Henry Watched: The Philadelphia Story

So before I name my favorite movie of all time by culminating my Top 100 list, my uncle Pierre demanded that I watch a triple feature of Rocky, the first Star Wars, and The Philadelphia Story as he feels those are the best films of all time. Well I've seen Rocky many times...it's not in my Top 100. Top sports movies yes, but not my Top 100. And Star Wars: A New Hope is on my Top 100...just not number one. So that left a movie I'd known about for a long time, but never seen, the 1940 classic: The Philadelphia Story.





So I thought this movie was going to be a madcap, slapstick, screwball comedy like Bringing Up Baby. After all, it features two of the stars of that movie (Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant) along with Jimmy Stewart(...pretty great cast).

I was wrong. There's very little of that kind of wacky humor in TPS. TPS is a much more "intelligent" kind of comedy; more of a "romantic comedy," in a sense, but not nearly as annoying or chick-flicky as those tend to be nowadays.

First, let me use IMDB to sum up the plot for you: "Haughty divorced socialite Tracy Lord (Hepburn) is preparing for her second marriage. Enter Dexter Haven (Grant), her first husband, and Macaulay Connor (Stewart), a tabloid reporter with a distrust of the wealthy. What follows is a rapid-fire war of words as the two men try to help Tracy discover the heart beneath her holier-than-thou exterior as she is forced to choose among her past love, her present love, and her new love."

TPS was a play before it was a movie (written especially for Hepburn by Phillip Berry) and co-starred Joseph Cotten and Van Heflin on the stage. Hepburn owned the movie rights and had, essentially, a producer's role for the making of the film. She wanted the studio to cast Clark Gable (in the Cary Grant role...easy to see why) and, her man, Spencer Tracy (in the Stewart role...ditto) but both were busy so we had to "suffer" through Grant and Stewart in the lead male roles.

Grant was given lead billing, and 100,000 dollars to "star", a sum he gave all of to the British War Relief Fund (This was 1940...). Stewart, coming off of Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Shop Around The Corner, won his one and only Oscar for this role; an Oscar he always felt was a makeup for his performance in Mr. Smith (The Academy still does this today...see Al Pacino winning for Scent of a Woman and not Godfather 2...or, more like Stewart's point, Russel Crowe winning for Gladiator and not The Insider).

K, enough information thrown in this review just for my uncle Pierre's enjoyment...what did I actually think
of TPS? I thought it was pretty dang good. Not the "be-all-end-all" like Pierre does...but dang good.

Hepburn, who I'd never found attractive...is at least very, very alluring in this movie. And she has to be. She has to win Stewart's, and more difficultly, Cary Grant's love (again) for the story to work. She has an immense amount of innate vitality, intelligence, and real interest, to be the real center of this movie.

Stewart, an actor who has always really annoyed me (outside of Rear Window...where he still kinda annoys me), is admiringly strong. He plays the role of the audience: flabbergasted by these super-rich people, but really charmed by them. It's very easy to point to the scenes that won him the Oscar. One is a scene in which he's drunk, and goes to Cary Grant's house to basically confess his love for Hepburn...the other is a very charming scene between a drunk Hepburn and a drunk Stewart.

Grant is the least impressive, but he is still his undeniably winning self, as the puppeteer of sorts. Grant is an actor who always seems like he knows more than his character does, which adds a lot to his role here, and sells the only questionable part of the film...the ending.

To cut to the chase: the bulk of this movie is a delightful, witty, sharp, surprisingly honest and sometimes grim, masterclass is plotting, scripting, and acting. Then we get the last ten minutes...which just doesn't quite click for me. I won't spoil things but the way the last few scenes play out...well it feels very theatrical and fantastical...and it doesn't quite work on screen.

So, final verdict...Sorry Pierre...this doesn't bump my Number One film on my Top 100. In fact, I don't think it makes my Top 100...but I did enjoy it a whole lot. If not for the last few scenes...I think I would have loved it...but as is I just liked it, and respected the heck out of it.

Grade: B+

Best Scene: A Drunk Jimmy Stewart goes to Cary Grant's house.