Man's Favorite Sport?
Man's Favorite Sport? is a 1964 American comedy film starring Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss and directed and produced by Howard Hawks. Hawks intended the film to be an homage to his own 1938 screwball classic "Bringing Up Baby" with Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, and unsuccessfully tried to get the original stars to reprise their roles. Plot. Roger Willoughby works at Abercrombie & Fitch as a salesman for sports fishing equipment. He is very successful at his job and highly sought after by his customers, who are looking for equipment which could help them win  the next edition of the yearly fishing tournament at Lake Wakapoogee. His boss Mr. Cadwalader requests Willoughby to also participate in the tournament, something Willoughby had never done before. This request comes at the suggestion of Isolde "Easy" Mueller, the daughter of the owner of the lodge at Lake Wakapogee, and Abigail Page, the director of public relations for the lodge and Easy's friend. They believe it would improve the tournament's standing and Mr. Cadwalader's business. Willoughby refuses to participate. After Abigail and Easy follow him around and speculate about the reasons, he confides the truth in  them: He has never fished in his life, cannot stand the touch or taste of fish, cannot swim and cannot operate a boat. His success comes from listening to his customers, most of which are very talkative: he simply passes on the advice that one customer gives him to his other customers. Abigail and Easy, who themselves are adept at fishing, promise to teach Willoughby in the remaining days until the tournament starts. He arrives at the lodge with a ridiculously large amount of equipment, all of which was provided by Cadwalader. He does not know how  to handle any of it and Abigail's lessons are not very successful, one ending with him almost drowning when he falls out of a boat. During another lesson Easy tells them that famous fishing champion Joe Killroy will arrive and enter the tournament. They think about ways for Willoughby to get out of the tournament and conclude that a broken arm would be a good excuse. So Abigail and Easy put an improvised cast on Willoughby's arm, only to find out that Killroy actually had an accident and has a cast himself. So they ineptly saw off Willoughby 's cast, to his horror. That night, Abigail comes to Willoughby's lodge to request a sleeping pill and lets herself in. When he has to leave to talk to some of his customers, who have also arrived for the tournament and want to get some tips from him, Abigail, who had taken the sleeping pill, falls asleep in his bed. When he comes back, he decides to sleep on the floor. The next morning, Easy arrives looking for Abigail. When she tries to help Willoughby open the zipper of his sleeping bag, his fiancee Tex arrives. She is at  first amused at the sight but when Abigail comes out of his bedroom she storms off. When the three-day tournament starts, Willoughby is still incompetent but, by sheer luck, catches some large fish which make him very competitive. During one of the nights, he walks Abigail to her lodge and they kiss. Even though the kiss clearly impresses her, she acts as if it was a disappointment, confusing and angering him. On the third day, Willoughby, again by pure luck, catches another large fish, eventually winning the tournament. On that evening, Abigail comes to his lodge, in tears. She  apologizes for getting him in so much trouble and also begs him to refuse the prize and come clean with his boss, the tournament director and his customers and competitors about not being able to fish. After she leaves, he admits that he was going to do that anyway but that she made it easier for him. He gathers everyone and confesses everything. Even though his boss fires him, everyone is impressed by his honesty. Willoughby then goes to look for Abigail, who went camping at the lake shore to be alone. He finds her but they bicker until a  storm forces them to share her tent, where they fall asleep, still angry with each other. Meanwhile the competitors convince Cadwalader that he has to rehire Willoughby for business reasons: when it will come out that even a totally incompetent fisherman can win such a tournament with Cadwalader's equipment, people will want to buy that equipment. So Cadwalader goes out on the lake to search for Willoughby. The storm meanwhile has flushed Abigail's tent out to the lake where they are met by Cadwalader's boat. After they hear the good news, Abigail and Willoughby happily kiss again . Production. It was the first in a three picture deal Hawks signed with Paramount. In March 1962 Hawks reported John Fenton Murray was working on the script. The story idea was based on a line in a magazine article Hawks had read about a fishing expert who had never been fishing. In July Hawks said the film would star Cary Grant and a French actress and that the other movies would be "Bengal Tiger" and "Yukon Trail". According to Hawks, Grant turned down the movie because he felt he was too old to appear opposite three young women. By November  the stars were Rock Hudson and Paula Prentiss. The second female lead, Maria Perschy, was a discovery of Hawks'. Another newcomer was model Charlene Holt. Hawks called the film "as broad a comedy as has been filmed in many years. Yet it's believable." Filming took place in January 1963. Hawks said Hudson "tried hard and he worked hard and he did everything he could but Rock is not a comedian. And when you have visualized one person in it and you're trying to get that, it's an awful tough job to do it because you just do n't come out right. And even then we ended up with a pretty good picture." Hawks liked Prentiss saying "she ought to be a big comedy star. I don't know what's the matter." Hawks said the film previewed successfully but Universal wanted twenty minutes cut out to enable an extra screening per day. He claims the film did not preview as well so Universal cut out another twenty minutes and that was the version they released. Release. Box office. The film was released on February 5, 1964, eventually grossing $6 million at the box office, while earning  $3,000,000 in US theatrical rentals. It was the 24th highest grossing film of 1964. Critical reception. The critics' reactions were somewhat tepid, particularly in comparison to Hawks' earlier works, though Molly Haskell wrote a glowing analysis of the picture seven years later in "The Village Voice". Haskell admitted an indifference to the film in 1964, and that upon revisiting the film in 1971 she was "both delighted and deeply moved by the film—delighted by the grace and real humor with which the story was told, and moved by the reverberation of the whole substratum of meaning, of sexual  antagonism, desire, and despair." Hudson was given relatively sympathetic reviews for the difficult position of impersonating Cary Grant. Robin Wood notes: "It was cruel to make [Hudson] repeat the night-club scene from "Bringing up Baby" which Cary Grant brought off with such panache." Prentiss was especially praised for her performance. "Miss Prentiss slips ... agreeably into Katharine Hepburn's shoes. Her bass voice is comically imposing. She's more consciously malevolent/charming than Miss Hepburn in "Baby". She's just terrible to Hudson and her outrageousness almost makes the movie half a good comedy." Robin Wood: "Paula Prentiss is—as  always—very good, but at times one has the feeling that Hawks is importing a characterization on her instead of working with her." Hawks would later say: "Paula Prentiss was good, but she couldn't remember what she was doing from one shot to the next. Her shots never matched". References. Notes Further reading