This review is an entry in the Valentine's Day Romantic Movie Write-Off, organized by teskue and involving the following talented participants:

AmyLEnsor, dandj, flak-attak, frazzledspice, hhire, isinga, james23, jankp, jenni1396, jennifer_gibbons, joubert, jubrismom, lagavulin, lonelyladyk, msmorvay, mtbat, Presleysmama, prettyinpink, sephiroth2000, sugarbugg23, 1truluv, taishan, and of course, teskue.

I encourage you to read their fine opinions as well.

Asking me to talk about my favorite romantic films is much like quizzing Harold Stassen about his presidential campaign experiences… there’s no end to either, apparently. Choosing one to discuss is a function of mood, not rational evaluation. Being one of those folks for whom tears well up whenever I see Barbara Stanwyck looking through the window at her daughter at the end of Stella Dallas, or Jack Lemmon chasing after Shirley MacLaine on New Year’s Eve in The Apartment, I’m not a person you’d want to ask to grade romantic films on an objective scale. But if numerous viewings on cable and two different video copies (need to have a backup, in case one fails) are any indication, George Cukor’s The Philadelphia Story is the romantic movie that I’d miss most if the electronic gods chose to wipe our film heritage.

A film adaptation of a Broadway stage success, The Philadelphia Story brings together three of the finest actors in cinematic history in Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn and James Stewart. Hepburn’s really at the center of the story: as Tracy Lord, an heiress with nose continually upturned, she’s the spoiled ex-wife of Grant’s Dexter Haven, a playful yacht-club type with a sense of humor Tracy finds painfully objectionable. Luckily, there’s a character available to demonstrate just how boorish one can become without Dexter’s sense of play – George Kittredge (John Howard), Tracy’s fiancée and a Main Line sort who loses no opportunity to advocate his norms of class correctness.

It’s on the eve of Tracy and George’s nuptials that reporters Mike Connor (Stewart) and Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) arrive at the Lord household in disguise, seeking an exclusive story and photos for a magazine feature. Naturally, Mike finds Tracy captivating, and Liz, all business on the surface but pining for Mike on the inside, endures the typical screwball-genre high jinks that ensue when he decides to pursue Tracy despite the demands of journalistic integrity and sense.

The plot of the film isn’t particularly innovative – after all, it wasn’t a secret to anyone after the play’s lengthy run on Broadway. It’s the delightful writing of Philip Barry and David Ogden Stewart and the amazing performances of not only the principals but the character actors, so unrecognized but so gifted throughout the days of the studio system, that make this film a delight on every viewing. Grant is wry, knowing, and every bit the urbane ironist: the cutting humor he displays in this movie would later be diluted in such saccharine productions as Father Goose, but here he’s in his prime. Stewart is laconic and gentle, as always, but there’s a passion in his fire for Tracy that he wouldn’t display again until Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

But above all… there’s Hepburn as Tracy. When we first encounter her, she’s spoiled and stubborn: she’s rejected Dexter as too easygoing and “soft,” and she sees George as a sober man likely to enjoy business success, the antithesis of the libertine Grant character. It’s the evolution of Tracy from a repressed, demanding scion of a family of privilege into a sharing, fully realized woman that’s fascinating and thrilling. Hepburn’s shrill and autocratic when the film begins: even her father confesses that he’s about had it with her imperial mien. But through a series of largely champagne-fueled high jinks, George proves to be possessive and inflexible, and Tracy increasingly realizes that even if Dexter over-indulges in his highballs occasionally and often appears blasé, he’s tolerant, loving, and for her the best of all possible mates. Reminiscing about the yacht they shared when married, the True Love, which Dexter’s made plans to sell, Tracy remembers that “she was yar,” seaworthy and smooth… as she stares into the distance, she seems to recall that at one time the course of true love was the same.

One more reason to admire Hepburn’s involvement: she’s at the center of this movie both on-screen and off. Having purchased the film rights to the play after her successful run as Tracy Lord on Broadway, she was able to control virtually every aspect of its celluloid production. She was thus one of the few female actors of her time who had a degree of commercial control of her labor, and probably the first since Mary Pickford to take a relatively high-profile business role in her own productions.

Still, it’s the tentative chemistry between Stewart and Hepburn, and the lasting, seemingly pre-ordained love that by contrast Hepburn and Grant evince, that make this film one of my romantic favorites. In setting these side-by-side, and further adding the banality of the “courtship” of the stiffly correct George, The Philadelphia Story shows us how the light-headed passion of the brief encounter and the boredom of a “logical” arrangement will never ultimately suffice. In creating a seemingly unstudied and effortless love on-screen, while demonstrating throughout the film just why that kind of partnership takes effort and patience, Grant and Hepburn provide a true romantic ideal.

Like the True Love, this picture will always be “yar.”


Recommended:
Yes

Viewing Format: VHS