Week of May 4, 2006, Issue #550
FILM
heresy!
Paul MATWYCHUK / paul@vueweekly.com
In Heresy!, Vue Weekly invites its film reviewers to either champion a film that everyone else thinks is trash, or to trash a film that everyone else regards as art.The exalted popular reputation of the 1940 romantic comedy The Philadelphia Story (it’s #51 on the AFI’s list of the greatest American films of all time) has always seemed to me to represent a triumph of starpower over sense.
It’s the rare film from the “Golden Age of Hollywood” to feature not just one, not just two, but three iconic actors in the lead roles: Katharine Hepburn, Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart, all of them playing exactly the type of character that even audience members who’ve never seen an old black-and-white movie in their life immediately associate them with.
Hepburn plays a haughty socialite, maybe a little exasperating with all her quirks but a good egg underneath it all; Grant is the effortlessly debonair charmer whose rakish streak only adds to his charisma; Stewart is the lanky, gawky sweetheart, easily flustered by women but always ready to stand up for his principles. The Philadelphia Story looks so much like a classic that it’s easy to see why so many people have mistaken it for one.
But aside from its justifiably famous wordless opening scene (culminating with Grant placing his hand over Hepburn’s face and shoving her to the ground, a perfectly executed bit of marital slapstick), The Philadelphia Story is actually pretty thin stuff. It’s one of those movies where what we’re told about the characters and what we see of them have almost nothing in common.
We’re told that Hepburn is a prig who can’t accept imperfections in anyone around her—she divorced Grant because of his excessive drinking. But in fact, she seems just the opposite: she adores her goofy little sister, her scatterbrained mother and her irresponsible uncle. Hepburn seldom worried about whether audiences liked her or her characters, so it’s a sad irony that this film, which works so hard to deny her flaws, should be the one that audiences have decided contains her best work.
The film has other problems: Grant’s character is too passive, and the two big comedy scenes (an interview with Stewart’s magazine reporter in which she pretends to be a dizzy, spoiled aristocrat, and a later bit where Grant discovers her, half-drunk, half-hungover, half-dressed and sprawled in Stewart’s arms) are overlong and not very imaginatively performed on Hepburn’s part—although I seem to be in the minority with that opinion.
What makes The Philadelphia Story’s enduring popularity even more mysterious to me is the comparative obscurity of a 1938 movie called Holiday which, except for James Stewart, it was made by the exact same team of artists (Grant, Hepburn, director George Cukor and writer Philip Barry) takes place in the same milieu (upper-crust, class-conscious New England society). Like Philadelphia, it’s about flawed, unconventional people in conflict with a social world that refuses to forgive imperfections, but this time out, that conflict is portrayed with a genuine poignancy, a Wes Anderson-style mix of comedy and melancholy that puts The Philadelphia Story’s fluffy screwball setpieces to shame—in fact, it shoves them to the ground as easily as Cary Grant pushed over Katharine Hepburn.
Incidentally, Holiday will be screened at the Provincial Museum Auditorium on Mon, May 8 at 8 pm. See it for yourself, Philadelphia Story fans, and tell me I’m wrong. V