The Philadelphia Story opens with one of the great silent gags in American film. Cary Grant, playing the newly ex-husband of Katharine Hepburn, storms out of their house carrying golf clubs while she trails behind hurling his belongings after him. She snaps one of his clubs over her knee. He responds by putting his open palm flat against her face and shoving her, hard, backward through the front door. Not a word is spoken. The whole marriage, its wreckage, and roughly forty percent of the movie’s argument about who these two people are to each other, plays out in about fifteen seconds before the title card even finishes.
That’s 1940 for you. Confident enough to trust an audience with silence, sharp enough to know exactly how much information one gesture could carry.
Directed by George Cukor, the film follows Tracy Lord, a Philadelphia socialite about to remarry the safe, dull George Kittredge two years after divorcing the far less safe C.K. Dexter Haven. On the eve of the wedding, a tabloid magazine sends a reporter and photographer to cover the society event, using leverage over Tracy’s philandering father to force their way in. Dexter, still very much in love with his ex-wife whether he’ll admit it or not, arranges for the reporters to attend under false pretenses, hoping to protect the family from scandal and, not incidentally, to remain close to Tracy as her wedding approaches.
What follows is a single overheated day and night in which Tracy gets drunk for the first time in her life, falls into something resembling love with a man she just met, nearly marries the wrong person twice, and has to reckon with a version of herself she doesn’t much like hearing described out loud.
Katharine Hepburn plays Tracy, and she came to own this role in a way few actresses ever own anything. The part was written for her by playwright Philip Barry after her career had cratered so badly that a theater trade paper had literally labeled her box office poison. She bought the film rights to the play herself, negotiated her way into the production, and picked her own leading men. It worked.
Watching her now, the performance holds a kind of controlled recklessness, a woman who’s been told her whole life she’s a marvel and has started to believe the parts of that she shouldn’t. Tracy Lord is arrogant, a little cruel, and completely alive on screen, and Hepburn never once asks you to like her before she’s earned it.
Cary Grant plays Dexter with a restraint that was unusual for him at the time, more glue than spotlight, holding the picture together while Hepburn and James Stewart get the showier moments. Stewart plays Macaulay Connor, the reporter, and he’s the one who walks away with the trophy, literally. He won the Academy Award for Best Actor for this role, playing a man who shows up cynical about high society and ends up drunk, poetic, and swimming in a fountain at midnight, reciting half-formed verse to a woman he has no business falling for. It’s widely understood in film circles that the award was as much an apology for Stewart losing the year before for “Mr. Smith Goes to Washington” as it was a reward for this specific performance, and that’s a fair read. It doesn’t make him bad here. It just means the Academy had a debt to settle and picked a convenient moment to settle it.
What holds up nearly nine decades later isn’t the plot mechanics, which are pure stage-play scaffolding, three men circling one woman until the right one wins. What holds up is the writing, adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart from Barry’s Broadway hit, which trusts its characters to be smart, funny, and wrong about themselves in equal measure. Nobody in this movie is simply good or simply awful.
Tracy’s father blames his own affair partly on his daughter’s coldness, which is a genuinely ugly thing for a film to let stand without fully punishing him for it, and it’s worth going in knowing that particular thread hasn’t aged as gracefully as the rest. But the film surrounding it, the champagne-lit longing, the rapid-fire dialogue, the way Hepburn’s face does five things in the space of one line, still plays like something written yesterday by someone who understood people better than most writers manage today.
This is a film to watch on a night when you want to hear people talk to each other like talking still mattered. Pour something with bubbles in it. Skip ahead for nothing.
