The Philadelphia Story

Media:	DVD
Directed by:	George Cukor
Starring:	Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart
Release date:	01 June, 2004
List price:	~~$19.97~~
Our price:	$16.48 that is 17% off!

The Philadelphia Story

Average rating: Stars

Three Screen Legends in One Movie

How can you top the star power of Hepburn-Grant-Stewart? Well you cant! This is probably one of the can't miss trio in movie history. Hepburn radiates with icy commanding presence. Jimmy Stewart was at his "everyman" best and the ever suave Cary Grant demonstrates again his talent for comedy.

Some really memorable scenes including the "screwbally" opening with Grant and Hepburn, the "fireworks" speech of Jimmy Stewart that melted Hepburn icy heart, and the unexpected wedding in the finale. This is just one those movies you watch over and over again.

The extras in the DVD are topnotch which includes a commentary and 2 feature length documentaries: one involving George Cukor and the other involving Katharine Hepburn told by Hepburn herself. It was such a great documentary as Hepburn herself tells her story from her humble beginnings to her legendary status. That documentary alone is worth the price of the DVD

Grade: A

The Philadelphia Story - Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and more

Mighty "yar"

"You're slipping, Red. I used to be afraid of that look - the withering glance of the goddess."

The movie begins with one of the most classic scenes in film history. The audience does not know who the characters are in the first scene, and no dialogue is used. We see Cary Grant angrily slam the front door of a mansion and stalk towards a car parked out front. A moment later, Katharine Hepburn, dressed in a nightgown, follows him out, carrying a bag of golf clubs. After removing one club, she contemptuously throws the bag filled with the rest at him, haughtily breaks the one club over her knee, throws the halves at him, and stomps back towards the open doorway. Grant follows her, taps her on the shoulder...and when she wheels around, he pulls his fist back as if to punch her, but instead mashes her face in the palm of his hand, shoving her backward through the open doorway, where we next see her rubbing her neck as she sits up. The scene ends.

Cut to "Two Years Later" as the title informs the audience; the day before Philadelphian blue-blood Tracy Lord's (Katharine Hepburn) second wedding. The audience also realize that the mashee in the opening scene and the masher were formally husband and wife: Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) and C.K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant). Soon Dexter has makes a surprise visit to the Lord household on the eve of the wedding. Tracy is about to marry George Kittredge (John Howard), her stuffy and rather chauvinistic well-to-do fiance. What Tracy doesn't know at first is that Dexter, perhaps seeking revenge on Tracy, has arranged for Mike Connor (James Stewart), a writer for a tabloid-like magazine named "Spy", and Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), a "Spy" photographer, to do a story on the wedding under the guise of being friends of a friend of the family. Once Tracy is informed by Dexter that she must either allow the story to be written or her father's ongoing illicit affair with a dancer will be the big story instead she consents, but Connor and Imbrie do not know that she knows who their real identities and purpose...and she plots to "really give them something to write about...we'll set them on their ears!"

The first scene where Tracy meets Mike Connor and Liz Imbrie, and practically interviews them sets the tone for the rest of the film.

To reveal more of the story would spoil it for anyone who hasn't seen the film. But in the next twenty-four hours Tracy and the others find their lives turned upside-down in an alternately hilarious and touching series of events.

Katharine Hepburn made the extremely wise move on the advise of Howard Hughes, whom she was dating at the time, of buying the film rights to Philip Barry's play - she had been a hit onstage in the role, which was written for her. Recently having been labeled "box-office poison", even being offered a role in a film tentatively entitled "Mother Carey's Chickens", it was the only way to guarantee her the role in any filming of the play. She had spent a year on Broadway in the film version, and interrupted the tour of the play to film it for MGM. For the film, she had wanted Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy for the roles of Haven and Connor. She got Grant and Stewart - hardly shabby! And better choices anyway, IMHO. Donald Ogdent Stewart took over for the screenplay adaptation, as Barry had apparently requested too much money. The dialogue is some of the best of any film of its time, and Hepburn, at her most radiant, is beautifully costumed by designer Adrian. She is at times "lit from within", as Stewart's character Mike tells her, and at other times "made of bronze" (as her father, played by John Halliday) asserts. Dinah, Tracy's young sister, is portrayed to hilarious effect by child actress Virginia Weidler, who makes her appearance to the reporter duo in ballet toe shoes, spewing French and finishing her introduction to them by manically playing and singing a lusty dance-hall song on the piano. Pinch-prone Uncle Willie (Roland Young) adds great spice and fun with his smaller part.

Side note: In the scene where Mike arrives drunk at Dexter's house late one evening, Stewart purposely hiccups to try to crack Grant's straight-faced resolve - and it works.

"The Philadelphia Story" won six Academy Award nominations: Best Picture, Best Actor (Stewart), Best Actress (Hepburn), Best Supporting Actress (Hussey), Best Screenplay (Donald Ogden Stewart), and Best Director (George Cukor). James Stewart and Donald Ogden Stewart won their nominations (Stewart's sole Oscar win), and although Katharine Hepburn did not win for this role (she lost to Ginger Rogers for her performance in "Kitty Foyle"), she received the New York Film Critics' Award. The film revived her professional reputation, was a huge success, is of course considered to be one of the all-time classics of romantic comedy, and my personal favorite of Hepburn's films of this genre.

Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn and more - The Philadelphia Story

Classic Led by Sharp Repartee and Three Scintillating Leads

It has taken me a while to warm to this 1940 classic probably because the characters are not as immediately likeable as others of the period, for example, Howard Hawks' "Bringing Up Baby". In what has to be her career-defining role, Katharine Hepburn was born to play imperious Main Line socialite Tracy Lord. As Hepburn herself says, the part fits her like a glove as her angular beauty is matched by the razor sharpness of her haughty, self-absorbed character. On the eve of her second marriage, Tracy is surrounded by three men who all want her at some point in the story. With whom she ends up is no surprise, but the journey there contains all the biting wit and human insight that one could hope for in what is essentially a drawing room comedy.

As the pretentiously named C.K. Dexter Haven, Tracy's ex-husband, Cary Grant surprisingly plays the most grounded character in the story, a romantic in cynic's clothing, watching others get caught in the fear of commitment and a gauzy haze of indecision. His only moment of typical Grant physical humor is right at the outset when in the classic opening scene, he reacts to Tracy's golf club-breaking defiance with a well-judged facial push. Together, along with the uproarious "Bringing Up Baby" and the sublime "Holiday", Hepburn and Grant made a dynamic, temperamentally compatible screen couple in their youth, a combustible tug-of-war between equals versus the more subservient role she played later with Spencer Tracy. Ironically, the triangle (or more accurately, quadrangle) element of this movie allows just enough interplay between the two in what was to be sadly their final film collaboration. As the third point, a young and refreshingly cynical James Stewart portrays Macauley "Mike" Connor, a reporter covering Tracy's nuptials for the gossipy "Spy" magazine. Connor turns out to be a talented, published short story author, which Tracy finds immediately attractive. Intriguingly, it is Mike, not Dexter, who gets the most romantic scene in the movie as he bathes Tracy in the moonglow of romantic foreplay before a midnight swim.

What is so refreshing about this triangle is that it never reduces itself to some heroic duel to win the damsel. In fact, both men have understandable reservations about Tracy's high-and-mighty stance and her inability to tolerate others' weaknesses. Dexter turns out to be an alcoholic whom Tracy enabled during their marriage, and this makes for some of the most incisive dialogue in the movie. Mike is really an anti-establishment type who is appalled by what he is doing, and he also has an unspoken relationship with Liz Imbrie, his smart-mouthed photographer sidekick who of course, pines for him. In one of the more painful scenes, Tracy's father, whose apparent indiscretion provides the blackmail-driven plot which allows "Spy" to cover Tracy's wedding, tells off his daughter by calling her a "prig" and a "perennial spinster" asserting she is as cold as a bronze statue. Of course, the one man who wants to worship her is her fiancÃ©, George Kittredge, who is socially insecure among the old rich and reveals his true intolerance when he believes that Tracy is guilty of the same type of indiscretion that ironically Tracy accused her father. As you can imagine, it all ties up beautifully, and all these complications come through with a great deal of humanity thanks to the wonderful, sometimes surprisingly edgy dialogue in Philip Barry's original play and Donald Ogden Stewart's screen adaptation. It is fair to say that the rest of the cast is fine but overshadowed by the three superb and fully embodied leads. Ruth Hussey does what she can in showing her character's vulnerability between the wisecracks as Liz, and Virginia Wiedler has a few hammy scenes as Tracy's precocious sister Dinah. A major portion of the credit for this first-class production needs to go to estimable filmmaker George Cukor, who is completely in his element here guiding his players to their peak. A true classic.

The extras in the new two-disc DVD package are excellent. The first disc has informative albeit rather enthusiastic commentary by film historian and critic Jeannine Basinger, as well as ten trailers for various Cukor classics. I am happy to report the video and audio transfer of the film itself is clean. The second disc contains "Katharine Hepburn: All About Me--A Self Portrait", a wonderful, nearly two-hour, first-person documentary made in 1992. At 85, she is a ball of energy and still quite lucid as she reflects back on her career in somewhat scripted remembrances. But her true feelings come out when she speaks lovingly about Spencer Tracy or what her responses are on myths about her. Her true personality - abrupt, ribald, and hilarious - comes across in the at-home scenes with her devoted entourage. It's a great retrospective of a full life. The second documentary is the Cukor contribution to "The Men Who Made the Movies" series produced by Richard Schickel, an overview of the master director's career though it oddly stops at 1954's "A Star Is Born". Both documentaries are chock full of memorable film clips.

Just like going to the movies in the forties, one can see a short with the acerbically amusing Robert Benchley and a cartoon on the second disc. There are also two radio broadcast versions with the three leads. The one-hour 1942 version is burdened by bad, crackling sound and an intrusive Cecil B. DeMille commenting on the plot throughout. The half-hour 1947 broadcast is the more intriguing of the two, as the actors' voices have coarsened somewhat over seven years. Hepburn, in particular, seems rather disengaged until the romantic interlude with Stewart when he humorously stutters a line in typical Stewart fashion.