Marian Ramsay realizes that her wealthy husband Michael has lost interest in her on their 19th wedding anniversary together. Still craving romance, she takes up with "Mr. Jaromir", a mysterious young man who is really the deposed king of the tiny Balkan country of Morania. Their grown daughter Tillie discovers what is going on with her parents and flirts with Jaromir to throw a spanner into the works of her mother's affair. This has the unintended consequence of ruining her relationship with Nathan Reade, a stuffy archaeologist more interested in dinosaur bones than the curves of a woman's body. At the same time, Mr. Ramsay tries to use his fortune to place Jaromir back on the throne of Morania so as to eliminate the competition. All these situations are compared and contrasted with the love lives of cavemen and women fifty thousand years ago, proving that relations between men and women have progressed very little since then.
Meant to be a character study of "the modern girl in a new light" Adam's Rib was not one of director Cecil B. DeMille's runaway successes, barely breaking even at the box office. This was mainly due to the lavish sets built for the sequences that took place in prehistoric times - a relatively small part of the movie, but expensive nonetheless. DeMille had wanted May McAvoy (The Jazz Singer) for the part of Tillie, but she balked at the scanty cavegirl costume she would have to wear during the prehistoric scenes. Instead he cast Pauline Garon, a Broadway actress whose trim figure had gotten her work as a body double for Lillian Gish and Sylvia Breamer. After Adam's Rib she shot to stardom, playing the titular role in the crime melodrama The Average Woman (1924) and co-starring with Gloria Swanson and John Boles in The Love of Sunya (1927). Her career was curtailed in the 1930s when she was tragically struck by polio.