The Philadelphia Story
Directed by: George Cukor - 1 hour, 52 minutes - USA - 1940 - B&W - DVD - 1.33:1
Starring: Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, John Howard, Ruth Hussey
Society lady Tracy Lord is about to get married to George Kittredge, and her ex-husband C.K. Dexter Haven is crashing the wedding, with two friends in tow. The two friends, claiming to be friends of Tracy’s younger brother, are actually reporters for a tabloid paper, brought to the wedding by C.K. to get exclusive coverage of the wedding, in exchange for not publishing a story about Tracy’s father’s fling with a dancer. The Lords are wise to the tabloid reporters and play them by putting on show of how perfect their family is. Classes are crossed, assumptions challenged, and stilts are swept from the stilted. The rest you’ll have to see.
Full disclosure: this is probably my favorite movie that doesn’t have a Wookiee in it, and minus nostalgia it might even take the lead. It’s not even home city bias, because the movie has pretty much nothing to do with Philadelphia (the Main Line was always a separate world). The Philadelphia Story is another Broadway adaptation, from a script that Philip Barry wrote specifically for Katherine Hepburn, to lure her back to the stage after bad reviews of an earlier performance. Howard Hughes later purchased the film rights and gave them to Hepburn as a gift. She asked the studio for Clark Gable to play C.K. and Spencer Tracy to play Mike, but the studio recast due to scheduling. Once the film was released, it was a huge success and erased Hepburn’s reputation as “box office poison”.