The Philadelphia Story (MGM, 1940)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2024 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

After watching The Pleasure Garden, my husband Charles and I finally put on Turner Classic Movies and watched an acknowledged masterpiece by a team of filmmakers at the peak of their form: The Philadelphia Story, made by MGM in 1940 and starring Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and James Stewart in a farce comedy directed by George Cukor from a script by Donald Ogden Stewart based on a stage play by Philip Barry. The Philadelphia Story was Hepburn’s comeback film; in 1938 she had been fired by her initial studio, RKO, after the commercial failure of the film Bringing Up Baby. Today it seems inconceivable that a hard-edged screwball comedy classic like Bringing Up Baby could have bombed on its initial release, but it did. Later Columbia Pictures’ head Harry Cohn decided to sign Hepburn to a one-film deal to do a remake of Philip Barry’s play Holiday, originally filmed by Pathé in 1930, but it ran into trouble from Harry Brandt, head of the Independent Theatre Owners Association. Brandt had listed Hepburn, along with Marlene Dietrich, Mae West, Edward Arnold, Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and Kay Francis, as overpaid stars whose films were “box-office poison.” Cohn decided to try to turn Brandt’s jibe against Hepburn into a selling point – he put up billboards for Holiday which asked, “Is it true Katharine Hepburn is box-office poison? See her in Holiday and decide for yourself!” Unfortunately, Cohn’s curious advertising strategy ran into opposition from Wes Anderson, a roller-derby star in Los Angeles, who put up his own billboards reading, “Is it true Katharine Hepburn is box-office poison? Wes Anderson thinks it’s true.”

Fortunately for Hepburn, at the time she was dating multimillionaire Howard Hughes, who put up his own money to commission a play for her, The Philadelphia Story, and get the Theatre Guild in New York to produce it on Broadway. Hughes also made sure that he owned the movie rights and he assigned them to Hepburn, guaranteeing that whatever studio filmed the play, they’d have to use her in the female lead. Louis B. Mayer, studio head of MGM, saw the play, but Hepburn’s heart sank when she saw who his date was – Norma Shearer, widow of Mayer’s former partner Irving Thalberg and a star in her own right. She was worried that MGM would offer to buy the rights to The Philadelphia Story as a Shearer vehicle, but she handled the negotiations herself and got not only the right to repeat her stage role on film but also her choice of director and a say in the casting of the male leads. She got her director, George Cukor, but not her leading actors, Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Mayer told her, “You can have James Stewart for one of the leads because he’s under the sort of contract where he has to do whatever we tell him to,” but for the other big role Mayer gave Hepburn a budget of $150,000 and told her to hire her own leading man. Hepburn got Cary Grant, with whom she’d already made three films – Sylvia Scarlett, Bringing Up Baby and Holiday – and I tend to agree with critic Danny Peary that as legendary as the later Tracy-Hepburn vehicles have become in film history, her movies with Grant are on the whole better.

The Philadelphia Story is a farce comedy about Tracy Samantha Lord (Katharine Hepburn), who was previously married to C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) but divorced him two years prior to the main action. Now she’s engaged to George Kittredge (John Howard at his stuffiest), who worked his way up from being a coal miner (this is Pennsylvania, after all) to CEO of the mining company he worked for and has political ambitions. Tracy has a mother, Margaret (Mary Nash); a father, Seth (John Halliday), who’s separated from the family because he’s keeping a dancer as a mistress in New York; and a younger sister, Dinah (the precociously talented Virginia Weidler, whose film career came to an unhappy end in Best Foot Forward in 1943; after a brief attempt at a vaudeville career she retired, got married and seemed to have settled down into a happy life when she got heart disease and died at just 41; she’s great in this movie, especially in the scenes in which she does impressions of Hepburn at her hammiest). Alas, Sidney Kidd (Henry Daniell), publisher of Spy magazine (read: Life), has got the story of Seth Lord’s relationship with that dancer and threatens to publish it unless the Lord family allows two Spy staffers, reporter Macaulay “Mike” Connor (James Stewart) and photographer Elizabeth “Liz” Imbrie (Ruth Hussey), to cover Tracy’s wedding. The two show up at the Lord manse along with C. K. Dexter Haven, who has arranged the whole thing (it was he who leaked the story about Seth Lord’s extra-relational activities to Spy) as a plot to break up Tracy’s impending marriage and get her back.

What follows is an hour and 52 minutes of sheer delight, as the characters fall in and out of their various attractions – at one point Mike takes a drunk Tracy out into the Lords’ pool for a midnight swim, and returns barking out “Over the Rainbow” (earlier we’ve heard Virginia Weidler at the Lords’ piano belting out “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady”). At one point Mike proposes to Tracy, but she’s too good a sport to take him away from Liz even though she’d earlier offered to put him up in her vacation home so he could write great novels and wouldn’t have to be a reporter for a living. (He virtuously replies that the system of private patronage has been dead for over a century.) At various points in the story Tracy is referred to as a princess, a goddess and what Philip Barry’s dialogue called a “married virgin” – she may have given her body to the man she married but never her heart – and she gradually realizes that the one man who can break down her defenses and make a woman out of her is … her ex, C. K. Dexter Haven, whom she ends up marrying in the ceremony originally planned for her wedding to Kittredge for what looks like a very Taming of the Shrew-ish relationship. (In the early 1950’s she’d play Katharine in The Taming of the Shrew on stage but, alas, it wasn’t filmed.) It’s an indication of Katharine Hepburn’s self-confidence that she made The Philadelphia Story with most of the same creative team with which she’d made her earlier flop, Holiday – George Cukor as director, Philip Barry as writer, Cary Grant as her co-star – and she had a hit. (Interestingly, her co-stars in the stage production were then unknown to movie audiences but later became film stars on their own: Joseph Cotten played C. K. Dexter Haven and Van Heflin played Macaulay Connor, and part of me wishes we had an alternative-universe version of The Philadelphia Story with them in it.)

The Philadelphia Story is a well-oiled laugh machine and an example of the studio system at its best, a beautifully crafted vehicle – though, oddly, it was James Stewart who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for the film even though a) it was the second lead and b) it’s a perfectly fine performance but not a spectacular one. TCM’s host, Dave Karger, mentioned that a lot of people in Hollywood thought it was a “consolation Oscar” because Stewart had been passed over the year before for his genuinely award-worthy performance in Frank Capra’s Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, which not only showcased Stewart’s range far more than The Philadelphia Story but anticipated the deeper, richer roles he would play when he returned from combat in World War II and got out from under the limits the studio system had put on him. Meanwhile, Hepburn was nominated for the Best Actress award but lost to Ginger Rogers for Kitty Foyle (“a fluke,” said Gary Carey in his history of MGM; “her only legitimate competition was Bette Davis in The Letter”), and the film’s real male lead, Cary Grant, wasn’t nominated at all even though a) he wipes the screen with poor James Stewart and b) Grant is part of the Academy’s “Dishonor Roll” of actors who never won a competitive Oscar despite a long series of performances that deserved it. Then again, MGM probably promoted Stewart over Grant for the award because he was still bound to them by a term contract while Grant had already emancipated himself from the clutches of the studio system.