63. The Philadelphia Story

George Cuckor, 1940

Now this, sir, is a classic, a great movie with an even greater cast.  Here you have Katherine Hepburn, Cary Grant, and Jimmy Stewart all in one film.   Katherine Hepburn plays Tracy Lord, a real rich bitch and the ex-wife of Cary Grant's likable C. K. Dexter Haven, also rich but significantly less bitchy.   For some reason, Mr. C. K. Dexter Haven regrets his separation from Ms. Lord and conspires to crash her latest wedding along with a pair of reporters from Spy Magazine, your standard gossip rag.   Jimmy Stewart is one of the reporters and a budding short story writer.  Along the way, Tracy falls in love with her fiancé, with Stewart, and, if he gets his way, with C. K. Dexter Haven, but first she's going to have to be "yar," to use the film's terminology, and seek an equal as a mate instead of a "high priest" to her own "virgin goddess."

Every performance in this film is simply amazing and full of a great deal of comedy.  I particularly like the scene, near the end of the film, where a drunk off his ass Jimmy Stewart goes to C. K. Dexter Haven's house to discuss Tracy.  There seems to be a good amount of ad libbing going on in this scene and Grant constantly looks like he's going to loose it in the face of Stewart's hilarious drunk acting.   There is also an excellent bit early on where Tracy decides that she is going to present the Spy Magazine reporters with an exaggerated view of an eccentric rich family.  She and her sister prance into the room speaking French to each other and gliding around like a couple of bimbos.   Tracy's younger sister, herself a very likable character who seems to understand what Tracy needs in a man more than Tracy does, then sits down to play piano, making this the only film on my list to feature the song " Lydia, the Queen of Tattoos."

I suppose this film is best categorized as a comedy, but the reason I like it so much is that it is significantly more complex than that.   The film is a prototypical example of the so-called "comedy of re-marriage," a branch of screwball comedy that concerns the leads falling back in love with each other.  Yet, unlike most screwball comedies, there is a real question here regarding the lead's suitability for each other on a personal level.   Tracy really is a bitch and it's interesting to a see a movie address that, along with various class distinctions, and a much more plausible romantic triangle, or quadrangle I suppose, than usual.   It's a movie with a lot of twists and turns in the plot, but, thankfully, just as many in our perceptions of the characters.  And that's what the story is really all about, the characters, their relationships, and the transformations they have to make for each other.   Great stuff.