Production
The film was written specifically as a Tracy-Hepburn vehicle (their 6th film together) by friends of the couple, Garson Kanin and Ruth Gordon. The pair, who were married to each other, got their inspiration for the story from the real life case of William and Dorothy Whitney, who were married lawyers who ended up divorcing and marrying their respective clients in a case. Kanin saw great potential in the idea of married lawyers as adversaries, and the plot for Adam's Rib was developed. The original title for the film was Man and Wife, but the MGM front office quickly vetoed it as dangerously indiscreet.
Hepburn and Kanin encouraged Judy Holliday to play the role of Doris in the movie, which was used by Columbia Pictures president Harry Cohn as a screen test for the chance to re-create on film her Broadway success in Kanin's play Born Yesterday. Receiving positive notices for Adam's Rib, Holliday was cast in the 1950 film version of Born Yesterday, for which she won the Academy Award for Best Actress.
It has been noted that in several scenes of the film, there are unusually long takes, where the camera does not move for minutes at a time. Most of these scenes happen when the principal characters are arguing.
Read more about this topic: Adam's Rib
Famous quotes containing the word production:
“To expect to increase prices and then to maintain them at a higher level by means of a plan which must of necessity increase production while decreasing consumption is to fly in the face of an economic law as well established as any law of nature.”
—Calvin Coolidge (1872–1933)
“An art whose limits depend on a moving image, mass audience, and industrial production is bound to differ from an art whose limits depend on language, a limited audience, and individual creation. In short, the filmed novel, in spite of certain resemblances, will inevitably become a different artistic entity from the novel on which it is based.”
—George Bluestone, U.S. educator, critic. “The Limits of the Novel and the Limits of the Film,” Novels Into Film, Johns Hopkins Press (1957)
“The society based on production is only productive, not creative.”
—Albert Camus (1913–1960)