The Philadelphia Story (1940)

The Philadelphia Story.  It's a screwball comedy.  Did you guess?

Directed by George Cukor
Written by Donald Ogden Stewart (screenplay), Philip Barry (play), Waldo Sort (extra dialogue)
Starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart


Who starred in the Godfather series? Al Pacino, of course. Robert De Niro. Marlon Brando. Robert Duvall. Big stars, big names, big capital letters on the poster. Yet Pacino and De Niro famously didn't appear on screen together – then or at all – until Michael Mann's Heat, some two decades later (they've since appeared together once more, now in the gradual decline of their careers, in Jon Avnet's Righteous Kill). Two great actors, working mostly in similar genres, who could have enhanced no end of pictures, had that been how Hollywood works. It's not how Hollywood works. Contracts, budgets, marketing, all conspire to ensure that there's rarely more than one major male star named above the title.

Conspired? Perhaps that's not fair. Filmmakers create art, but the studios sell product. As companies, with profits and shareholders to be tended to, they have to make money – and more stars means a much larger profit, means the risk of greatly squeezed margins. It's also uneconomical: why sell one movie with a name when you could sell two?

And if that's the case now, in an age when actors have a good deal of freedom to go off and make the pictures they want to make, what of the days when a star was little more than the most favoured of the studio contacts? The old Studio System had an iron grip on who did what, when and with who. If two stars were pitched into a picture together, it was an actor and an actress, and they were there to fall in or out of love; the big male leads of the day were kept apart.

Which is why The Philadelphia Story was always and inevitably going to be an unabashed joy. It stars Cary Grant and James Stewart, the only film they'd ever make together, and right at the peak of their careers to boot. And lest there be any doubt that such a pairing deserved a major female star to complete the triangle, it also stars Katharine Hepburn. Do you need to know any more? Does anyone? Well, it's a screwball comedy, in the classic style. It's a screwball comedy starring Cary Grant, James Stewart and Katharine Hepburn. It's everything that it ought to be; it should have been a delight, one to see again and again, and that's precisely what it is, witty, sharp, endearing, dramatic, stylish: a wealthy divorceé (Hepburn at her most wry) is to be remarried; her deviously debonair ex-husband (Grant, of course, as The Cary Grant Character, unchanging and unwavering from one picture to the next) blackmails her into allowing the glossy society rag he works for to cover the wedding; the rag in question sends its most notable reporter (Stewart, short-tempered, sharp-humoured, charming) to cover the big day. All descends into a fast-talking and clever farce, as it must.

Really, I don't need to go further. It's a screwball comedy with Cary Grant, James Stewart and Katherine Hepburn, a perfect recipe. Perfect.