Today's Cinema Sunday is a re-post from March 1, 2020 which looks back on a classic film starring Katherine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant.
I'll be back with a new Cinema Sunday post next week.
Cinema Sunday: The Philadelphia Story
Hi there! Welcome to another edition of Cinema Sunday wherein I look at various movies that I've seen at various points of my life.
After last week's dark turn with an unexpectedly dark Andy Griffith, I thought we should look back at lighter movie for this week's post.
It's another comedic team up for Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. I wrote about their collaboration on Bringing Up Baby from 1938 in a previous post on January 26, 2020.
Today's spotlight falls on a movie from 1940 called The Philadelphia Story.
The movie centers around the days leading up to the wedding of Tracy Lord (Hepburn), the elder daughter of a wealthy socialite family. This is not her first go round on the marriage carousel. She used to be marred to C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant) until they divorced two years prior.
Tracy's wedding to George Kittredge (John Howard) is set to be the social event of the season with the Lord family rife with potential for sensational scandal. So with help from Dexter, a New York gossip magazine arranges for reporter Macaulay "Mike" Connor (James Stewart) and photographer Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) to infiltrate the wedding. Dexter tags along, slyly grinning as chaos unfolds about him.
There's a lot of class snobbery going on and not all of it from the socialites. Mike can barely stand the thought of having to hob-nob with these rich people who want for nothing and do little for it.
George got rich the hard way by earning it and his stuffed shirt morality seems an odd fit with the far looser Lord family.
Tracy has her own issues with being judgmental. She has little or no tolerance for the flaws of others. She views herself at a rarefied level of propriety above even her own family and certainly above her ex-husband, C.K. Dexter Haven. Seems Dexter liked to drink which Tracy criticized him for; such criticism served only to drive Dexter to drink even more. And so their marriage failed. Which is why Tracy thinks marrying George with his hard earned money and his morality seems like a good fit. Even though its clear that they are not a good fit.
On the night before her wedding, Tracy does something rash: she gets drunk. And Mike, for all his class warfare against socialites like the Lord family, also gets drunk. And the two wind up connecting and having a really good time. Which includes Mike digging deep for all the poetry at his command to describe just how wonderful, how luminescent Tracy is. And it also includes a midnight swim.
If you think "midnight swim" is a euphemism for sex, remember this was 1940. Sex wasn't invented until 1967.
Anyway...
George sees Mike carrying an intoxicated Tracy into the house and assumes the worst, even though sex has not been invented yet. What happens next? Oh, I've told you too much already. Go watch it yourself. This is a wonderfully delightful movie and you will enjoy it. Unless you want things to get "blowed up real good", then maybe not.
Virginia Weidler plays Dinah Lord, Tracy's much younger sister who has a wickedly acerbic sense of humor and a profound sense of self-awareness.
Ruth Hussey doesn't have enough to do but her time on screen as Liz is really good. An effective counter weight to Mike's tendencies to wage war for social justice or pine for meaningful work as a real writer, Liz is refreshingly pragmatic. When pressed into service to infiltrate Tracy Lord's wedding, Liz is all, "Well, a girl's gotta eat." And I have to mention this bit. Donald Ogden Stewart wrote the screenplay which won him an Oscar. Upon taking the stage to accept his award, he said, "I have no one to thank but myself!"
The Philadelphia Story remains a remarkably funny movie. I've seen several times including just two weeks ago with Andrea. She enjoyed it a lot.
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