The Best Mother in the World

There was a time when cinema knew how to make magnificent romantic comedies within the very production system of the great studios. The secret was to bring together a director who commanded time, space and performance (the famous mise-en-scène), a well-written screenplay — with short, rapid and biting dialogue — and, of course, actors willing to surpass themselves. It is because it has all of this that The Philadelphia Story remains such an entertaining and admirable work.

Based on a Broadway play written by Philip Barry to revive Katharine Hepburn’s career, the film depicts three days in the life of Tracy Lord: a young high-society woman — beautiful, intelligent and tremendously arrogant — preparing to marry again. The action unfolds almost entirely at the family’s luxurious residence and opens with a dialogue-free flashback in which the implacable Tracy throws Dexter (Cary Grant) out of the house and snaps one of his golf clubs. He threatens to hit back with a punch but restrains himself, opens his hand, shoves her, and she falls to the floor. Two years after a tempestuous divorce, Tracy is about to marry George Kittredge (John Howard), the perfect opposite of her first husband. We return to the same shot of the house and step inside: they are preparing the wedding.

Right from the first exchange, we learn that Tracy is a morally intransigent and prejudiced woman; her father is more or less exiled in New York after an affair with a dancer and has not been invited to the ceremony; her mother misses him but submits to her daughter’s orders; and the youngest sister, Dinah, loathes George and adores Dexter. Like a little imp, the girl voices the wish that something might happen, and it is that whim that will send the story off the rails. Next, we meet Uncle Willie, an old aristocrat fond of drinking and of the odd pinch. And, finally, the groom: despite having pulled himself up in life — or precisely because of it — George does not fit very well into the snobbery of one of Philadelphia’s oldest and most prestigious families, as is clear from the disastrous way he sits a horse. The first cluster of characters has been introduced.

In a quick raccord, we move from a shot of the gossip magazine Spy being trampled by the horses to the offices where a conspiracy is being hatched. With Dexter’s complicity, the disgruntled journalist and writer Macaulay “Mike” Connor (James Stewart) and the sardonic photographer and painter Elizabeth Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) are to infiltrate the family home in order to produce — as the magazine’s editor, Kidd (in this story every name has its purpose), puts it — the report that gives the film its title: The Philadelphia Story. These are the characters who will shake up the Lords’ celebration.

Not even 15 minutes have passed and the die is already cast. From here on, and much like A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the plot will tangle itself into numerous set pieces, witty verbal sparring, swapped couples, misunderstandings and so on. Dinah’s plan is under way and, despite the frenetic pace, Cukor captures all these twists with enormous elegance, giving the actors room to enchant us.

We return to the opening framing of the house, for the third time, for an extremely intense day that fills more than half the film: the eve of the wedding. Dexter forces the reporters upon them in exchange for Spy publishing nothing about Seth Lord’s extramarital adventures, and imposes himself as a disruptive element. By way of retaliation, Tracy and her sister decide to stage an eccentric performance pour épater les journalistes. Dinah comes in on tiptoe, speaking French and, out of nowhere, sits down at the piano to play and sing “Lydia, the Tattooed Lady”. Tracy’s schemes are more sophisticated: she fires off a series of jibes at the reporters, ruins the roll of film and passes Uncle Willie off as her father — and vice versa when the real father turns up by surprise — always with a false smile on her face. But things do not go well for her: Mike accuses her of being a privileged woman who knows nothing of life; Dexter and her father reproach her for not having an ounce of compassion and for behaving like an unreachable goddess; only George praises her superhuman morality, but that does not please her either, for she does not wish to be worshipped like a statue. Broadly speaking, the masks begin to fall at Uncle Willie’s party: the father becomes a father again; the uncle, an uncle; the journalists, journalists; and the puritanical Tracy, weary of her own royalty, gets drunk. She is not the only one. Blind drunk, Mike goes to Dexter’s house and, in the course of the conversation, some dirt on Kidd comes to light, which they will use to put an end to the forced report. The night seems to have no end. Tracy and Mike end up dancing and flirting by the pool. Dexter and George catch them after a swim: Mike appears carrying Tracy in his arms and singing “Over the Rainbow”. More than a triangle, Cukor draws an unusual romantic square. Dinah watches it all from her bedroom window, like a mischievous cupid.

The wedding day begins disastrously: Uncle Willie and Mike are hungover, Tracy too and, on top of that, she cannot remember what happened the night before. It falls to her sister to needle her, recounting her nocturnal misadventures. Tracy realises she is turning into a flawed human being, but what might be a loss is, in the end, a gain: she apologises to her father and to Dexter for her excessive judgements, gives up George and Mike — who, rich or poor, do not belong to her social class — and ends up following Dexter’s cues and marrying him once again, now with pomp and circumstance. In the end, Dinah says it was she who brought it all about, and she is not far from the truth. To close a perfect circle, the planted editor of Spy takes a photograph and catches Stewart, Grant and Hepburn wide-eyed. As the Spanish saying goes, and as Cukor demonstrates: with the rich and powerful, a little patience is required.