Cinema
The Philadelphia Story (U, selected cinemas)
It's a privilege
Mark Steyn
The Philadelphia Story would be wel- come anytime, but its reappearance now seems especially apt: after the Helloifica- tion of the landed classes, the notion of a wealthy family welcoming a couple of gos- sip-magazine hacks into their home for a behind-the-scenes exclusive on their daugh- ter's wedding is almost routine. Other aspects, too, seem more contemporary than they did: the idea that a man's drinking could be a 'problem' meriting 'sympathy' was not the standard take of films or plays 60 years ago. On the other hand, the open- ing scene, where he slams her in the kisser, plays less cute than it once did.
Philip Barry's story is a simple one: an account of the 48 hours leading up to the nuptials — take two — of Philadelphia's Miss Tracy Samantha Lord. This time her husband is a man who's pulled himself up by his bootstraps. Unfortunately for him, Tracy's ex is still around, as is her philan- dering dad, a wisecracking photographer, and a soulful writer grubbing a living for a gossipy rag. Barry's Broadway play has pro- duced two fine films — George Cukor's straight version of The Philadelphia Story (1940) and the musical High Society (1956). But their qualities are entirely different, which is why a decade ago, when Richard Eyre tried to do a stage version combining Barry's play and Cole Porter's songs, it was a schizophrenic mess. High Society stuck closely to the plot layout but moved the action to the Newport Jazz Festival and cast Bing Crosby, who's too much a demo- cratic American Everyman to pass for a languid aristocrat. The sharp, brittle tone of the original vanished completely. Barry's widow once told me the only line in the score that came anywhere near capturing her husband's characters was Porter's description of Tracy as 'the fair Miss Frigidaire'.
George Cukor's film is a wonderful example of the 'photographed play': with- out losing anything of Barry's claustropho- bia — the sense that too many relatives are in the same room — the director opens the play up to let the casual wealth of the Lords breathe, across the pool and the grounds beyond. Seen through the eyes of the two reporters, this really is 'the privi- leged class enjoying its privileges'. The dia- logue swanks almost as extravagantly. 'Kittredge isn't a tower of strength. He's just a tower,' says Cary Grant. 'You hardly 'I don't care what you do in your public life, so long as it doesn't adversely affect your private life, darling.' know him,' says Katherine Hepburn. 'To hardly know him is to know him well,' says Grant.
It was Hepburn who commissioned the piece from Barry, played it on Broadway, acquired the film rights and then signed Cukor. So there's no point querying her performance because neither the play nor the character would exist without her. What's amazing is how superbly cast every- one else is — not just Grant, but also Ruth Hussey as the gal photographer, John Howard as the stiff who's lining up to be Tracy's second husband, and Virginia WeiIler as Tracy's precocious kid sister. They gave the Oscar to the guy who plays the reporter, Jimmy Stewart, which seems fair enough. When you're speaking lines as smart as those of Barry — and his adapter Donald Ogden Stewart — they can some- times sound too smart: in their transfer from stage to the intimacy of film, you become aware of them as lines. But Stew- art's performance is a marvel: in that mea- sured, unhurried way, he seems to shrug off every line as if the thought's just occurred to him. It's as fresh now as it was in 1940.
Alan Pakula died last week in a grisly automobile accident: on the Long Island Expressway, a piece of metal pipe that had fallen from a truck was hit by another car, flipped up into the air and came crashing through Pakula's windscreen, spearing his skull and sending him careering off the road. Anyone who's driven in New York will be familiar with the amount of metal debris lying around the highways under the lethargic regime of the state's department of transportation. But, even so, what a ghastly end — and one far too lurid for Pakula's movies. He belonged to that breed of commercial Hollywood film-makers for- ever talking about the textures, subtleties and ambiguities of their work. In fact, films like Klute (1971) and The Parallax View (1974) work mainly because the subtleties and ambiguities are so unsubtly and unam- biguously laid out.
Pakula hung on through the Eighties and Nineties, directing Sophie's Choice (1986) and The Pelican Brief (1993), both hits, though neither demonstrating the shrewd feel for the beat of the times that he Showed in the Seventies. If Woodward and Bernstein became heroes to a generation of journalists, it's less to do with their dogged, downbeat book than with the star- ry thriller Pakula made of it. All The Presi- dent's Men (1976) is a weird hybrid — crusading film noir — and very Hollywood: any British or European picture on an equivalent theme would have had some kind of political dimension, but for Pakula the neuroses of the era — generalised Paranoia and conspiracy theories — were more than enough. Given that Nixon had only resigned two years earlier, the film is a masterpiece of shortcut myth-making, and a useful lesson for anyone wondering why the current President's difficulties aren't Playing out in quite the same way.
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