Review of The Philadelphia Story (1940) by Tom B — 19 Mar 2010

I saw this a couple times with my dad when I was a boy. Saw it tonight, or finished it after starting it last night, with my own son. He'd seen it before but had forgotten it. Great to see him laugh at Jimmy Stewart's performance and the hilarious situations, and to be caught up in the romance.

As movies go it's "yar", we think. Love the words on which it's based, Philip Barry's play. Surprisingly watchable for a stage play due in no small part to all the wonderful people playing in it and the great words.

Cinematically it's meat and potatoes, solid and savory, one of the tastier American films of the era, if I had to choose. Do the values it embraces hold true today? I think so, especially the central one around the issue of having regard for human frailty.

Fun to think of Katherine Hepburn being one of the mavericks of the time yet intensely a woman in every sense, down to her frailty. I suppose something I like about this story is how the moral, the meaning, is touched on but not hammered home.

It's so full of guffaws and mirth it's hard to discern life-and-death stakes, though they are there. I suppose the life and death at stake is the death-in-life problem of not following one's true course.

In boating terms, to follow the spirit of the story, it might mean going against the natural flow of one's own disposition in order to please the needs of what one believes is right, or to save face.

As usual for the movies, this means the choice between love and something else, usually duty. I was in love with Hepburn's character when I was a boy. She was the most beautiful woman I could imagine: strong, pretty, and growing through to new realizations.

Now when I watch the film I'm older than Cary Grant was when he made the film and played the man who loved Hepburn. In many ways I'm older too than the characters they play and I can see the other side of the lesson they claimed as their own in the story.

To watch as a boy and see something of value, and to then watch as a man and look back at the same value and see the imperative of it, the result of the choices as played out over a lifetime, is something different.

Perhaps that's why some stories survive time regardless of the medium: the values and lessons they seek to explore are impacting and mean things beyond the moment in which they are expressed. Easy for me to gush about this one, seen it about a dozen times now.

Always easy to admire and enjoy. Always funny, always thoughtful, and with each new viewing the vitality of the characters shifts and expands, each new view showing me something new to reflect on in at least one of the players.

It's also damn easy to watch.