Pop Culture 101 - ADAM'S RIB

In 1949, the year Adam's Rib premiered, philosopher Simone de Beauvoir published her seminal study of male oppression of women, The Second Sex.

In 1973, ABC launched a short-lived television series based on Adam's Rib. Blythe Danner and Ken Howard starred as the battling lawyers. One episode was a re-make of the film, with Madeline Kahn in Judy Holliday's role. The series lasted 11 weeks.

Although not adapted from Adam's Rib, Joel and Ethan Coen's 2003 film Intolerable Cruelty, about a divorce lawyer who falls in love with his rival attorney's client, was their attempt to capture the spirit of the Tracy-Hepburn classic. George Clooney and Catherine Zeta-Jones starred.

Pierce Brosnan and Julianne Moore played feuding lawyers who have an affair in 2004's Laws of Attraction, a contemporary attempt at a Hepburn-Tracy romantic comedy.

Although best known for his work on glamorous "women's pictures," Cukor was capable of startling realistic effects. The opening of Adam's Rib, in which the cameras follow Judy Holliday through a series of real New York locations, including the subway, as she tracks her philandering husband, had a realistic edge later found in the cinema verite films of the '60s.

by Frank Miller