The Philadelphia Story (2)

Donald Ogden Stewart
Stewart is one of two people credited with turning Philip Barry's stage play into a screenplay. The other is Waldo Salt. Both men were communists and both were blacklisted.

Stewart famously said that he changed very little of Barry's play because it was near perfect. That's not true. Even a perfect play—and the The Philadelphia Story was most emphatically not perfect—has to be modified quite a bit to make it work on the screen. What is true, however, is that Stewart and Barry saw the world in very much the same way. Both men were radicals. Where Stewart was a political radical, Barry was an artistic radical who desperately wanted to be the American Strindberg.

There is a seeming irony then that the only reason either man is remembered today is a movie that glorifies old money and the manners that go with it. What the movie hates, and hates with a passion that is incandescent, is self-made men and the liberalism of its time. (This will come as a surprise to many younger readers, and especially to anyone who got their understanding of "liberalism" at university, but liberals and communists were each others' most hated enemies for most of their respective histories.)

To go back to my earlier post today, the magazine that inspired Spy was not some gossip and scandal tabloid as you might guess from watching the movie but Fortune, yes the "Fortune 500" Fortune. It didn't sell for 5 cents a copy (a typical price for the era) but for $1 an issue in 1929! And the model for Sidney Kidd is Henry Luce. Barry and Stewart hated Luce and what Luce stood for so much they couldn't do an honest parody but instead engaged in the very cheapest insults.

Here is the odd contradiction  in both men: for all their radical notions they were both shameless social climbers. They hated capitalism, industry, markets and men like Luce who succeeded through catering to the tastes of America's growing middle classes and they worshiped old wealth and status in a way that the term "sycophant" doesn't begin to suggest.

Oddly enough, both Barry and Stewart were well-placed to have done a genuine portrait of Luce because all three went to Yale and both Stewart and Luce were asked to join the very exclusive Skull and Bones society while there. They were all members of a very small and exclusive society of elites. If there were any dirty stories like the one that Macaulay Connor tells CK Dexter-Haven in the movie, they would have known it.

They didn't, however, because there wasn't any such story. There never was a more fang-less satire in the history of film than the attack on Luce here. Luce's real offense, besides being much more successful than Barry and Stewart, was that he was an anti-communist.

So we have one empty promise here. The movie promises an evisceration of a certain kind of journalism and misses its target by miles. It also promises us an inside look at one of the most famous debutantes of its time. Tomorrow I'll discuss how well it delivers on that promise.