Charles Walters (1956)
At the start of High Society Louis Armstrong and his band – as themselves – are on a bus travelling to the society wedding at which they’re going to play. (Their destination is, conveniently enough, Newport, Rhode Island, home of the jazz festival.) Armstrong sings the film’s limp, calypso-ish title track then announces, ‘End of song, start of story’. He also – chorus-like – gives you the background to that story and a hefty hint, even if you don’t already know The Philadelphia Story, of how things will turn out (and how you should want them to turn out.) Armstrong and his companions might be saying to the audience, ‘We’re only here for the music and, let’s be honest, so are you’. It’s hard to see otherwise why anyone would want to re-adapt Philip Barry’s play for the screen: George Cukor’s 1940 movie is an almost perfect romantic comedy of manners but it can’t be denied that Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart don’t sing[1]. There are some good numbers in High Society (‘Who Wants to be a Millionaire?’, ‘Well, Did You Evah!’) and ‘True Love’ is a pleasant enough melody (although the lyrics are dreary). It’s nevertheless the Cole Porter songs that are the real letdown of the film – because they’re the only thing you expect to justify the enterprise. When there’s no singing going on, High Society just seems painfully inferior to The Philadelphia Story and you’re impatient for the next song. When the song arrived I was usually disappointed by how far it was from Cole Porter’s best.
Grace Kelly is pretty gruesome as the spoilt goddess-socialite Tracy Lord. Vocally, she often seems to be doing a Hepburn imitation but you’re not always sure which Hepburn. Kelly lacks the eccentricity that makes Audrey Hepburn’s cooing elocution charming; she has little of Katharine Hepburn’s edgy wit and none of her tensile variety. The spectacle of a performer acting up emotional recklessness without feeling it isn’t edifying. (It’s a mercy that, when Tracy gets drunk, Grace Kelly also acts sleepy, so becomes less irritating.) At least Kelly looks great – whether in trousers or a bathing suit or a bridal outfit – although she looks better in single shots than she does moving about. She’s such an effortless clotheshorse that, when Tracy emerges with a hangover into the glare of the morning after the night before and wails how heavy her wedding dress is, you don’t believe it for a moment. There’s next to nothing going on between Kelly and Bing Crosby as C K Dexter Haven (the character has been rewritten here as a successful musician, chiefly to justify the Crosby-Armstrong and co number ‘Now You Has Jazz’). Cary Grant’s Dexter used his debonair acerbity as a weapon; Crosby is so complacently relaxed that there’s no tension at all between the recently divorced Dexter and Tracy. Crosby sharpens up only in the scene with Frank Sinatra that culminates in their ‘Well, Did You Evah!’ duet. This comes over as an expression of the pressure of competition rather than characterisation but it’s rather gripping to watch.
As in the original, the journalist Mike Connor arrives with his photographer-girlfriend Liz to cover Tracy’s wedding to a boring engineer called George Kittredge. (Mike and Liz are allowed in because their employer, Spy Magazine, is in possession of embarrassing information about Tracy’s philandering father.) In the Cukor film, James Stewart gives Mike a prickly integrity that makes his romantic capitulation, under the influence of alcohol and Tracy, very funny and charming. In comparison, Frank Sinatra’s Mike is unvaryingly slick and shallow but his singing is so great that it’s hard to mind (and he does some amusing things – like the way he moves his wrist to indicate he wants a hair of the dog). The most satisfying performance is from Celeste Holm as Liz. She combines a quick-witted, wry ruefulness that Mike may look elsewhere for love with a contained determination that he won’t. Holm (who is now ninety-three) was younger than Sinatra but looks a few years older. This makes Liz’s passion for Mike more touching. And their ‘Millionaire’ duet is the high point of the film.
Lydia Reed, as Tracy’s younger sister Caroline, is a graduate of the performing seal school of child acting; oddly enough, this unbeautiful girl is physically convincing as Grace Kelly’s sibling. John Patrick’s screenplay seems almost to forget about Caroline in the second half (I didn’t think the character disappeared from The Philadelphia Story in quite this way), although that’s no bad thing. Margalo Gillmore gives a winningly low-key portrait of Tracy’s worried mother, a role which tends to encourage performances much more theatrically busy than this one. In his last film (he died a few weeks before its release), Louis Calhern is surprisingly unfunny as the reprobate Uncle Willie. Sidney Blackmer can’t do much with the pompous humourlessness of Tracy’s father; John Lund, in the thankless role of the jilted bridegroom George, manages rather more. This was Grace Kelly’s last picture before she became Princess Grace of Monaco. That’s obviously why I had the idea that High Society was set in Montecarlo, although the impersonality of the world before our eyes means that the story could be taking place anywhere or nowhere. Charles Walters’s direction lacks flair, to put it mildly, and the opulent settings make for a limited colour scheme – very blue and fairly pink.
11 June 2010
[1] Afternote: That’s not quite right. Watching The Philadelphia Story again reminded me that Stewart’s character, in his cups, bellows his way through ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’.
