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Powerful

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

The joyful confection is coated in a sparkly gloss, bright enough to gleam from the darkest, most cynical corners.

Through painfully honest and emotional moments, the movie becomes irresistibly relatable

One of my favorite film proposals is from Without Love. Based on Philip Barry's play, Katharine Hepburn, who starred in the show on Broadway, recruited her off-screen sweetheart Spencer Tracy to act in the film adaptation. They play intellectual patriots—he's a government scientist and she's his assistant—who get along quite nicely as friends but aren't interested in romance. Because of logistics during wartime, Kate gets the bright idea that it would be easier if they married so he can continue his important experiments, and she gives a hilarious nervous monologue proposing a marriage "without love".The Hays Code didn't allow double beds in a bedroom, or for an unmarried couple to lay down next to one another—one person's feet had to be always on the ground. Without Love was pretty daring for its time, since it stretched the boundaries and filmed some pretty risqué bedroom scenes using the excuse that Spencer Tracy's character was a chronic sleepwalker. To modern audiences, those scenes might seem a little silly, but try and imagine how it felt seeing them in 1945!While this isn't my favorite Tracy-Hepburn pairing—that award goes to Adam's Rib and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner—it's definitely worth watching. They're awfully cute together in this one, and the romance doesn't include constant bickering like some of their other films. It's nice to see them actually get along, plus Felix Bressart, Kennan Wynn, Gloria Grahame, and Lucille Ball round out the supporting cast nicely.

During WWII there was a housing shortage in Washington, DC, and that's what sets the plot in motion in Without Love. Jamie Rowan (Hepburn), a fairly well-off widow, advertises for a caretaker for her Washington home (she also has a place in the country) and Pat Jamison (Tracy), a scientist working on an aviation invention for the government (but with no skill at taking care of the house) moves in. Both these people have been deeply hurt by love, she by the death of her husband, he by rejection from a woman he loved. They decide on a marriage "without love" because they want companionship without emotional entanglement. Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn play another couple, Carl Esmond is a man attempting to romance Kate; Patricia Morison plays an attractive bitch.I guess the movie doesn't really reach any heights, but it's a lovely, thoughtful, intelligent, warm and yet surprisingly sharp comedy, with very good acting. The film creates a little world and invites you in. Harold S. Bucquet (who took over Kate's film, Dragon Seed, when Jack Conway fell ill) had been the director of the MGM Dr. Kildare films, which were pretty darn good programmers. He brings a nice quality to this love story.

This movie was quite slow and drawn-out, silly and dated, and not very funny either. The main idea about a couple who marry for convenience, and intend not to share a bedroom, but then develop feelings for each other after all, is quite good though - although not original. So much more could have been made by it. What one wants to see in a story with that theme, is the sexual tension slowly growing between the man and woman, and some innuendo... that is the whole point. Instead there were too many other, uninteresting, people involved here, and there was too much running in and out through doors like in a drawing room comedy on the theater stage. The whole movie is carried by the two leads: Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn. I like it that Hollywood already in the 1940:s could make a love story with leads who were no longer young (especially that the woman is no longer young), and who did not have the traditional perfect handsome/pretty looks but instead more individual looks. The couple makes the movie worth watching once, in spite of all its shortcomings.

If it wasn't for "Adam's Rib", this film would be my favourite of the Tracy/Hepburn movies. I like the characters they both play, and there's a plus of another plot going on in the background between Lucille Ball and Keenan Wynn. Of course you know what's going to happen by the end but the movie is entertaining and the obviousness doesn't matter. I heard that Tracy wouldn't play in this on stage which seems a shame as he's so good on the screen as the cranky scientist taking up residence in Hepburn's cellar. Hepburn is fabulous as ever and the brittle widow is a perfect part for her. Of course no one who marries in the movies 'without love' stays that way. If they did we wouldn't have had these kind of movies in the golden age of Hollywood!