Film review

George Cukor (1940)

Autres temps, autres moeurs … In the prologue to George Cukor’s film a man exits a house and his marriage.  His wife, standing in the doorway, breaks one of his golf clubs in two.  The husband’s revenge parting shot is shaping up as a punch to her face until he changes his mind and merely pushes her over.  The aggressor is Cary Grant, in 1940 an increasingly well-liked leading man.  The woman on the receiving end is Katharine Hepburn, considered ‘box-office poison’ when The Philadelphia Story arrived in cinemas.  Audiences knew they were watching a comedy; even so, the effect of this domestic violence was remarkable – is even more remarkable in long retrospect.  Grant’s character, C K Dexter Haven, wasn’t considered a villain – even in comic terms – as a result of his behaviour; audiences who had found Hepburn an overbearing screen presence enjoyed her opening pratfall as if she – rather than her character, the entitled socialite Tracy Lord – had it coming.  Hepburn’s loss of dignity in the prologue heralds what’s to come throughout the film.  When she and Grant co-starred in Howard Hawks’s Bringing Up Baby (1938), he was repeatedly made to look silly, often by her.  With the boot on the other foot, the movie-going public warmed to Katharine Hepburn.  The Philadelphia Story was one of the biggest popular successes of her long movie career.

Not that it’s quite as simple as that.  The playwright Philip Barry, a friend of Hepburn, wrote the role of Tracy Lord specifically for her.  She had played it on Broadway and, when The Philadelphia Story proved a commercial hit there, bought the film rights.  Keenly aware of Hepburn’s persona and talents, Barry devised a highly effective combination.  He supplies plenty of opportunities for her to show off her sharp-tongued, maddeningly superior side, as Tracy runs verbal rings round others; by cutting her down to size, he also enables Hepburn to express Tracy’s emotional brittleness.  She does this affectingly thanks in part to another important aspect of her acting (though it’s a quality shared with the best of her contemporaries, Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwyck):  Hepburn doesn’t bid for audience sympathy.  (Until this performance, her indifference to what audiences thought of her was probably a main reason why they found her dislikeable.)  George Cukor and Donald Ogden Stewart, who adapted Barry’s play for the screen, show a similarly good understanding of both the leading lady and the source material.  That opening spat between Hepburn and Cary Grant is Cukor’s and Stewart’s invention.

Despite its stage origins, The Philadelphia Story is a prime example of a specifically Hollywood sub-genre of the time – the ‘comedy of remarriage’[1].  The film’s prologue is followed by a ‘Two years later’ title.  It’s the eve of Tracy’s wedding to George Kittredge (John Howard) – a marriage of old and new money.  George is, as well as rich, handsome but more conspicuously boring:  he and wilful Tracy are evidently not made for each other.  If her romantic options were tying the knot with plodding George vs reconciliation with exasperating, charismatic Dexter, it would be no contest.  A third suitor, Macaulay ‘Mike’ Connor (James Stewart), is essential to the story, in more ways than one.  New York-based Mike, a journalist, and photographer Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), who’s also his girlfriend, are dispatched to Philadelphia to cover Tracy’s wedding – a major social event in the city.  Mike and Tracy have at least one thing in common:  moral censure of others comes easily to them.  The plot pivots on this high-minded pair being taken down a peg or two.

Tracy divorced Dexter because he was easygoing to the point of drunken philandering; she’s similarly outraged by the marital infidelity of her father, Seth (John Halliday).  Now separated from Tracy’s mother (Mary Nash), he returns to the family home for the wedding, and the sake of good form.  (Dexter also returns for the occasion, not for the same reasons.)  Mike despises his employer, ‘Spy’ magazine, and its unscrupulous publisher, Sidney Kidd (Henry Daniell).  Mike also detests the Lord family’s wealth and privilege.  Like Tracy’s surname, his given name is no accident:  Macaulay Connor aspires to be a serious writer.  He has published a book of short stories, which didn’t earn him a fortune.

Liz Imbrie, who would rather make a living as a painter than as a high-society snapper, takes a rueful but more accepting view than Mike of the Lords’ opulent lifestyle – their acres of rooms, their fleet of domestic staff.  And the film-makers are amused, even charmed, by it.  Like plenty of social comedies before and since (all the way up to Emerald Fennell’s repellent Saltburn last year), The Philadelphia Story takes the view that the well-bred wealthy, however badly they behave, are more entertaining than their inferiors – whether those are servants or someone who, like George Kittredge, has worked his way up to prosperity.  Dexter is part of Tracy’s social set but not quite one of the idle rich.  He’s a designer of yachts, including the ‘True Love’, on which he and Tracy spent their honeymoon:  now his wedding gift to his ex-wife is a miniature of the yacht.  He also has connections with Sidney Kidd:  Dexter has been doing something or other for ‘Spy’ in South America and agrees with Kidd to get Mike and Liz into the Lord household by introducing them as friends of Tracy’s brother, a diplomat in Argentina (he doesn’t come back for the wedding).  Although Tracy doesn’t believe this, she reluctantly agrees to let Mike and Liz stay to cover the wedding once Dexter reveals that Kidd is sitting on a muckraking piece about Seth Lord’s affair with a dancer.

The dialogue, always dynamically witty, is mostly very enjoyable too but there’s a startling interruption in a confrontation between Tracy and her father.  After justifying his womanising as a natural reflection of male ‘reluctance to grow old’ (this anticipates world-weary Rose Castorini’s ‘They fear death’ diagnosis in Moonstruck (1987)), Seth Lord proceeds to tell his daughter, brushing off her several interruptions, that:

‘I suppose the best mainstay a man can have as he gets along in years is a daughter. … A devoted young girl gives a man the illusion that youth is still his. … without her, he might be inclined to go in search of his youth. That‘s just as important to him as it is to any woman.  But with a girl of his own – full of warmth for him, full of foolish, unquestioning, uncritical affection … You have a good mind, a pretty face, a disciplined body that does what you tell it.  You have everything it takes to make a lovely woman except the one essential.  An understanding heart.’

Senior citizens of the patriarchy – whether represented by Seth’s breathtaking, brutal candour or by Tracy’s genial Uncle Willie (Roland Young), an inveterate bottom-pincher – are the hardest for modern audiences to take in The Philadelphia Story.  That both parts are well played gives them extra piquancy:  despite his antics, it’s hard not to enjoy watching Uncle Willie.

What’s more, the set-up requires Tracy to acquire an understanding heart and (along with Katharine Hepburn) come down from her pedestal.  She finds Mike’s short stories in the local library, and likes them.  The two are already warming to each other when they both drink too much and go for a midnight swim together, after which George sees Mike carrying Tracy into the house.  Next morning, amid the competing hangovers (Hepburn’s is the best but Roland Young runs her a good second), George demands an explanation from his fiancée, who says she has none.  She knows that George has, misguidedly, idealised her – and that she doesn’t love him.  As the wedding guests gather, the engagement is called off and the scene set for a terrific finale.

George isn’t alone in observing Mike and Tracy during the night:  the younger Lord sister, twelve-year-old Dinah (Virginia Weidler), who thinks Tracy should never have got rid of Dexter, is also keeping an eye on things, and reports what she sees.  Nothing daunted and regardless of Liz, Mike asks Tracy to marry him instead.  She turns him down, ‘Because I don’t think Liz would like it … and I’m not sure you would … and I’m even a little doubtful about myself’.  But when Tracy goes to explain to those-gathered-together what’s happened, she can’t go through with that either.  Her ex-husband seizes his chance.   It’s a pity the heroine’s learning humility is underlined in one of the film’s few false moments:  as her father prepares to give her away to Dexter, Tracy asks Seth how he feels and he replies, ‘Proud’.  But the remarriage makes undoubted emotional sense.  Earlier on, when George is puzzled by Dexter’s wedding present, Tracy recalls sailing on the real thing – ‘My, she was yare’.   George is even more puzzled so she explains that ‘yare’ means ‘Easy to handle, quick to the helm.  Fast, bright.  Everything a boat should be’.  Now Tracy tells Dexter, she’ll be yare too.

George Cukor handles the cast impeccably.  Cary Grant and James Stewart, who’ve been known to be even more grating than Katharine Hepburn, are as delightful as she is here – especially Stewart.  His performance is a perfect balance of comedic and romantic, his playing drunk a wonder, particularly in a tête-à-tête with Grant.  Precocious, kooky Dinah could be a complete pain (as the equivalent character is in High Society (1956)) but she’s actually rather likeable – perhaps it helps Virginia Weidler, who was thirteen at the time, has the face of a rather plain thirty-five-year-old.  Ruth Hussey, as well as reliably hitting the target with Liz’s one-liners, is quietly affecting in the less showy role of long-suffering Liz.  All the bit players do well.  That prologue sequence isn’t only funny but also a very deft piece of scene-setting: the combined effect of the two things is just about elating – and that, like Tracy’s pratfall, is a taste of things to come.  Cukor lets his actors exult in the funny writing; he also keeps the film visually on the move throughout.  The Philadelphia Story is among the most entertaining and satisfying of all the Hollywood-golden-age romantic comedies.

6 August 2024

[1] ‘[The] Hays Code… banned any explicit references to or attempts to justify adultery and illicit sex.  The comedy of remarriage with the same spouse enabled filmmakers to evade this provision of the Code. The protagonists divorced, flirted, or even had relationships, with strangers without risking the wrath of censorship, and then got back together’ (Wikipedia).