by George Cukor, 1940.
Starring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, John Howard, Ruth Hussey, Jimmy Stewart, Virginia Weidler.
Rating: 6/10, 7.5/10.
Oh, golly. Oh, golly.
Why does everyone in the world lie about this movie? They say it’s a comedy, they say it’s silly, they say it’s lots of fun. Well. Parts of it are silly, yes, parts of it are fun. But most of it, I thought, was upsetting, disturbing, depressing, and sad. Was it just me?
Katherine Hepburn stars as Tracy Lord, a rather unwilling society woman, about to marry the solid but boring George Kittredge (Howard) two years after her whirlwind marriage to and divorce from the oddly named C. K. Dexter Haven (Grant). Into the picture come McCauley ("Mike") Connor and Elizabeth Imbrie (Stewart and Hussey), a reporter and photographer, respectively, for the gossip magazine Spy—not that either is particularly fond of the job. They manage to work their way into the Lord household to cover the wedding. However, things go crazy when Dexter tries to find a way back into Tracy’s heart, while something seems to be starting between Tracy and Mike.
There are some very, very funny parts, like when the Lord family has discovered that Mike and Liz are reporters, but through circumstances are forced to let them stay. Rather than telling the two that they know their secret, the Lords decide to play up on Mike and Liz’s preconceptions of the rich society family. Tracy and her little sister, Dinah (Weidler) sweep in, speaking French to one another, Dinah playing piano and singing, both saying "Darling" and that sort of thing, posing in doorways. This was hilarious. This was near the beginning. I thought, "Ooh! This is as funny as everyone says!"
Most of the rest of the film, though, was not. In the course of it, nearly every person Tracy cares about tells her she is inhuman, and it breaks her. Yes, as we watch, Katherine Hepburn’s character is emotionally destroyed. It’s all topped off when, for quite some time, she thinks that she has drunkenly committed a grave, unforgivable offense against her own personal sense of morality. Happy ending or no, it doesn't change the fact that we've just watched a whole lot of human suffering. She does a lot of crying in this movie. That alone doesn’t say much—she did a lot of crying in Bringing Up Baby, too—but it’s an entirely different sort of crying than in that other movie. In Bringing Up Baby, they were the tears of a flighty but manipulative woman, both caused by her own flaky emotions and by her knowledge that she could use tears to manipulate the man she wanted. These were funny tears. In Philadelphia Story, though, they are the tears of a woman who has lost faith in life and herself. She cries because she truly thinks she has reason to, and this is NOT funny. Nor, it seems to me, was it meant to be.
I’m not saying it’s a bad movie. In some ways it is very good—the writing is brilliant, both in the funny parts and in the serious parts that the whole world conspired to keep me from knowing about. The performances are as great as you’d expect from a cast including not only Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant, but also Jimmy Stewart. In some other ways, though, it did not strike me as very good—the way the funny parts and the utterly depressing parts clash, for one thing. These elements can both be in one movie, but this one just didn’t seem like it could make up its mind. Also, some characters—Dinah and Tracy’s mother, in particular—would vanish for great stretches of time, and then come back seeming to play an entirely different character. Take Tracy’s mother, who is very present as a witty, strong woman at the beginning, then goes away for the majority of the film, only to come back near the end, simpering and ditzy. What happened? I mean, it’s her daughter’s wedding day, but still.
I have to say, though, I did like the film. Not as much as the rest of the world seems to, and certainly not as a comedy. More than anything, it left me confused, and with a strange, indefinable sense of betrayal. Did I really see the same movie everyone else did?