about what equality in a marriage should look like.
The wildcard
Something you would not have found on your own.
RBG2018
Adam's Rib dramatizes, as comedy, the exact equal-protection argument Ginsburg spent her career turning into actual law — watching RBG shows you the joke becoming jurisprudence.
A documentary portrait of Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who has said she loved this film as a young woman and later built real legal arguments — cited in actual Supreme Court cases — on the same idea Amanda Bonner argues in a Hollywood courtroom: that the law shouldn't treat men and women differently.
But It's a straightforward, reverent documentary with none of the wit or performance fireworks — you're trading Hepburn's timing for archival footage and talking heads.
People
Cast
Spencer TracyAdam Bonner
Katharine HepburnAmanda Bonner
Judy HollidayDoris Attinger
Tom EwellWarren Attinger
David WayneKip Lurie
Jean HagenBeryl Caighn
Hope EmersonOlympia La Pere
Eve MarchGrace
Clarence KolbJudge Reiser
Emerson TreacyJules Frikke
Polly MoranMrs. McGrath
Will WrightJudge Marcasson
Directing
- Jack GreenwoodAssistant Director
- Joel FreemanAssistant Director
- George CukorDirector
- Andrew MartonSecond Unit Director
Writing
- Garson KaninScreenplay
- Ruth GordonScreenplay
Production
- Lawrence WeingartenProducer
- Charles LevinUnit Manager
Recommended by
Legally Blonde, RBG, The Philadelphia Story, Ball of Fire, The Lady Eve, The Awful Truth, The Thin Man, The Taming of the Shrew, Ninotchka, Baby Mama, The Good Wife, Woman of the Year, Mr. & Mrs. Smith, My Cousin Vinny, After the Thin Man, The War of the Roses, The Quiet Man, I Was a Male War Bride, Pat and Mike, McLintock!, Private Benjamin, On the Basis of Sex