A Philadelphia Story review: A very different romantic punch-up

If you are accessing this review of an essential reissue in the print version of the paper . . .

Well, first of all, we thank you for your continuing interest. With that out of the way, we apologise for the need to replace one film concerning sexual violence with another very different romantic punch-up.

It's all too easy to set George Cukor's sublime comedy of bad manners beside Fifty Shades of Grey (denied an appropriately timed press show due to its undoubted brilliance) and derive all kinds of lessons concerning a decline in public discourse. Let's do that then.

Okay, we're now sounder on homosexuality and racial issues, but the notion of Katharine Hepburn allowing herself to be ritually pummelled by Cary Grant is so absurd as to defy lucid expression. Grant does ram his hand into Hepburn's face in The Philadelphia Story. ("Oh, please, mother, maybe he's going to sock her again!" a neighbouring child remarks. "Don't say 'sock', darling, 'strike' is quite an ugly enough word," her mother replies.)

We are, however, never in much doubt that the estranged couple – once married, now considering new lives – have quite the measure of one another. Hepburn’s Tracy Lord is nobody’s idea of a submissive. Emerging in 1940, when the screwball comedy was at its height, the film is too fervent with activity to permit any character time to be such a doormat.

Indeed, The Philadelphia Story stands as monument to one woman's determination to overcome national mood swings and the inflexibility of powerful men. Hard though it may be to credit, by the late 1930s, Katharine Hepburn had become "box-office poison". (That phrase may have made its first ever appearance in comments on the actress by Harry Brandt, an independent cinema-owner.) Even the now-revered Bringing Up Baby bombed with the public.

Hepburn’s response was to back a play by Philip Barry and, when it became a hit, persuade her (ahem) close friend Howard Hughes to buy her the film rights. MGM duly picked up the hit property and, drafting in Grant and Jimmy Stewart as twin romantic foils, sat back to favour Hepburn’s triumphant reinvention.

These days, the enjoyable, if less astringent, musical version High Society plays more often on television. So, the story is familiar. Tracy Lord has divorced CK Dexter Haven (Grant) some years previously and is about to embark on a new marriage to nouveau swell George Kittredge (John Howard). The wedding is the most talked-about of the moment and Spy magazine resorts to subterfuge to gain access.

The editor persuades Dexter to arrange invitations for reporter Mike Connor (Stewart) and Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) as old friends of the family. Tracy suspects who they are, but, always eager for sport, allows the hacks to attend anyway.

Of course, Tracy knows what’s going on. With the exception of George – rendered ignorant by the disease of new money – more or less everybody knows more or less everything that’s going on more or less all the time.

In love with patrician style, convinced that wit is a virtue in itself, Cukor’s zinging entertainment assumes an intelligent audience that savours intelligent characters. All of this went out of fashion in the 1960s when – in both liberal and conservative circles – a suspicion of cleverness accompanied revulsion at the diseased public polity.

Seventy years later, the romcom has so stagnated that it barely figures in the studio release schedules. Too much stupidity eventually killed it off. Meanwhile, the unstoppable desire for ersatz sophistication manifests itself in the chocolate-commercial chic of Fifty Shades of Grey. Which is where we reluctantly came in.