If I haven’t exceeded my capacity for superlative esteem beyond meaning The Philadelphia Story (1940, George Cukor) my friends is the most perfect film Hollywood has ever made to gift us with the uh stuff that dreams are made of. The dream of true love to be precise. It’s self-reflexive in that it both expresses a disdain for the American public’s pathetic moronic indulgence in tabloid celebrity gossip rag culture while allowing us into the ultimate inner lives expose of the young, rich, good-looking trying desperately to hide away from the public light couple as we steal our very own voyeuristic intrusion into their world. The Philadelphia Story is a domestic psychological dissection of the female mind and her growth into maturity screwball luxury excursion drama away into the seas of the wealthy class, which makes that rarest of all forays, sympathizing with them, allowing us to empathize with them, understand true love through them, and most importantly of all to laugh with them.
If Lubitsch shows us how sex is luxury, George Cukor distances us from the wealthy so that we can appreciate love’s high price tag without necessarily needing to let us take it home ourselves; so that next time we go shopping we’re a little better discerning in how we go about it. Cukor feels like our own American Lubitsch. Lubitsch is the Riviera. Cukor is Mid-Atlantic.
In The Philadelphia Story the middle-class journalists mock the decadence and refinement of the upper-class household. But they also want to be a part of it. There’s no rags to riches Cinderella crap here. They can’t. And by the end they’ve stopped making jokes about them. That’s the arc. But there’s also this aspect to the narrative whereby the family is blackmailed by the tabloid to allow the tabloid to sneak a spread of their wedding, but have the tables turned on them, yet just at the moment they’ve taken the spoils, the final twist ending is that the tabloid loses the high stakes but still walks away with what they came for—and sell it to us with the end superimposed over our gluttonous eye candy. That’s the pitch-black noir-tinged screwball edge: the house always wins.
C.K. DEXTER HAVEN (Cary Grant) is screwball characteristically alpha. Everyone in the family acknowledges his binge drinking and wife beating in the most charming light. When the little girl mentions the violent assaults she’s full of glee and phrases it like “I wonder if he’s gonna sock her again?” TRACY LORD (Katherine Hepburn) is confronted with the truth by her father in Act II when he tells her she’s a prig who lacks an understanding heart. These aren’t Lubitsch ideal lovers. They’re deeply flawed. They’re relatable because they’re human. But we see them working on becoming better people. They are exemplary of the truth that love takes work.
It’s also cool how in The Philadelphia Story the Ralph is actually a loser. When KITTRIDGE tells Tracy she’s a goddess and he wants to worship her, it isn’t how sweet, it’s how nauseating. The Ralph is typically neutral or naïve, but Kittridge is repulsive. Most of The Philadelphia Story is posh indulgence interspersed with flights of sublime wit; but there’s always that cynical bloodthirsty clawed wild nature of it all just slightly underneath. Hearth fires and holocausts is right.
My favorite gag is when MIKE and LIZ are invited outside for sherry with the family. The sound of Liz’s camera shutter snapping offscreen with the cut revealing each shot subsequently gets increasingly off-putting to the point of aggravation. When Cukor films the wide with Tracy kicking over the table and breaking Liz’s camera that’s the kind of robust cathartic laugh which utilizes the reserve energy of the aggravation to fuel the explosion. An exhaust valve is therapeutic.
Finally for me Tracy is my way into all this and the star in every sense. The way Act III is entirely Tracy hungover and piecing together what occurred during her blackout the night before is revelatory. She’s the light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long emotionally. Right there with you Tracy. That final exchange between Tracy and Dext tells us everything we need to understand what makes this picture work so well: “How do I look?” “Like a queen. Like a goddess.” “How do I feel? Like a human being.”
In The Philadelphia Story the middle-class journalists mock the decadence and refinement of the upper-class household. But they also want to be a part of it. There’s no rags to riches Cinderella crap here. They can’t. And by the end they’ve stopped making jokes about them. That’s the arc. But there’s also this aspect to the narrative whereby the family is blackmailed by the tabloid to allow the tabloid to sneak a spread of their wedding, but have the tables turned on them, yet just at the moment they’ve taken the spoils, the final twist ending is that the tabloid loses the high stakes but still walks away with what they came for—and sell it to us with the end superimposed over our gluttonous eye candy. That’s the pitch-black noir-tinged screwball edge: the house always wins.
C.K. DEXTER HAVEN (Cary Grant) is screwball characteristically alpha. Everyone in the family acknowledges his binge drinking and wife beating in the most charming light. When the little girl mentions the violent assaults she’s full of glee and phrases it like “I wonder if he’s gonna sock her again?” TRACY LORD (Katherine Hepburn) is confronted with the truth by her father in Act II when he tells her she’s a prig who lacks an understanding heart. These aren’t Lubitsch ideal lovers. They’re deeply flawed. They’re relatable because they’re human. But we see them working on becoming better people. They are exemplary of the truth that love takes work.
It’s also cool how in The Philadelphia Story the Ralph is actually a loser. When KITTRIDGE tells Tracy she’s a goddess and he wants to worship her, it isn’t how sweet, it’s how nauseating. The Ralph is typically neutral or naïve, but Kittridge is repulsive. Most of The Philadelphia Story is posh indulgence interspersed with flights of sublime wit; but there’s always that cynical bloodthirsty clawed wild nature of it all just slightly underneath. Hearth fires and holocausts is right.
My favorite gag is when MIKE and LIZ are invited outside for sherry with the family. The sound of Liz’s camera shutter snapping offscreen with the cut revealing each shot subsequently gets increasingly off-putting to the point of aggravation. When Cukor films the wide with Tracy kicking over the table and breaking Liz’s camera that’s the kind of robust cathartic laugh which utilizes the reserve energy of the aggravation to fuel the explosion. An exhaust valve is therapeutic.
Finally for me Tracy is my way into all this and the star in every sense. The way Act III is entirely Tracy hungover and piecing together what occurred during her blackout the night before is revelatory. She’s the light that burns twice as bright burns for half as long emotionally. Right there with you Tracy. That final exchange between Tracy and Dext tells us everything we need to understand what makes this picture work so well: “How do I look?” “Like a queen. Like a goddess.” “How do I feel? Like a human being.”
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