THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (George Cukor, MGM, 1940)

Easily one of the best films ever made and one of my personal favorites THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (George Cukor, MGM, 1940) cannot be praised enough.  A true classic the film is a marvelously written one with great dialogue as well as a funny and romantic narrative.  The cast may be one of the best ever assembled with everyone giving stellar performances.  Being adapted from a stage play makes the film stagnant in setting but this is a minor knock on great work by George Cukor.  Watching the film today leaves me with one very striking facet that cannot be ignored.

The facilitating vehicle bringing Mike (Jimmy Stewart), Liz (Ruth Hussey), Dex (Cary Grant) and Tracy (Katherine Hepburn) together is the desire of Spy magazine to get a first hand account of a socialites wedding.  Now in this day and age this type of thing doesn't at all seem implausible or even far fetched, in fact it might even be expected.  This role played by the tabloid press is an interesting one.  At the beginning of the film Tracy complains of the indecency of such press and wonders how any decent and good person would succumb to such invasion of privacy.  The tabloids are viewed as an intrusion and the characters of Mike and Liz despise their jobs but despair having to make money.  Today this type of behavior is embraced, the cameras welcomed and the privacy of lives commoditized.  This signifies a tremendous shift in the societal and moral directions this country has taken.  A significantly sad one.

This shift can best be seen in analyzing stars.  The stars of this film; Stewart, Hepburn and Grant were of the classical mold.  Carefully tailored images, discreet private lives.  Always leaving their homes as part of the bigger picture, never being photographed in less than detailed presentation.  Contrast this to today's celebrity personas.  It is as if everything done by these greats was tossed out the window as anachronistic and tired, useless in today's age of media over saturation.  Watching a great film like THE PHILADELPHIA STORY takes you back to a different time and those short two hours let you relive things as they used to be if only for a little while.