The Church of TCM, plus a few words about Adam's Rib

There are many fine Religions out there. Take Sufism, for example, an ancient mystical sect of Islam whose followers believe in a return to the "primordial state of fitra," a word than translates roughly to mean "insight" or "intuition."

For instance: my intuition telling me to stop reading about Sufism.

Growing up, my folks were both fairly religious, but thankfully this didn't translate into going to church a lot. I say thankfully because as all of you who go to church regularly know, there's nothing a physicist can teach you about relative time you can't learn by going to a one and a half hour church service that clearly lasts four hours.

In my house we had another religion. One we worshipped and pledged ourselves undyingly to. And it's one I've followed to this day.

The Church of TCM

Pictured: Jesus crossed with Mr. Rogers

Since it launched on this day (April 14th) in 1994, Turner Classic Movies has become a dominant part of my family's life (I'm pretty sure we tuned in the first day). Of the 1200+ movies I've seen, it's a reasonable guess I saw 400-500 or so for the first time on TCM, and chances are if you had a time machine and picked a random day these last 16 years and walked into my parents house, a TV somewhere inside of it would have TCM on.

It's quite frankly the Indispensable Channel, and it's programming is so wide and varied you can enjoy it on multiple levels of movie knowledge, from the casual fan who wants to watch Casablanca once a month... or, like they did last month, wants to watch every Akira Kurosawa movie ever made (in honor of what would have been his 100th birthday).

But despite all of that watching, now and then I come upon a widely beloved classic that for some reason I've never seen. So, as part of this TCM anniversary I'd like to talk about how I did this recently with a beloved classic and why I, uh... hated it.

Hated Classic #1: Adam's Rib

A vehicle for Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn, who if they had lived in this day in age probably would have probably had their relationship dubbed "Hep-C", Adam's Rib is the story of married attorneys who end up on the opposite sides of an attempted murder trial.

The case: a woman has shot at and wounded her husband, who she thinks is cheating on her.

The way the movie presents the facts the whole thing seems pretty open and shut. The woman is caught at the scene, there are two witnesses, it's her gun and she admits to stalking him up to the apartment and pulling the trigger.

All is well. That is, until Hepburn installs herself as the woman's lawyer (Tracy is given the case as a prosecutor) and proceeds to throw the movie for a vomit-inducing loop.

Hepburn works herself into a real lather, gets into court and throws the following bombshell of a case at a jury: my client (the admitted shooter), a) was just trying to protect her family, and b) if a man had shot his wife under similar circumstances, no one would have a problem with that.

No really, read that again. She admits her client not only did the crime, but had motive and premeditation. Her argument is that if a man had done it, he'd go free. Therefore this woman should go free.

Obviously, Hepburn's tactics lead to marital strife, as Tracy objects to Hepburn trying to shove a traffic cone into the butthole of justice, and Hepburn not understanding why Tracy would want to stand so intolerantly in the way of a woman's right to shoot her cheating husband.

Even in the light of the O.J. trial, where some black people openly rooted for O.J. to go free just because he was black, Adam's Rib cannot be endured as anything approaching the way the justice system works. Johnnie Cochran might have been manipulative and occasionally full of shit, but even he didn't say that O.J. should go free because if it had been a white athlete killing his black girlfriend and her black lover, he'd get off no problem.

Also, that defense strategy doesn't rhyme, which would have been a problem.

Adam's Rib is not really pitched at the level of realism, though. The court scenes are not believable in the slightest and sort of treated as farce (Hepburn at one point puts a series of "accomplished" women on the stand, one of them a circus strongwoman who does backflips in front of the judge before lifting a protesting Tracy in the air with one arm).

But make no mistake, it's farce with a message: women should be equal in the eyes of law and society.

And that's a case worth fighting for... unless you cache it in a legal strategy so dangerously stupid you could use it to justify anything from speeding to, you know, actual murder.

The movie's final kick in the head? Hepburn wins the case. Maybe you guessed that by now, but it still floored me.

Yup. She wins. She fucking wins!

What a profoundly dumb movie.