Director: George Cukor
Writers: Donald Ogden Stewart( screenplay), Philip Barry (based on the play by).
Stars: Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart.
“The Philadelphia Story” was created in 1940 and directed by George Cukor. According to IMDb, this romantic comedy won 2 Oscars, another 2 wins, and 5 nominations. The story of the film is about a socialite whose wedding plans became very complicated after her ex-husband and journalists arrived at her house.
I really enjoyed this film. In my opinion, the film intrigues the spectator a lot, and the marvelous movie environment makes it even much more involving. The majority of the episodes of the film made me laugh a lot and after the movie, the positivity was still felt. Another exciting detail was the outstanding characters’ names which completely fitted the characters.
This is not actually an easy task, as sometimes it takes a lot of time to find the best possible option to express the character itself. I have heard that the majority of writers nowadays use random name generator to find the perfect names for their movies/books characters as it gives a bunch of random names and surnames options. Also, this name generator tool offers other fake data as phone or address, so you can create all character data easily.
The situation of the story is quite complicated: an amazing, beautiful woman is not able to decide what she wants. Simultaneously 3 marvelous guys with different personalities mixed her mind, she must make a decision, which would influence her all future life. Tracy Lord (Katharine Hepburn) is about to marry “man of people“ George Kittredge. This marriage could guarantee her wealthy and popular life. However, unexpectedly her ex-husband C. K. Dexter Haven’s appearance brought old feelings. On top of that, there is one more guy – reporter Mike Connor, whose poetry admires Tracy a lot. Thus, as the wedding day neared, Tracy found herself more and more torn among George, Dexter, and Mike.
I love the way people communicate in this movie. Almost all dialogs were funny and sparky. The ridiculous situations in the film made it even more lively and fascinating. Moreover, I really liked Tracy’s teenage sister Dinah. From my point of view, she was fantastic! In many situations, she had her own opinion and bravely said it to everyone.
For example, all the time Dinah loudly expressed that she prepared more Dexter than George. I think she was the most honest character in this movie. The funniest thing for me was the episode in the last scene when the photographer took a picture of Dexter and Tracy at their wedding because during this episode a camera made a loud sound and after it, they reacted by looking at the photographer.
However, after some moments, when the photograph is shown, we were able to see that all of them were looking directly at the camera. In fact, the picture was taken first, so the couple should be looking somewhere else, but not directly to the camera.
All in all, as I have mentioned before film is not very unique, but the chemistry among characters, funny situations, and dialogs make it attractive for the spectator. On the other hand, there was a thing, which I did not like. It was apparent. It was really the first film, where the actor’s clothes were not great (of course it is just my individual opinion).
Despite everything, “The Philadelphia Story“ is an amazing movie, which showers us with love, frustration, decision-making.