Movie Review - The Philadelphia Story

The Philadelphia Story (1940) It is such a joy to come across a movie that truly excellent in every aspect.  Great cast(Katherine Hepburn, James Stewart and Cary Grant plus a top notch supporting cast), great scrip(based on a Broadway script written especially for Hepburn), and director(George Cukor)  each bringing their tasks home with skill, a complete package.  AFI put this movie at #5 for Romantic Comedies.  It's all of that and more.

On the eve of her second marriage wealthy and beautiful Tracy (Hepburn) has questions about how she really feels when her ex-husband (Grant) returns bringing a tabloid reporter (Stewart) along for the ride.  In the end she's not the only one who will re-assess how they feel and what they want to do with their lives.

This is a sharp smart movie with some really wonderful performances not only by the three stars (I keep forgetting how good Cary Grant can be) but from the rest of the cast as well.  But mostly they just need to keep setting the big three up and then get out of the way.  Think of this movie as Middle America's mid-20th Century riff on Shakespeare's "Taming of the Shrew".  Like the Bard's Kate Tracy is headstrong and unaccustomed to suffering other people's shortcomings.  America's Kate is stylish and coolly remote as the resident "goddess" winding her way among all the men in her life.  Her philandering father delivers one of only awkward moment in the movie.  His "explanation" of why husbands cheat is appropriate in the context of the movie's time but just sounds foolish 70+ years later. The other moment is in the opening of the movie when Grant grabs Hepburn by the face and shoves her to the ground.  The female character doesn't seem to be injured nor particularly upset by the move but it feels uncomfortable in this day and age.  Meanwhile Tracy ends up with no less than three men who want to marry her.  In the end she finds a much more modern partnership than her Elizabethan counterpart manages.

The stories behind the movie are almost as much fun as the film itself. Shot in just 8 weeks the movie apparently required NO re-takes.  The opening scene is great especially when it dawns on you that there is NO dialogue!  Stewart would win an Oscar for the role even though he always said that Henry Fonda should have won that year for "Grapes of Wrath".  For Hepburn the movie was something of jump start for a career that had hit a string of flops (she was listed as "box office poison" by a group of theater owners).

In the end the movie is just spectacular.  I was prepared to like it but not prepared to be drawn in by it the way I was.  This should be required viewing by most modern movie directors.

Rating = ***** You Should Own It