Whatever may be said in the continuing battle of words of stage vs. screen, "Without Love," Phillip Barry's play of a few years back, has become as a motion picture far more entertaining fare than much of what clutters up the Shubert chain today.

Donald Ogden Stewart, who did "The Philadelphia Story," was the obvious choice for screen-play duties, and he has done what most screen-writers are afraid to do: on celluloid, "Without Love" is not just a photographic reproduction of a stage play. Advantage is made of the medium to an enormously greater extent than in, say, "Claudia." Which is as it should be.

And in this drawing-room comedy that wanders so far from the drawing room, Katherine Hepburn, in her original role, is ever the actress, never a "star." Spencer Tracy, whom she marries without love and in haste, to succumb at leisure, is ever Spencer Tracy: a big teddy-bear shock-absorber in whose farm-boy's mouth the clever lines seem sometimes out of place.

Tracy, as a scientist, often appears to have only one foot on the ground; and as a lover, both feet too solidly on the ground. Hepburn, as the young, aristocratic, New England widow, repeatedly comes forth with unexpected Gertrude Steinisms: "No thank you thank you very much but no thank you."

The formula used to place two people in a position where they want a Platonic marriage need not be gone into; suffice it to say that everything is quite mature, quite credible. What should be said is that Will Hays was very happily asleep when the matter of the sacred institution of marriage, and other matters, arose, which counters the objection that Graumont's is always so much more sterile than the Rialto.

Phillip Barry's play was mostly Hepburn. Its plot was flimsy; it was, after all, just a simple courtship within an artificial framework, something that oriental and royal couples go through all the time. Stewart's added persiflage is amusing and unassuming. What makes "Without Love" thoroughly refreshing is the superior acting of la Hepburn, buoyant, mature, clever, with more than peaches-and-cream, and with as much sex as she can muster.

This MGM production presents a delicate rearrangement of the queen and the knight on a chess-board they have seen at least twice before, in "Keeper of the Flame" and "Woman of the Year." It does not present merely a re-grooved record; Katie and Tracy manage to stay in character in an intelligent comedy that has good lines, a virtue plays like "The Wind is Ninety" don't feel is necessary. There's even a quote from T. S. Eliot--"April is the cruelest month"--which must be some kind of record for the movies. jgt