DVDs: High Society
Tracy Samantha Lord is told by her ex-husband C. K. Dexter Haven that she's "a goddess, without patience for any kind of human imperfection. You'll never be a first class woman or a first class human being till you have learned to have some regard for human frailty."
As a young member of Philadelphia aristocracy about to marry for a second time, Tracy, intolerant of weakness and in need of an understanding heart, is the heroine of Philip Barry's elegant comedy The Philadelphia Story. The play opened at Broadway's Shubert Theatre on March 28, 1939, and lasted a healthy 417 performances. Katharine Hepburn was born to play Tracy, and the star had strong support from Joseph Cotten, Van Heflin, and Shirley Booth, the latter two as magazine folk sent to cover Tracy's impending nuptials.
By the late '30s, Hepburn had come to be labeled by the press "box-office poison" in Hollywood. She was in need of a comeback picture, and realized that her stage hit The Philadelphia Story was just the ticket. After all, audiences saw her as a cool, somewhat distant figure, just like Tracy, and in the story of how Tracy changes and learns tolerance, movie audiences would see her transformed into a more down-to-earth creature.
Depending on which sources you consult, Hepburn either purchased the film rights to Barry's play or had Howard Hughes buy them for her. In either case, she brought the package to MGM, where, because of her ownership of the property, she had the right to supervise casting. Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy were the first choices for the respective roles of ex-husband and reporter, but the parts went instead to Cary Grant and James Stewart. The 1940 film version of The Philadelphia Story thus features three of the all-time greatest movie stars, and allows one the chance to see Hepburn in what was probably her greatest stage role.
The play covered twenty-four hours at the home of the Lord's, in the country near Philadelphia. In his screenplay, Donald Ogden Stewart did a fair amount of rewriting, opening things up to include scenes at the Lord's stables, the office of Spy Magazine, a library, and Dexter's home. George Cukor was the ideal director for the property; it was the fifth Hepburn-Cukor film, just as it was the fourth Hepburn-Grant movie.
The Philadelphia Story won an Oscar nomination as Best Picture, along with nominations for Hepburn, Cukor, and Ruth Hussey as the magazine photographer. Winning Oscars were the two Stewarts. The Philadelphia Story was ranked fifteenth on the American Film Institute's list of the best U.S. film comedies, and ranked a very respectable fifty-one on the same institution's list of the top U.S. films of all time.
For its 2005 DVD reissue, The Philadelphia Story got the double-disc, special-edition treatment. The first disc comes with an informative track of audio commentary by film historian Jeanine Basinger. The second disc includes documentaries on Hepburn the fascinating 1992 All About Me and Cukor; a couple of short subjects; and two radio versions of The Philadelphia Story, both featuring Hepburn, Grant, and Stewart.
The play is currently enjoying a London revival, with Kevin Spacey as Dexter and Jennifer Ehle as Tracy. In 1980, Lincoln Center Theater revived the play at the Vivian Beaumont, with Blythe Danner's fine Tracy. But it should also be noted that, much more recently, the play came back to Broadway as a musical.
Shifting the action to Newport, Rhode Island to take advantage of the local jazz festival and to include Louis Armstrong playing himself, the 1956 film High Society was a musical remake of The Philadelphia Story, with Grace Kelly, in her final film role before becoming Princess Grace of Monaco, opposite Bing Crosby and Frank Sinatra. High Society featured nine songs by Cole Porter, one of which "True Love" became a hit-parade item.
Comparing the two films, one must note that the '56 picture, while a box-office success, is at best a lukewarm retread. Much of the wit has vanished, and the performances can't compare to those in the non-musical film, with Crosby too mature and bland for Dexter and Kelly not a comedienne in Hepburn's class. As for Porter's songs, they seem written more for Crosby and Sinatra than for the characters those men are playing. And because Kelly was not a singer, her character, the central one of the story, went unmusicalized.
High Society's shortcomings made it less than an ideal property for stage adaptation, but that didn't stop it from happening, first in London in 1987, with Natasha Richardson the superb Tracy. For the spring 1998 Broadway version of High Society, Arthur Kopit's book reset the action in Oyster Bay and stayed closer to Barry's dialogue than did the film musical. More significantly, the Broadway High Society attempted to address the casual musicalization of the '56 film by adding almost a dozen additional Porter songs, while retaining seven of the film songs. Susan Birkenhead reworked several lyrics in order to make them more applicable to the story and characters at hand.
The result, which played the St. James Theatre and starred Melissa Errico, Daniel McDonald, Stephen Bogardus, Randy Graff, and John McMartin, was an abridged, watered-down version of the Barry play punctuated by songs that rarely illuminated the psyches of the characters singing them. This was inevitable, as Barry's people, especially his heroine, are complex, and can't be adequately musicalized with songs that weren't written for them to sing. The songs tended to interrupt rather than further what was left of the original play. And too many of them "I Love Paris," "It's All Right with Me," "Just One of Those Things" were overly familiar.
The plot and characters tended to peak in the dialogue rather than in the numbers, and a great deal of Barry's plotting and character detail were stripped away to make room for those numbers. The result was an occasionally pleasant but mostly tepid and perfunctory evening, although Errico was ideal for Tracy. During New York previews, original director Christopher Renshaw and choreographer Lar Lubovitch were largely supplanted by Des McAnuff and Wayne Cilento, but the latter team was unable to do much to make High Society function.