© 2014 by James Clark
Whereas (in Italy, in 1962) Anna Magnani would capitalize, on the leverage stemming from her indispensability, to hijack Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Mamma Roma, for her own reasons, Katharine Hepburn would shape to her liking the 1940 film romance, The Philadelphia Story, to an outcome unsurprisingly very different from the former project—but, nevertheless, quite amazingly within the same galaxy where disinterestedness becomes palpably crucial. In 1939, Hepburn helped herself to her ex-boyfriend, Howard Hughes’ film rights to Philip Barry’s stage play, The Philadelphia Story (in which she starred); and, ever the shrewd media player, bought out her contract with RKO and signed on with MGM mogul, Louis B. Mayer, on condition that he finance her film property, starring herself (of course) along with a cast and production team of her devising, including her friend, director, George Cukor. Her coming, from out of such high-finance scheming, to navigate along a flight-path which Magnani broached with a wave of instinctive, emotive poetics, is one of the great enigmas of supposedly mainstream, Hollywood “entertainment.”
Though at the cusp of departing Depression-era escapism (in favor of World War whirlpools), The Philadelphia Story includes as high a sugar content as all those 1930s charmers reminding a shaken populace that life’s not so bad. Hepburn was far from a widely-beloved free spirit like Magnani, able to lucratively connect with a huge fan-base. In fact she had, at the period of her deft corporate grazing, become known as “box office poison.” Therefore, the dazzling coup of taking control of the movie version of that Broadway success would not fail to look like another People’s Choice. As guided by our star (a Bryn Mawr grad and member of a very rich family), there would be studio and locations enhancement of a precinct of the “idle [and blithely] rich” so seductive to film-going dreamers. With that format (operating like a Toyland for adults), there would be Barry’s motif of a seemingly spoiled-rotten young woman undergoing a zany life-lesson as she prepares for her imminent wedding. She transfers, with almost magical alacrity, from a very harsh critic of her father, her former husband, a team of publicity hounds, and her flaccid upper crust circle, to a seemingly dutiful bride now onstream to become what everyone loves (and pays to see in the movie theatre), namely, “a person with an understanding heart,” generous toward the little slips we all make. Hepburn’s literary friend, Philip Barry (apparently a devout Catholic with a sister who was a nun), would be something of a Pasolini, but with an affectionate flair for bringing into view those with mansions. That leaves us wondering if Hepburn (over and above her proving to be [like her folks] adept at rescuing a faltering franchise) would, like Magnani a few years later, see, amidst that predictable attraction, something else—something that has drawn her away from the comfortable trivia of her clan, to a life in performing arts. (Hepburn’s character, Tracy Lord, was briefly attached to a first husband [who, as it happens, becomes her second husband, as well], namely, Dexter Haven, who is on record as being a polo players and builder of a boat for his own use.)
Looking at the architecture of Barry’s quite charming little money machine, you can see how Hepburn could not only turn it into something quite different from the interests of the playwright and all those lovely customers who are always right; but do so, unlike Magnani with Mamma Roma, without having to overtly and annoyingly spoil someone’s day. Let’s approach the jolly melee, of what our star and entrepreneur and perhaps even auteur was able to have her way with getting onscreen, with a view to a couple of egregiously antiquated and crude harangues sent her way in the course of attempting to have her see the destruction she has occasioned. Her father comes home for the first time in years, to not only attend the wedding but brazen out his having left his wife in favor of a young dancer in New York (the setting being the Main Line manicured hinterland of Philadelphia). Tracy tears into him for having caused her mother distress and also for becoming the project of a scandal rag which, to prevent being published, forces her to allow her wedding to be photo-documented for the amusement (benign or otherwise) of “readers.” The crusty oligarch immediately shows a side of breathtaking oiliness, blaming her “coldness” for forcing him to seek in a young stranger the sense of youthfulness “the right kind of daughter” would have endowed him with. (Blazing all over this premise, of course, for anyone having departed the medieval era, is the question of what kind of affection Tracy would have had to provide in order to give Daddy what the bouncy young dancer was good at.) The stricken family man tells her, “You have everything but what it takes to be a human being, an understanding heart.” She, we may surmise, being very ardent about that matter (more, in fact, than about marriage and its run of romantic love), is noticeably overcome, her bite and sheen escaping her. (He also called her, in the course of his archaically presumptuous self-justification, “a prig and a perennial spinster… a married spinster…”) She mutters distractedly, “…I’m a kind of goddess? We’re the mighty?”
That vein whereby Tracy is assailed for lacking initiatives generally regarded as ladylike appears again in a rationale for alcoholism by Dexter (another uninvited and unwelcome guest). “You were no helpmate. You were a scold.” He snidely addresses her as “Red” (“You look in the pink, Red” (implying she’s become an abrasive, subversive fanatic). Then, his foot in the door in being until recently the Buenos Aries correspondent of that scandal sheet, Spy, and therewith able to facilitate the gambit to buy off the impulse of spotlighting her father by installing the wedding feature, he stages his bid for a comeback, first of all announcing his overcoming the addiction she supposedly drove him to. “Red, you could be the first woman on earth. But you’ll never amount to anything until you have some patience for human frailty.”
There is, of course, nothing, on the face of it, wrong with Dexter and Daddy’s sermons. Red is very much a “scold,” though a playful and witty one. (Her intended groom is a left-leaning self-made industrialist/would-be politician, up from the mines.) And the destabilization of her whole sensibility, its tuning forever going flat comprises a richly theatrical main thrust of conflictedness that in fact races amongst many of the players and (perhaps) constitutes a manifestation which culminates in Tracy’s not merely getting married but getting lucid. Finding the new groom would seem to be an intensification of all her well-known ruthlessness. (At the outset, her young sister remarks to her gentle, conciliatory mother, “She’s sort of hard, isn’t she? Stinky not to invite Father…” ; and even the always supportive lady has to admit, “Yes, Dear. I do think it’s stinky” [a poor excuse for tuning]. We first see her new beau, George Kittredge (a name emitting much prose and much less poetry), at the stables area of her family’s estate, where Tracy addresses him with light but pointed banter. “You look like something right out of a shop window.” She immediately goes on to wrestling him to the dusty terrain, in an instinctive effort to have him emit some earthy suppleness as against squeaky-clean, nouveau-riche self-promotion. George tells her when dusting himself off, “I used to dream about clean clothes when I worked in the mines. But now I’m getting fairly important [he owns a coal mine]—just luck, of course! What kind of publicity would we send out from this approach?” Tracy snaps back, “Not in my home!” He counters, “I thought it was our home…” And she hurries to say (the prospect of apt tone going down the drain), “Sorry, Darling! I mean very much our home…” After Kittredge’s taking an eternity to mount his horse, farcically, one of the three horse-savvy patricians along for the ride, calls out, “Hi ho, Silver! ( a neat, if slightly off-color quip within a time of vague foreboding). She had, before the peculiar corruption, yelled out, “Who’s that handsome man? Can Tracy pick ‘em or not?” Well, pretty soon, “not” is inescapable. Hard-working George’s being about to do some “progressive” politicking—she tells Dexter, who had averred, “He’s beneath you… in spirit,” “Already he’s a national figure”—casts some light on her getting mixed up with him due to sharing (at some level) hostility toward those fully devoted to material well-being. But the facile virtue spilling out amidst the horsey set here doesn’t reckon with Hepburn’s body language in showing Tracy’s joie de vivre glow which cuts across the imbroglio and leaves her virtually without a consort—a strange state of affairs for a wedding celebration of sublime romance, and pursuit from three self-assured admirers.
The third suitor, McColly Connor (“Mike”), comes aboard as the Spy Magazine writing wing of the two-winged hawk attack upon Tracy’s big day. His first reaction to the assignment is to bluster about such “Society Snoop” work as beneath him; then he jauntily invites (as told to his photographer/sidekick/girlfriend, Liz) dismissal—“I could start writing short stories again.” He quickly caves in when confronted by his boss and by starvation. Soon he’s joining Dexter and Daddy in dissing the bride as a heartless (and, not fully recognized as such, frightening) avatar of power. “The unapproachable Miss Lord—a Philadelphia Story. It’s degrading and undignified!” Having brought aboard Jimmy Stewart (to play Mike) in his genius for mawkish self-assertion, the project counts on his unbuttoned lip and heavily emotive attitude to not only iterate the problem of tuning but to open a front by which Tracy can regain a productive vantage point to replace the one obliterated by the anathematizing delivered by Daddy and Dexter. Even before the full bombardment, she proves to be alert to Mike’s occupancy (however shaky) of that art world nowhere to be seen on the Main Line. They bump into each other at the town library (which Dexter has to make clear as having been endowed by his grandfather)—he looking into background detail about the Lord family and she reading Mike’s one and only published book (which garnered all of $600.). She tells him, “I can’t make you out at all now. You talk so big and tough. But then you write like this… It’s quite an art…” On his pointing out that full-time poetics would be financial suicide for him, she offers him the use of her own residence tucked nearby amidst the verdant rolling countryside, which he is quick to praise. Then he demurs with, “I think patron Lady Bountifuls have more or less gone out.” On getting very drunk to antidote the opprobrium about her going around like a “high priestess,” she gravitates toward Mike, the loose cannon (unable to resist the estate’s house phone and announce to Tracy’s hapless Mom, “This is the Voice of Doom. Your days are numbered…”), and his emotive repertoire being the only kin in sight with a shot at what she regards as true. (Dexter has given her, for a wedding present, a model of the boat they once had, “The True Love;” that its outer range was a trip to Maine [a reminder of their Main Line bailiwick] raises questions about the compatibility of their sense of the “true.”)
At the pre-nuptials all-night party, she dances with Mike and they polish off some bottles of champagne, to the annoyance of George, clearly, even at this point, a groom who won’t be going down the aisle of domesticated predictability. The aftermath of this rediscovery of powerful earthiness finds her telling Mike, “It’s just that things I thought were important suddenly aren’t…” (Thus Dexter, shown in the opening scene [while still married to her] getting thrown out by her [for being less than dazzlingly graceful]—and in turn pushing her face and having her reel backward onto the floor and seeming to regard this as true to life, if not to love—gets back into the running in view of her now requiring only a trace [far from a ton] of playability from her interpersonal field. On that former fractious occasion she breaks one of his golf clubs over her knee.) Mike leaves the party to go over to Dexter’s to clear up some nagging confusions about where Tracy is coming from. Hiccupping, and babbling out maudlin platitudes—“Tracy’s no ordinary woman. When a girl is like Tracy she’s one in a million… She’s sort of like a queen, a radiant, glorious queen…” By contrast, Dexter is composed and goes on to pick the runoff of Mike’s brain, by means of which to contrive a way to lift the blackmail pertaining to Tracy’s dad’s fountain of youth that’s no one’s business but his own. Liz has driven the unconscious Tracy to Dexter’s driveway and on seeing her he puts his face close to hers and, with calm sincerity (Stewart’s shrillness paying off, by contrast), says, “You look beautiful, Red.” She informs him she doesn’t drink, Mike comes over, and she drives off with him, back to the party. Then, not only does their drinking resume, but she proposes, “Let’s have a quick swim to brighten things up.” Before they get there, Mike insists she can’t be serious about Kittredge, and she calls him an intellectual snob. “You live by your mind… The time to make up your mind about people is never… You’re a mass of prejudices… You’re a mass of brains and no feeling…” Mike joins in this pre-swim pool of consciousness by splashing back, “You’ve got all the prejudice…with all your class.” “What’s prejudice got to do with it?” is her making some sense while stumbling around. From out of this skirmish they suddenly embrace and deliver a passionate kiss. He asks, “It couldn’t be anything like love, could it?” She replies, “Oh we’re out of our mind! Put me in your pocket, Mike!”
The denouement threads this champagne-fuelled jet of romance (coming remarkably late to a narrative about a wedding) into: their finally having that quick swim; his carrying her back to the house—singing, dreadfully, the then recent fantasy movie song hit, “Somewhere over the Rainbow;” being met by a bemused Dexter and a livid George now on the patio; Tracy then brushing the obstacles aside by demanding, “Don’t stop, Mikey, Keep crooning!”; Dexter choosing to put a comedic, harmless spin on the event, Kittredge (declaring, “You don’t know women”) opting for tragedy (“All of you and your sophisticated ideas!”); Mike’s wrist watch turning up in her bedroom; Tracy’s being desolated by how far from correct behavior she’s fallen (fallen from her simple, now acknowledged to be simplistic, cover); her calling off the wedding to a resentful former hero (“You’re too good for me”/ “If that’s the way you want it… You and your whole rotten class! You’re on the way out! All of you!”); her saying to Mike, “Thanks, but no,” to his offer to come onstage as the new groom (crushing Liz, who soon recovers in the role of bench strength as they go forward to some kind of romance)–here Tracy tells Mike, “But I am beholden to you…”
Tracy waives her father’s offer to deliver a little speech to the “dearly beloved,” smoothing over the mishaps (something he does often and well); and instead she steps forward at the doorway to address the gathered blue-bloods. “There’s been a slight hitch in the proceedings,” she tells them. Then, desperately counting on smoothy Dexter on the other side of the door (Cary Grant, no less!) to seal the deal with those customers who could be testy, she’s prompted to finally offer them the wedding they were “cheated” from when she and Dexter eloped two years before. Like Goldilocks having found the repast that was “just right,” she puts herself into this scheme with great warmth and sparkle. Dexter borrows Tracy’s mother’s ring (only a prop anyway), Mike and Liz become Best Man and Maid of Honor and the squelched scandal publisher (Mike having made usable the latter’s being as compromised as the “sue me” Dad) snaps a photo of all of them at the altar. The frozen result of that moment has them all having lost that giddy topspin, looking, instead, like deer in the high-beams, a perfect depiction of the volatility of true love.
The optics of this subtly happy ending plays many trump cards. We’re even made to imagine Tracy’s parents getting back together. In the confusion when the Wedding March had already begun, and a different wedding was on tap, Tracy’s dad tells her, “You’re like a queen… like a goddess…” She grabs that cue to recite (with real feeling—ambiguity notwithstanding), “You know how I feel? Like a human being.” Dear old Dad then adds, “And you know how I feel? Proud.” Along the way he shows some lawyering skills—“I never said [you were a disappointment], daughter.” To which she measures out, “I don’t seem to be made of bronze.” His intended-to-be- charming rebuttal is: “No, you’re made of flesh and blood…” (But then it’s pretty clear he always feels proud, even when ditching and surely hurting his wife to screw around. One of the points she makes in refusing Mike’s proposal is its being a source of hurting Liz [already a bit crushed by Mike’s ruthlessly disregarding her]. Another factor is inherent in her question, “Why has your mind taken hold again?” Tracy never articulates this factor of her hatred toward her father, perhaps at that earlier point [she having that extra house for the “hunting season”] regarding her mother as a born victim, lacking necessary incandescence and resilience. Now with some brand new ammo [thanks to Mike’s kick-start] she is truly Diana the Huntress, clipping along through erstwhile dizzying turbulence. Her very first remark, “How do you spell omelette?” speaks to a problem of synthesis. So does Dexter’s alert, to George: “She needs trouble to mature her… Give her lots of it.” Maybe she and Dexter will go all the way to Maine again on their boat, enjoying far from inconsequential riches of romance, however contrasting. The True Love she’s entered into would have a far more complex, solitary component, a component the happy viewers would not suspect.) The business deal here was to see her taken down a peg. (“You’re slipping, Red. I used to be afraid of that look.”) But careful viewing would see her climbing up a peg.
So it’s no more box office poison for Ms Hepburn, now so obviously close to her customers. Of course she was at the point of embarking on an unconventional romance with a nominally married, Spencer Tracy; but it was a well-hidden romance, never compromising her celebrity persona as a humanitarian hero. The DVD supplement to The Philadelphia Story features the star in later years, most personably discussing her career, largely passing it all off as due to having been since childhood a glutton for being in the spotlight. On coming to our movie here, though, she ever so carefully alludes to something else. “I know what makes Tracy tick!” Yes, she does; and the upshot of her discernment at white-hot levels is a surprisingly edgy little vehicle, possibly inspiring Powell and Pressburger’s I Know Where I’m Going.
While this film is unquestionably Hepburn’s, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart also turn in terrific performances. Grant chose the more low-key role, oddly enough, while insisting on top billing. This left the field open for Stewart to sneak in and try his darned best to steal the movie from Hepburn’s capable hands, and he almost succeeded. The chemistry between Hepburn and Stewart is a delight to watch, and I do wonder what Grant could have done with this role if he’d chosen it. Could he have improved on it? Highly doubtful. This is quite the fascinating review of the film!
Thanks, Peter.
I must admit I’ve never been a fan of either Katharine Hepburn or Jimmy Stewart. But I love them in this film. My enthusiasm for the wittiness of Cary Grant, however, extends into the issues of part-time lover which I believe the film version of The Philadelphia Story was designed to convey (to a minority of its audience).
These days I’m preparing my piece on Jules et Jim, and I find it to pose another type of inflection. The figures named in the title are clearly on notice to ditch a lady who could only drag them down. But Truffaut can’t let go of the reflex to find her charming. Could Katharine Hepburn be a more incisive contemporary figure than Francois Truffaut?
One of the best films of this type. And quite a trenchant examination of it. I always laugh when I think that James Stewart won Best Actor (clearly a consolation for his not having won the year before for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) when it was really Hepburn who stole the movie. Brilliant screenplay.
Thanks for the thumbs up, Tim.
Being in or out of favor is a strange and edifying thing, indeed. This weekend we’re seeing The Dance of Reality, by a filmmaker (85 years of age), namely, Alejandro Jodorowsky, who has had to wait 23 years to be able to get his next and latest film off the ground. And here he is rolling the dice with regard to fellini’s Amarcord. Wonder what discoveries he’ll show us!
Hepburn as Tracy Lord gives one of her greatest screen portrayals in the film (to sit alongside THE LION IN WINTER, BRINGING UP BABY, ALICE ADAMS, THE AFRICAN QUEEN and LONG DAY’S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT) and she stands tallest in an otherwise exceptional cast. Yes I do absolutely agree that Stewart won his Oscar in consolation for losing in the remarkable lead acting year of 1939, when Robert Donat won, but Laurence Olivier and Clark Gable were in an astonishing line-up. The cast really transcends the material and there’s a snapping rhythm and pace to the delivery of the lines that make the film a scintillating watch. Cukor was a master at transforming stage material into fluid cinema, and for most this is a prime example. Jim you have gone further than anyone else I have read in bringing profound insights and definition to this screen classic. Certainly this is one of the supreme achievements of this countdown.
Thanks very much, Sam.
The field of romantic films, it seems to me, occasionally offers figures who are not simply ambivalent about one or other prospect for long-term bliss or blast; but who have found their way to impressive traces of bliss or blast amidst solitary moments. Such figures would be confronted by a tricky juggling act that registers on the screen as rather grotesque floundering. They would, as in the case of Tracy Lord (a name evoking quite a stretch) and Joan (not nearly a martyr or saint) in I Know Where I’m Going (up this coming Tuesday; followed [this coming Wednesday] by the far less balanced dreamers in A Slightly Pregnant Man), present a rather harsh first impression. Really getting to know them in their narratives would keep us on our toes. But in their delicate situations they could be harbingers of a type of interpersonal energy overlooked by 21st century contrarian mayhem and despair. I’m eager to probe Boyhood with the perspective of this excitement in the air.
I left a detailed comment here last night but it didn’t go through. Spot on assessment Jim and very well written. This is one of my absolute favorites. All the acting is superb. Love the performance by Virginia Weidler too. She’s a hoot.
Thanks, Jon
I, too, regard this surprising blast from the past as a production so classy in so many ways that it wins you over very quickly. There’s a screwball facade; but I think its far surpassing the concerns of screwball comedy and mainstream romance transmits in such a way as to leave the audience a bit bemused.
Compare it to High Society, where, for all the instincts of Grace Kelly and Bing Crosby, and the musical punch, the upshot is irrevocably fluffy.
An extraordinary analysis of why Philadelphia Story just works so well. Hepburn was never better than she is here (though I do dearly love her work in Bringing Up Baby). I especially liked your allusion to her interview, drawing a tantalizing possible connection to I Know Where I’m Going.
Thanks very much, Duane.
The film, as you say, works wonderfully well. It leaves us feeling that the real adventure is just beginning. Wat could be more exhilarating than that?!