Movie Monday: Without Love (1945)

If there is one thing I know for sure, it is that Old Hollywood couples made for a great match both on-screen and off-screen! Today’s Movie Monday film review is all about the movie Without Love starring a covert couple that created a lot of classic films together!

Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn made for an iconic couple in the movies, but in real life they had to keep their romance a secret. This didn’t stop them from letting a little bit of the real world love they had for one another creep onto the big screen for audiences to appreciate everywhere!

Of all of the Katherine Hepburn and Spence Tracy duo films, I think Without Love is my favorite. It isn’t a typical romance movie, instead it is all about convenience until it isn’t at all about convenience anymore. This is a film about how thinking with your head sometimes leads to something greater for the heart.

With a cotton candy sweetness like what Without Love posses, you really can’t go wrong watching this film anytime of the year! I know Valentine’s Day is coming up, but this love story is not tied to one special holiday. Instead, we see a couple take a journey through love and we get to see a peek inside their minds when as they try to decide what would be best for the future.

A huge surprise for me when watching Without Love for the first time was seeing the great Lucille Ball starring alongside one of my favorite Old Hollywood couples. Classic film fans know that Lucy had a vast career that included a long run in movies. However, Lucy was not known for her roles in films and wasn’t widely appreciated until she had her sitcom The I Love Lucy Show. Still, if you watch some of the movies that Lucy starred in before she made it big in television you will see how talented she is. Lucy’s films will make you laugh, smile, cry, hate her character, and then love her again. That was the kind of talent that Lucille Ball had.

This film review wouldn’t be complete without me talking about the talents of Katherine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy. These two just had a way of balancing one another out, yet that balancing dynamic shifted slightly with each movie they were in together. No doubt the off-screen romance helped out with the chemistry on-screen, but I believe that a lot of what we saw between their characters still took a large amount of professionalism and poise. It wasn’t easy to be in a secret romance with your co-star back in Old Hollywood and still be able to keep the set a professional area.

Katherine Hepburn has always come across to me as a tough cookie, but she was such a good actress that in Without Love Hepburn somehow makes herself seem like a overgrown schoolgirl. The sweetness she portrays because of her feelings towards Tracy’s character is almost tangible through the screen.

It is all beautifully contrasted by the serious science experiments that the couple conduct throughout the movie. Matter of a fact, even with the affection Hepburn shows in her character she never let her stray towards being unknowledgeable. We see Hepburn as a strong, capable woman who just so happens to be in love, and isn’t that the sweetest love story of all?

Spencer Tracy, on the other hand, has a stoney exterior, he is not interested in anything but what science can provide for him. However, we slowly begin to see that structure crack and eventually completely fall apart. This couple complements one another while also sharing enough similarities to be heading in the same direction.

Without Love reaffirms why I think Spencer Tracy is one of Old Hollywood’s best leading men. Tracy had the skill of making you believe he is steadfast in one emotion and then he just pulls the rug out from underneath your feet while remaining very much the character you trusted and believed in all along. Very few actors or actresses have had that ability, Spencer Tracy is one of the few.

Much Love,

Sarah