Film number eleven in my 100 Essential Films series (if you missed the first one, you can find the explanation for what I’m doing here) is the light and breezy romantic screwball comedy The Philadelphia Story. Released in 1940, the movie was selected in 1995 for preservation in the U.S. National Film Registry.
One of the most amusing minor moments of the movie is MGM sliding in a bit of cross promotion, as James Stewart sings Somewhere Over the Rainbow, which was featured the year before in MGM’s The Wizard of Oz. Less amusing is the character of Uncle Willie. He’s presented as a lecherous old man, and even goes so far as to sexually touch a woman non-consensually, which is played for laughs.
I was able to screen The Philadelphia Story for free with my HBO Max subscription.
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before scratch-off
The Philadelphia Story (1940)
dir. George Cukor
Rated: N/A
image: Pop Chart Lab
Alcohol plays a crucial role in the plot of The Philadelphia Story. I mention that because the film was released in 1940, a mere seven years after the end of prohibition. The Broadway play that served as the source material premièred the year before. As screwball comedies go, this one is about a five on the zany scale, with the full-blast Bringing Up Baby peaking that scale at a ten. It’s an amiable enough picture, relying mostly on the charms of its stellar cast, Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and James Stewart.
Philadelphia socialite Tracy Lord is set to marry new-money social climber George Kittredge after her disastrous first marriage to C.K. Dexter Haven ended in a bitter divorce two years earlier. Kittredge, a “man of the people,” has his sights set on the world of politics. George has all of the qualities Dexter lacked, according to Tracy, whose biggest beef with her former husband was his drinking, a pastime Tracy has only overindulged in once, during her marriage to Dexter. The Lord family gathers and prepares for the wedding on the day before the big event, with the exception of Tracy’s father, who has left her mother to pursue an affair with a dancer.
Meanwhile, in a harbinger of our current paparazzi-fueled media age, Spy magazine publisher Sidney Kidd has devised a plan to get a surreptitious all-access pass to the high society wedding. As it happens, Tracy’s ex-husband works for Spy, in its (improbable) South American bureau, and Kidd has hatched a plan to sneak a reporter and photographer into the wedding. The plan is to have Dexter introduce Macaulay "Mike" Connor and Liz Imbrie as friends of Tracy’s brother, Junius, who can’t attend the wedding due to his work in Argentina as a U.S. diplomat. The stage is set for high jinks, as Tracy struggles with her feelings for both George and Dexter, and as she also gets to know – and starts to fall for – Mike.
Playwright Philip Barry wrote the stage version of The Philadelphia Story specifically for Katharine Hepburn. The actress’s career in Hollywood was floundering after several box office failures, including – unbelievably, considering its current reputation – Bringing Up Baby. In 1938, Harry Brandt, president of the Independent Theatre Owners of America, took out an advertisement in entertainment trade publications in which he pleaded with Hollywood producers to avoid casting actors he deemed “Box Office Poison.” Hepburn was among those he listed. But the success of the play, and critics’ positive reviews of Hepburn’s performance as Tracy, turned her career around and led to the movie version.
Even though The Philadelphia Story is one of the best-known examples of the “comedy of remarriage” subgenre, popular in the 1930s and ‘40s, I was still delighted with how the film kept me guessing as to who Tracy would end up with by the film’s finale.
It’s never in doubt that this is a love triangle. Poor George Kittredge never has a chance. Actor John Howard does a fine job as George, but the character is practically a nonentity. Howard’s best and funniest moment as George comes early in the film when he feebly tries to mount a horse to take a ride with Tracy. The three or four failures that precede George finally getting in the saddle signal the character’s impotence and his ultimate ill-suitedness to make Tracy happy.
Tracy’s two real love interests, her ex-husband Dexter and the poetic writer Mike, who reluctantly works as a reporter to pay the bills, both make us forget completely about George. The wattage of the stars in those roles, Cary Grant as Dexter and James Stewart as Mike, burn white-hot in every scene they share with Hepburn.
I’m somewhat of an outlier in not fully appreciating Bringing Up Baby – the movie’s antics that I alluded to earlier, in which every scene’s zaniness volume is cranked to 11, struck me as obnoxious – but I can’t deny Grant and Hepburn’s screen chemistry in it. Their repartee here, in which they spend the majority of the film sniping at each other, is acerbically charming. Dexter’s description of the only time Tracy got drunk, which ended with her venturing onto the roof of their house completely naked and bathed in the moonlight, is itself intoxicating. Grant makes us understand how Dexter could be at once completely besotted and frustrated with Tracy.
The opening scene, a flashback to the couple’s acrimonious split two years prior, sets up their dynamic splendidly, even if it’s slightly cringe-inducing when viewed through our current understanding of domestic violence. As Dexter is leaving their house for the final time, Tracy breaks one of Dexter’s golf clubs over her knee. He responds by thrusting his hand into her face and pushing her violently to the ground. The set-up that Tracy is an impudent woman who will get her comeuppance by the film’s end is subverted by the screwball convention of a strong woman who challenges her male partner’s masculinity, putting her on equal footing with him.
In contrast to the fireworks between Hepburn and Grant, the scenes in which Tracy gets to know Mike are conversely sweet and heartfelt. The emotional connection the two make is splendid when Mike discovers Tracy reading his book at the local library after his cover has been blown.
Jimmy Stewart plays Mike with a thin layer of hard-bitten cynicism covering the classic “awe-shucks” demeanor for which the actor was famous. One of Stewart’s best comedic moments in the movie is a scene in which Mike is astonished at the decadence of the fine silver and serving dishes that have been delivered to Tracy as wedding gifts.
And there’s nothing quite as fun or funny as Stewart playing completely soused, as he does in the third act. Mike and Tracy, for only the second time in her life, succumb to the revelry during a soiree on the night before the wedding. What the two get up to during their drunken exploits, and how they handle it the next morning, leads to the film’s climactic twist.
In between the dynamics of the three leads, director George Cukor sets up a host of screwball antics that today play like classic sitcom setups. Determined to make her family appear normal to the interlopers, Tracy does the exact opposite when she pretends her uncle is actually her father, so she doesn’t have to admit that the patriarch won’t be attending her wedding. The joke is on her when, moments later, her father unexpectedly arrives.
Cukor also excels at the classical Hollywood filmmaking techniques. The best example of this comes midway through the film, when George and Tracy share a rare tender moment together. Cukor stages the two sitting outside on a set of entryway steps. This affords the director the opportunity to put his leading lady slightly above her costar, looking down at him. The two face each other in profile, in an intimate closeup. Three-point lighting creates the famous halo effect, casting Hepburn in the role of an idealized femininity.
One of the highlights of the movie is Virginia Weidler as Dinah, Tracy’s pre-teen sister. The young scamp, who only wants Tracy to get back together with Dexter, amiably agrees to help Tracy with a separate ruse of making her family appear eccentric to the reporter and photographer. Weidler does a hilarious ballet routine for the guests before showing off her knowledge of the French language. It’s the aristocracy by way of the documentary Grey Gardens, and this brief bit of the film tickled me to no end.
The Philadelphia Story is pure escapism. It’s a love story that allowed a country just starting to make its way out of the darkness of the Great Depression – and only months away from plunging into the hell of World War II – to see a satirical version how the other half lived and loved. Hepburn, Grant, and Stewart, and their on-screen chemistry, make the movie greater than the sum of its parts, if only marginally so.
after scratch-off
image: Pop Chart Lab
image: Pop Chart Lab