What fresh genre is this?
If we try and place The Philadelphia Story in a genre we are faced with an embarrassment of riches. It fits into a number of likely slots.
It could, for example, be a remarriage story. These were popular at the time and both Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn had hits with other movies in that genre. Grant had already starred in a wonderful movie called The Awful Truth and Hepburn would later do the good but over-rated Adam's Rib. And Tracy and Dexter do get divorced and remarried but it doesn't fit the type quite because the movie is all about one side. In a remarriage movie both the wife and the husband have to change to get back together.
An odd thing about The Philadelphia Story is how ridiculously easy it is on the men. Dexter, Seth and Mike have a lot to apologize and make up for but none of them ever do. Tracy left Dexter for very good reasons; he was an alcoholic and he beat her. And the case against her father is also rock solid. He really did have an affair with chorus girl and he never apologizes for having done so. In fact, the movie features one of the most morally insane arguments to ever make it to the big screen wherein Seth Lord tells Tracy that he is having the affair because she wasn't a good enough daughter. Fortunately, this isn't a very important plot point or else it would ruin the movie.
(Mike, meanwhile, treats Liz shoddily but never even sees that he has done so never mind apologize for it.)
The movie instead is almost entirely about its heroine and that is maybe the first hint about the genre it actually fits into.
Before going there, one more false trail. And that is the bring-the-big-people-down-to-earth genre. This stems from 1870 when one of most prominent preachers in the country, a man named Henry Ward Beecher, got messed up with another man's wife. The thing that made the Beecher-Tilton scandal fascinating to the public was not the scandal but the ongoing revelations about the real lives of the rich and famous; it was seeing the socially exalted revealed as silly and frivolous people.
Again, Hollywood made a genre out of this. The best is a probably movie called It Happened One Night in which Claudette Colbert plays a spoiled rich girl who learns about life by running into a hard-nosed reporter played by Clark Gable. "Just what she needed," we say, "to be dragged out of her cocoon and forced to deal with real-life problems. " And The Philadelphia Story starts off looking like that only Macauley Connor suddenly discovers that the rich girl is actually pretty special.
So what is it then?
I think this movie is the closest that Hollywood has ever come to producing a Jane Austen type story. And it comes so close it breaks my heart to think that Philip Barry wasted his life trying to produce capital-A "art" when he could have been doing more of these.
What makes it a Jane Austen type of story? Lots of stuff.
I'll begin with the setting. The story is set in a big house with an absent father. The big four Austen stories feature this touch. Mr. Dashwood is dead in Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Bennet is hiding from reality in his library in Pride and Prejudice, Sir Thomas Bertram is away dealing with his properties in the West Indies in Mansfield Park, and Mr. Woodhouse is off in a world of his own in Emma.
That absent father is crucial because his not being there allows the social order of the house to get out of control. Jane Austen's mothers, like Margaret Lord in The Philadelphia Story tend to be silly and ineffectual. And the female lead in these stories is always looking for something like a father figure. They seek an emotionally stable figure who values the same sort of life project they do. One of the powerful indications that this is what is really being sought is that there is zero sexual chemistry between Dexter and Tracy in this movie.
Next, it's a story about marriage and not about falling love. Austen's novels have been described as marriageship stories and not the courtship stories they often are taken to be. The universal failing of TV and movie adaptations is that they try to make them into love and courtship stories. The lack of sexual chemistry between Hepburn and Grant here is, oddly enough, what makes it work. It isn't that they aren't capable of it, it's that the story is about something else and that something else is working out how to be married together. This is true in real life as well, by the way, it's much easier to fall in love than to work your way around to what it takes to make a marriage work.
(Again, if you don't believe me, watch the remake. Again, there is little or no sexual chemistry on screen between Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly who play the lead parts in High Society. But they were certainly capable of it because they were having a torrid affair during the filming of the movie. It's a marriage and pursuit of happiness story, not a love and sex story*.)
The next thing crucial to an Austen-type story is a Shakespearean touch (one of several). The thing that differentiates class in this story is language. Next time you watch the movie, notice how much the first time Tracy encounters Mike and Liz is like Hamlet with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Tracy, like Hamlet, is pretending to be crazy and a weird sort of duel ensues in which she outmatches them completely in the use of language. I'll say more about this tomorrow, but neither Tracy nor Dexter ever fail with language. They speak an elegant, expressive and powerful language and that is what marks them as superior.
Another Shakespearean element that Austen uses is the contrasting world. In Shakespeare it is the court and the forest and Austen does that herself quite wonderfully in Mansfield Park in a scene where the characters run around the forest running into one another. She also does it with London, however, in Sense and Sensibility which serves as a contrast to the big house. The purpose of this contrasting world is that the rules and rigid social structures that hold in the first world are absent and characters keep matching up with others they normally would not.
In the movie the contrasting world is a special type like the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is a land where magic potions change people and here the magic potion is alcohol. The magic forest is the land of drunkenness and Tracy and Mike enter it. And it really is a magical world like the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. If you don't believe me, check the times. Notice when Tracy and Mike leave the party and all the things that are supposed to happen between then and sunrise. There simply isn't enough time left for everything that does happen in the real world. It is only because everyone enters a magical world and they keep meeting up in different parts of this enchanted forest that it does happen.
And then they all return and the world goes back to normal but the people in it have changed.
The final Shakespearean touch typical of Austen is the changing partners. The couples get flipped around and, in so doing, our heroine gets an opportunity for some valuable self knowledge.
And that, of course, leads into another crucial Austen touch. The successful resolution of an Austen novel always turns on virtue gained through better self knowledge.
Tomorrow, all about Tracy Samantha Lord, the magnificent character who makes this movie work.
* The most telling example of how Hollywood just doesn't get this is The Jane Austen Book Club. In it a bunch of people join a book club that reads only Jane Austen and the movie draws a parallel between each individual character and the book she or he presents at the club gathering. It almost works right up until the end. The last scenes, however, feature people tearing their clothes off and jumping into bed together. You couldn't get Austen more wrong if you tried. Even sea monsters make more sense in the plot than that.
If we try and place The Philadelphia Story in a genre we are faced with an embarrassment of riches. It fits into a number of likely slots.
It could, for example, be a remarriage story. These were popular at the time and both Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn had hits with other movies in that genre. Grant had already starred in a wonderful movie called The Awful Truth and Hepburn would later do the good but over-rated Adam's Rib. And Tracy and Dexter do get divorced and remarried but it doesn't fit the type quite because the movie is all about one side. In a remarriage movie both the wife and the husband have to change to get back together.
An odd thing about The Philadelphia Story is how ridiculously easy it is on the men. Dexter, Seth and Mike have a lot to apologize and make up for but none of them ever do. Tracy left Dexter for very good reasons; he was an alcoholic and he beat her. And the case against her father is also rock solid. He really did have an affair with chorus girl and he never apologizes for having done so. In fact, the movie features one of the most morally insane arguments to ever make it to the big screen wherein Seth Lord tells Tracy that he is having the affair because she wasn't a good enough daughter. Fortunately, this isn't a very important plot point or else it would ruin the movie.
(Mike, meanwhile, treats Liz shoddily but never even sees that he has done so never mind apologize for it.)
The movie instead is almost entirely about its heroine and that is maybe the first hint about the genre it actually fits into.
Before going there, one more false trail. And that is the bring-the-big-people-down-to-earth genre. This stems from 1870 when one of most prominent preachers in the country, a man named Henry Ward Beecher, got messed up with another man's wife. The thing that made the Beecher-Tilton scandal fascinating to the public was not the scandal but the ongoing revelations about the real lives of the rich and famous; it was seeing the socially exalted revealed as silly and frivolous people.
Again, Hollywood made a genre out of this. The best is a probably movie called It Happened One Night in which Claudette Colbert plays a spoiled rich girl who learns about life by running into a hard-nosed reporter played by Clark Gable. "Just what she needed," we say, "to be dragged out of her cocoon and forced to deal with real-life problems. " And The Philadelphia Story starts off looking like that only Macauley Connor suddenly discovers that the rich girl is actually pretty special.
So what is it then?
I think this movie is the closest that Hollywood has ever come to producing a Jane Austen type story. And it comes so close it breaks my heart to think that Philip Barry wasted his life trying to produce capital-A "art" when he could have been doing more of these.
What makes it a Jane Austen type of story? Lots of stuff.
I'll begin with the setting. The story is set in a big house with an absent father. The big four Austen stories feature this touch. Mr. Dashwood is dead in Sense and Sensibility, Mr. Bennet is hiding from reality in his library in Pride and Prejudice, Sir Thomas Bertram is away dealing with his properties in the West Indies in Mansfield Park, and Mr. Woodhouse is off in a world of his own in Emma.
That absent father is crucial because his not being there allows the social order of the house to get out of control. Jane Austen's mothers, like Margaret Lord in The Philadelphia Story tend to be silly and ineffectual. And the female lead in these stories is always looking for something like a father figure. They seek an emotionally stable figure who values the same sort of life project they do. One of the powerful indications that this is what is really being sought is that there is zero sexual chemistry between Dexter and Tracy in this movie.
Next, it's a story about marriage and not about falling love. Austen's novels have been described as marriageship stories and not the courtship stories they often are taken to be. The universal failing of TV and movie adaptations is that they try to make them into love and courtship stories. The lack of sexual chemistry between Hepburn and Grant here is, oddly enough, what makes it work. It isn't that they aren't capable of it, it's that the story is about something else and that something else is working out how to be married together. This is true in real life as well, by the way, it's much easier to fall in love than to work your way around to what it takes to make a marriage work.
(Again, if you don't believe me, watch the remake. Again, there is little or no sexual chemistry on screen between Bing Crosby and Grace Kelly who play the lead parts in High Society. But they were certainly capable of it because they were having a torrid affair during the filming of the movie. It's a marriage and pursuit of happiness story, not a love and sex story*.)
The next thing crucial to an Austen-type story is a Shakespearean touch (one of several). The thing that differentiates class in this story is language. Next time you watch the movie, notice how much the first time Tracy encounters Mike and Liz is like Hamlet with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern. Tracy, like Hamlet, is pretending to be crazy and a weird sort of duel ensues in which she outmatches them completely in the use of language. I'll say more about this tomorrow, but neither Tracy nor Dexter ever fail with language. They speak an elegant, expressive and powerful language and that is what marks them as superior.
Another Shakespearean element that Austen uses is the contrasting world. In Shakespeare it is the court and the forest and Austen does that herself quite wonderfully in Mansfield Park in a scene where the characters run around the forest running into one another. She also does it with London, however, in Sense and Sensibility which serves as a contrast to the big house. The purpose of this contrasting world is that the rules and rigid social structures that hold in the first world are absent and characters keep matching up with others they normally would not.
In the movie the contrasting world is a special type like the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. It is a land where magic potions change people and here the magic potion is alcohol. The magic forest is the land of drunkenness and Tracy and Mike enter it. And it really is a magical world like the forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream. If you don't believe me, check the times. Notice when Tracy and Mike leave the party and all the things that are supposed to happen between then and sunrise. There simply isn't enough time left for everything that does happen in the real world. It is only because everyone enters a magical world and they keep meeting up in different parts of this enchanted forest that it does happen.
And then they all return and the world goes back to normal but the people in it have changed.
The final Shakespearean touch typical of Austen is the changing partners. The couples get flipped around and, in so doing, our heroine gets an opportunity for some valuable self knowledge.
And that, of course, leads into another crucial Austen touch. The successful resolution of an Austen novel always turns on virtue gained through better self knowledge.
Tomorrow, all about Tracy Samantha Lord, the magnificent character who makes this movie work.
* The most telling example of how Hollywood just doesn't get this is The Jane Austen Book Club. In it a bunch of people join a book club that reads only Jane Austen and the movie draws a parallel between each individual character and the book she or he presents at the club gathering. It almost works right up until the end. The last scenes, however, feature people tearing their clothes off and jumping into bed together. You couldn't get Austen more wrong if you tried. Even sea monsters make more sense in the plot than that.
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