The Philadelphia Story

MOVIE
VIDEO
AUDIO
EXTRAS
OVERALL

One Disc
1.33:1 Full Frame
English Dolby Digital Mono 1.0
English, French & Spanish Subtitles
Original Theatrical Trailer
Run Time: 113 Minutes
Keep Case

MOVIE
Not Rated and contains a 1940 sense of well-being and witty repartee.

Sometimes I worry about judging the first half hour of an older film. I'm not saying that I'm ever kept up at night because of it, but I concern myself with the fact that I'm not seeing it through older eyes. Not an older person. Eyes in the olden days. Not as old as the horse drawn carriages, though. In this case a good sixty-two years ago. As Tecnodrome and I were watching The Philadelphia Story last night, we pondered whether it was us or the film that was a bit off during the half hour. He suggested that it was our sensibilities that were off. That we were jaded in this modern day and age and couldn't take a slow build-up, common to older films. I frowned and thought about this for a moment. Could it be? Me, a film student? Too jaded for classic films? It's possible. I've spent many a time just getting bored with classics, but I thought those days were behind me! No, then, I decided. No sir! Its not me! It IS some of the films. So I reasoned that perhaps, since it was still early on in the movie making days, maybe they still hadn't perfected the art. Sure, you get some like Casablanca and Citizen Kane and others of that ilk, but then you see great films that do just take a little while to get up to full speed. This is one of those.
Tracy Lord (Katherine Hepburn) is a porno actr--wait. That's Tracy Lords. Tracy Lord is an aristocratic young woman, once married to quite a wealthy lush of a gentleman named C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant) who drank and drank and drank and threw himself out of the house. Flash forward. On the eve of Tracy's wedding to her new beau, George Kittredge (John Howard) Dexter is sent, along with Mike Connor (James Stewart) and Liz Imbrie (Ruth Hussey) to get the inside scoop on the new wedding for Spy Magazine, a national tabloid. Immediately, the situation turns into a farce with uninvited guests showing up, people playing other people and that ilk.
As said in the paragraph above the paragraph above, I was less than thrilled with the long buildup in the movie. It was dull. And I'll again defend my sensibilities, I don't think it was me. The humor in the movie is crackling, once you get past that first thirty minutes, sparkling banter thrown back and forth and back between three masters of the craft, Hepburn, Stewart and Grant. The dialogue is later fast and furious as though it sprung from the pen of Mamet's seeming idol Orson Welles. So what was it about that first half hour? Well, it just didn't seem to be synched right with the rest, as though it were a record played too slow for a few minutes before the error was realized and flipped into the correct speed. Perhaps it was a testament to the different speeds of production way back when, like those movies that get started without a script finalized. Or maybe there was an ego clash between the many stars. But probably not. It's probably a combination of everything, a too slow pace and my shorter attention span than your average 1940 gent and lady. So, with the exception of that beginning, and with the realization that Katherine Hepburn was pretty damn hot in her day, I was delighted with this light film that was a pure steamroller of fun. Once it got started, the speed kept rising, the insults flying faster with that pre thought out fervor that only the forties could provide. The situations are rather surprising as well, people are having or suggesting affairs, Hepburn nearly undresses right in front of the camera (before putting on a head to toe body covering shawl that would do some kooky foreigners proud.) And surprisingly, the humor doesn't feel dated, though every once in a while, in specific situations, a golly gee or a gosh darn it doesn't seem to cut it in the strong language category. But it'd be years before they started swearing. And, when you get right down to it, I'll take a pseudo wholesome film any time.

VIDEO QUALITY
I'm nearly always impressed with the way black and white looks on a high quality DVD. The blacks are jet black and the whites are pure, unlike the muddled midrange grayscale we get with a VHS tape. The Philadelphia Story is no exception to those impressive tonal values. However, unlike some of the better DVDs of films from the forties and thirties, this one still has a great deal of grain present along with the cigarette burns and scratches inherent in an old print. I've seen first hand that they can get around that or clean it up, so why should we be content with a great film getting a less than pristine print. I guess I'm not completely content, but hey, it's not Orson Welles' The Trial, a film made in the sixties that looks like it came from the twenties on video at least. A word, though, the 1.33:1 aspect ratio is the film's original aspect ratio, so don't go getting miffed about that. That's just the way movies were shot way back when.

AUDIO QUALITY
The audio has a rich sound quality to it, so much so that when I close my eyes I can almost see that thick brown tape sliding across the heads of a reel to reel audio player, pumping out incredibly deep and rich mono sound. So, what we have is sound that'll only come out of your single center speaker on a good sound system, which is always rather depressing, but I wasn't expecting 5.1. All that being said, the sound is rich and clear just with a fairly limited range.

EXTRAS
We get a single extra on this disc, a VERY long theatrical trailer that starts out with pages of text on the screen with musical accompaniment. My favorite part of the trailer was the title card that informed us that the play The Philadelphia Story had run sold out shows for ten months at $4.40 per seat! The exclamation point was emphasized. Strange trailers back in those days. In addition to that we get a "collectable booklet" with information about the film.

CLOSING THOUGHTS
It's always nice to see a classic film and enjoy it, because there are many instances where things have just become classics because they've been deemed classics and have very little value to them beyond that word. The Philadelphia Story didn't disappoint. Although, it was a bit distracting to constantly be seeing light reflected off the slick (and I mean slick with a capital ICK) hair on our three leading men. This lead Tecnodrome and I to begin quoting lines from O Brother Where Art Thou? at first only lines referencing the hair treatment Dapper Dan, but then degenerating into any old quote. After a while we decided to get back to the film. See, sluggish first half hour.

"I'm testing the air. I like it, but it doesn't like me." Mike Connor (James Stewart)