AllMovie

Katharine Hepburn says "by gum" several times in Without Love and "jiminy cricket" at least once. She says many other things, mostly clever, in this comedy written for her by Philip Barry, the elegant playwright who had rescued her from the doldrums with The Philadelphia Story back in 1939. And Love's Jamie Rowan is almost like the dowdy cousin of Philadelphia's Tracy Lord. Both women had loved and lost and become hardened by the experience. But where Tracy is about to throw herself into a new and obviously doomed relationship with a stiff socialite, Jamie has the good fortune of meeting Spencer Tracy. And no one was more reliable than Tracy. He may not have realized it at first -- he never did, did he? -- but Hepburn's high-minded shrews always needed his taming, whether she was a globe-trotting reporter, as in The Woman of the Year (1942), or, like Jamie, a rather lost soul no longer sure of her place in life. It is difficult to believe that Tracy wasn't Philip Barry's inspiration for the no-nonsense, somnambulistic Pat Jamieson, but when Barry wrote the play, Tracy and Hepburn had yet to become a team. Needless to say, they are letter perfect in Without Love, which also benefits from the presence of two of the screen's best second bananas, Keenan Wynn and Lucille Ball, the latter playing Hepburn's cynical secretary. Despite the brevity of her part -- less than 30 seconds -- Gloria Grahame earns ninth billing as a flower seller suffering from hay fever.