The Philadelphia Story was released in 1940 and has never once felt like it needed updating. George Cukor directed it with such confidence in the material that time has had nothing to work with. Eighty-five years later it plays like a film made by people who knew exactly what they were doing and had no interest in hedging.
The setup takes about ten minutes to establish. Tracy Lord — played by Katharine Hepburn with a precision that makes every other performer in the frame work harder — is a Philadelphia Main Line socialite two days from marrying a self-made businessman named George Kittredge. On the eve of the wedding, her ex-husband C.K. Dexter Haven, played by Cary Grant, arrives with a tabloid reporter named Macaulay Connor, played by James Stewart. By morning, Tracy must choose among three men — and more importantly, figure out who she actually is. The plot fits on a cocktail napkin. The film fills 112 minutes without a wasted frame.
Tracy Lord is one of the most fully realized women in American cinema, which matters because the film is really a character study wearing the clothes of a romantic comedy. She is introduced as a goddess — literally referred to as one, more than once — and what the film tracks is the process by which she is humanized. Not diminished. Not punished. Humanized. Philip Barry wrote the play specifically for Hepburn, which was itself a kind of rescue operation: she had been labeled “box office poison” in 1938 after a run of films that never figured out how to use her.
She bought the film rights herself, brought the project to MGM, and chose her co-stars. That kind of self-determination is embedded in the film’s DNA. Tracy Lord is not waiting to be saved. She is waiting to be understood.
Grant’s performance is the one that gets underestimated, probably because it looks so easy. C.K. Dexter Haven is witty, roguish, and still in love with a woman who once decided he wasn’t good enough. Grant plays all of that without calling attention to any of it. He does comedy and heartbreak in the same scene and leaves no visible seams. The interplay between him and Hepburn — their fourth film together — has the shorthand of people who stopped trying to impress each other some time ago. Every exchange between them feels like we’ve walked in on a conversation that started before the cameras rolled.
Stewart won the Oscar for Best Actor, and there were people at the time who felt he was being compensated for the Academy’s failure to recognize his work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the year before. That may be so. But the performance here earns it on its own. Mike Connor is a serious writer who covers tabloid society events because the serious magazines don’t pay his rent, and Stewart plays that gap — between who Connor is and what he’s doing — with a quiet, building frustration that eventually has nowhere to go but out.
The drunken garden scene with Hepburn, where the two of them say things that daylight would never allow, is the emotional center of the film. Stewart carries it completely.
Cukor spent most of his career being called a “women’s director” by people who meant it as a slight. What they were actually describing was a director who paid close attention. He understood that what an actor’s face does in the half-second before the line lands is often more important than the line itself. He gives Hepburn room. He positions Grant at just enough remove that we can watch him watching her. He grasped that comedy is structural — that it’s built from entrances, exits, the shape of a pause, the thing that almost gets said — and the architecture of this film is as clean as anything the genre has produced.
The film took six Oscar nominations and won two: Best Screenplay for Donald Ogden Stewart’s adaptation of Barry’s play, and Best Actor for James Stewart. It returned Hepburn to major stardom, and did so through a story in which she earns every bit of it herself. In 1956 the material became High Society, with Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, and a Cole Porter score that has its own considerable pleasures. It’s also a much smaller film pretending to be a bigger one.
The Philadelphia Story holds up because it is about something that doesn’t go away. The difference between worshipping someone and loving them. Between demanding perfection and sitting with another person’s flaws. Between the face you put on for the wedding guests and the person you are at midnight in a garden, saying things you can’t take back. That conversation is still going on. So is this film.
The Philadelphia Story (1940) | Directed by George Cukor | Starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant, James Stewart | 112 minutes | Currently streaming on Peacock and available to rent on most major platforms.
