The Philadelphia Story (1940)

Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, what more could you ask for? Well, you may not ask but it has a brilliant script and excellent direction by George Cukor as well. The movie was based on a successful play by Phillip Barry. Hepburn had starred in the play on Broadway, where she had gone for refuge when her career hit a very rough patch in the late 1930s (she was famously declared to be box office poison by the theater owners). She planned her return to Hollywood brilliantly, however, by purchasing the rights to the play (with the financial support of her then-boyfriend Howard Hughes) so that she could have the last word on co-stars and director. Her first choice for the Cary Grant role was Spencer Tracy whom she had not yet met, but he was tied up so she settled for Grant only slightly reluctantly. This meant the postponement of their romance but it did the movie no harm.

The movie begins with a classic, the wordless end of the marriage of Tracy Lord (Hepburn) and C.K. Dexter Haven (Grant), childhood sweethearts from neighboring main-line Philadelphia families. We then immediately fast forward two years to the week before Tracy's second wedding to George Kittredge, self-made man who just happens to work for her father. In order to kill a story about Tracy's father and his chorus-girl paramour, Grant agrees to get access for two reporters from Spy magazine to do a story on Tracy's wedding. The reporter (Jimmy Stewart) and photographer (Ruth Hussey) are installed as house guests at the Lord mansion. Stewart is a serious writer who writes garbage for Spy to make the living that his serious writing does not produce. He and Hussey are a couple, but he's never been ready to settle down. The presence of these two and ex-husband Dexter wreak havoc on Tracy's wedding plans, thank goodness!

I've made this all sound very serious, but it's really a very funny movie. Of course all turns out well in the end but getting there is full of pitfalls and more importantly a VERY good script. Jimmy Stewart won best supporting actor for his role, although he was quoted as saying he really thought he was given the award because he didn't win for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington the year before. Really it's Katherine Hepburn's movie, as she knew it would be when she acquired the play and insisted they make the movie with her.