The Philadelphia Story (1940)

What the trade papers and pressbooks reported

Warner Bros.’ 1940 pressbook for Santa Fe Trail, a publicity document rather than a review, sells Van Heflin on his Broadway season opposite Hepburn in the play. It says the part raised his reputation and his weekly pay, calls him “Katharine Hepburn’s leading man” and refers to him as “the suave young modern” of the piece. A biographical note in the same pressbook says Heflin had been under a movie contract three years before and “very unhappy about it,” and that Hepburn, his friend, helped him buy it up. Later accounts record his stage part as Mike Connor, with Shirley Booth as Liz Imbrie and Joseph Cotten as Dexter Haven.

A 26 Oct 1940 item in Canadian Moving Picture Digest reports from Toronto on the “sensational success” of The Philadelphia Story at the Royal Alexandra, with Hepburn as its star. According to the item, the Avenue Theatre seized the moment by booking Holiday, which the Digest calls Hepburn’s “so-called comeback picture,” released about two years earlier. The Avenue booked it for three days and then held it over on the strength of its draw. The film’s New York premiere is dated December 26, 1940.

The reviews

LIFE made it the film of the week in January 1941 and placed it “among the best funny pictures” of the year, and The Film Daily ranked it third-best of the year. The New York Herald Tribune credited Stewart with “most of the comedy” as well as some of the “most irresistible romantic moments.” Herb Golden of Variety wrote, “It’s Katharine Hepburn’s picture,” and described her part as a composite of “flighty, but characterful, Main Line socialite gals.” Time’s review addressed the star directly: “Come on back, Katie, all is forgiven.”

Bosley Crowther, in The New York Times in 1940, called it a “blue-chip comedy” with a “splendid cast of performers” and wrote that the Music Hall should become “a shooting gallery” if the picture failed to run well into the next year. He closed on a line from the film about “the privileged classes enjoying their privileges,” and told readers they would enjoy it too. MGM’s records show a profit of $1,272,000, with $885,000 earned outside the U.S. and Canada and $2,374,000 inside them. At Radio City Music Hall, it earned $600,000 in six weeks, a box-office record there.

Later accounts

The film historian David Thomson later wrote that “the wrong man got the Oscar.” Cary Grant was bitterly disappointed to be passed over and joked that he would have to blacken his teeth to be taken seriously by the Academy. The film had six Academy Award nominations and two wins, for Stewart and for the screenplay. Stewart had voted for Henry Fonda, and he gave the statue to his father, who displayed it in his hardware store in Indiana, Pennsylvania. He rated his work in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington above it and believed the award made up for the previous year.

Waldo Salt worked on the script without credit. The screenwriter Donald Ogden Stewart, who wrote with a recording of a live stage performance playing so as to keep the biggest laughs, called his award “the easiest Oscar you could imagine.” Before filming, Hepburn said she did not want “a grand entrance” because many people wanted to see her “fall flat on my face,” and the picture opens with Grant knocking her onto her backside. Her biographer A. Scott Berg describes a character built so that audiences would laugh at her until they sympathized, which Hepburn thought essential to rebuilding her public image.

Production ran from July 5 to August 14, 1940, at MGM’s Culver City studios, five days under schedule. Accounts of the casting differ. Wikipedia’s entry on the film cites the documentary MGM: When the Lion Roars for the claim that Louis B. Mayer doubted Hepburn’s drawing power and engaged the two male stars as a precaution. The same entry says she wanted Spencer Tracy as Connor and Clark Gable as Dexter, both of whom had other commitments, and that Grant made top billing a condition of taking the part, along with a $137,000 salary that he donated to the British War Relief Society. Wikipedia’s entry on Hepburn says she picked Stewart and Grant and ceded top billing to Grant. The two entries also differ on the 1938 list, one naming the theater owner Harry Brandt as its compiler and the other the Independent Theatre Owners of America.

The later record makes the film Hepburn’s own project. She sold the film rights to Mayer for $250,000 plus final approval of producer, director, screenwriter and cast, and she chose Cukor, her director on Little Women (1933) and A Bill of Divorcement (1932). Howard Hughes had bought those rights and given them to her. Barry wrote the play for her, drawing on the Philadelphia heiress Helen Hope Montgomery Scott, and Hepburn helped finance it, taking a share of the profits in place of a salary.

The stars returned to their parts on The Screen Guild Theater on March 17, 1947, having earlier done so on radio for Victory Theater on July 20, 1942. The American Film Institute ranked the film #44 on the 2007 revision of its list of American films and #51 on the 1998 list, and the Library of Congress selected it for the National Film Registry in 1995. MGM had already reworked it in 1956 as the musical High Society, directed by Charles Walters, with Bing Crosby, Grace Kelly, Frank Sinatra, Celeste Holm and Louis Armstrong.