From pen, to stage, to film – and why it all mattered.
Google any list along the lines of ‘Best Old Hollywood Films To Watch’, or ‘Best Classic Movies Of All Time’, or ‘Best Romcoms Ever’, and this film from 1940 is probably unfailingly on it.
In short, it’s an incredibly well regarded entity and undoubtedly beloved by many. And it isn’t hard to understand why. It stars one of the world’s most well-regarded actresses, supported by some of Old-Hollywood’s most famous leading men in Cary Grant and James Stewart, and was directed by George Cukor as one of the most acclaimed directors in history. A recipe for success, surely.
And it’s a sum of more than just its parts. It’s a film you like to recommend to all of your friends who “don’t like old films” – countering instead, “Look look, they were funny back then! They said funny things! They had witty and clever banter! They got drunk! There’s crackling sexual tension! It’s not boring at all!”
And it’s not.
It’s not boring at all. Watching this film in this day and age and not in the ‘40s for the first time, its brilliance is immediately apparent. Yes, it’s also apparent some of the ways in which today’s world differs from the 1940s, but it’s more than possible to be swept up in a wave of sparkling dialogue and the rapid build of a screwball comedy plot – completely enraptured.
What’s not immediately apparent is the tumult of what was Katharine Hepburn herself was facing behind the scenes at the time when this film entered the world, and more broadly, why this film’s creation was so necessary in the first place.
By 1940, Katharine Hepburn needed something to save her.
Two Oscar nominations before this date and the other numerous such accolades since makes it easy to smooth over the fact things weren’t always plain sailing.
After her disastrously received turn in The Lake, she had not set foot on Broadway since 1934. Come 1937, she’d had four financially unsuccessful films in a row, culminating with Quality Street.
Holiday and Bringing up Baby, both with Cary Grant and both released in 1938, are praised and lauded now. But at the time, they both sank and failed to find her the foothold she was increasingly desperately needing.
Public opinion was only wavering further. Years of being unconventional were taking their toll. Challenging attitudes to the press, masculine behaviours and fashion senses, living with women, secretive and failed marriages, and ostensibly provocative political views were all snowballing behind her on top of the deteriorating critical acclaim. The time came where seldom was she referred to without the infamous "box-office poison" suffix.
Katharine knew there was work to be done.
Inviting playwright Phillip Barry to spend weeks with the Hepburn family at Fenwick, The Philadelphia Story in its first iteration as a Broadway play was born. Tracy Lord is as much Katharine Hepburn as much as Katharine Hepburn was Tracy Lord. Barry stitched a mould for Tracy out of the very fabric of Katharine and her life at Fenwick, sat on the jetty or observing the continual carousel of associates and relatives passing through the house. And Katharine didn’t just watch. “Make her like me,” she instructed Barry. “But make her all soft.”
He did. And it worked.
On the stage in New York as the play opened, she earned the reviews she’d so long sought after – Miss Hepburn had “at last found the joy she had always been seeking in the theatre.”
Success holding ground, she made her next shrewd action in purchasing the rights to the motion picture, with herself conditionally attached to the starring role. It was some fine advice from Howard Hughes, and one of the most important gifts he ever gave her. Well, what else are rich aviator beaus for?
Now film audiences all over the world, not just the privileged theatregoers of Broadway, needed to see this icy queen cut down to size.
Most literally, her opening scene watches her flattened horizontally to the floor while Grant as Dexter shoves her by the face through the doorway.
When Dexter confronts Tracy as his ex-wife to place the blame at her feet for the failure of their marriage, or when her father comes forth with further accusations of culpability, one might expect Katharine Hepburn to argue. To protest. To defend. To quip. Tracy Lord doesn’t. She cries.
No more the overt intimation of subversion and there being other ways to live. No more tomboyish wildness as in Little Women. No more masquerading as men as in Sylvia Scarlett. No more ruining her leading man’s life and work as in Bringing up Baby and being happy about it. No more rumours of the inclinations garnered by living with women and wearing trousers as in her own life. Here, she nestles herself comfortably into convention. Deferentially tempering that Hepburn fire and accepting her ‘mistakes’ head on, she slots into one of Hollywood’s most favoured neat endings – the comedy of remarriage and an acquiescence to loving her man.
She learns her lesson, Hollywood reasons. The New and Improved Kate.
Critical acclaim and another Oscar nomination? Why, but of course – nothing but the finest for our darling Katharine.
It seems upsetting to think of it like that and witness such a calculated and contrived humbling of our beloved untameable wildcat as we think of her now.
But we’ve had 80 years to settle into the ripples around the context of its creation and parse through the politics of its existence. What ever all of the surrounding paraphernalia may be, it does not negate any of the film's primary and immediate impacts.
Is it still markedly charming, clever, entertaining, funny, aesthetically wonderous and engaging to begin with? Arguably, yes.
There is no denying the wittiness of the dialogue. Regardless of what they were subliminally intended to make audiences at the time think, the endurance is shown by the fact the lines still have the capacity to make audiences today sit up, pay attention, and laugh. Even those who don’t ‘like’ classic films. The costumes are beautiful to behold. Her hungover hissing at the sunlight is one of the finest “Oh curse the follies and decisions of the night before!” sequences ever fixed into film. There's diversion too from all angles to sustain the variation and pace, with added moments of brilliance being provided by Ruth Hussey as Elizabeth and Virginia Wielder as crafty Dinah.
Ultimately, The Philadelphia Story holds up. It is still a remarkable film in its own right. But perhaps, it’s even more significant when considered in the context of its whole existence.
Donald Ogden Stewart said in his autobiography that the Philadelphia Story was the easiest job he ever had because the original play by Phillip Barry was so perfect.
