The Philadelphia Story (1940)

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Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM) released The Philadelphia Story to theaters on December 26, 1940. George Cukor directed film which starred Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart.

‘The Philadelphia Story’ Movie Summary

The Philadelphia Story is the classic 1940 romantic comedy starring Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and a bunch of other people who aren’t as important as the big three. The movie starts with a single scene of passionate marital bliss gone horribly wrong as Hepburn’s rich and spoiled Tracy Lord breaks the heavy-drinking Grant’s golf club so Grant’s CK Dexter does his best impersonation of an NFL player, palms Tracy’s smug face and Ray Rice’s her onto her keester and they divorce.

Fast forward a couple years, and Tracy is engaged to be married to a social climbing dud played by nobody you’d remember. Dexter ain’t having it so he and the publisher of 1940’s National Enquirer blackmail novelist Stewart’s Macaulay Conner and his lovely and secret-admiring photographer, Elizabeth, into attending the wedding in disguise for the gossip wedding of the year.

Using Dexter’s connections, the reporters arrive for the rehearsal at the Lord’s mansion the day before the wedding, and immediately lie to prove how trustworthy they are to the entire Lord family, who have been tipped off their new guests are really gossip reporters. Dexter enjoys the ruse, and since he is still the favorite son of the Lord family, he plays whichever side makes his ex-wife squirm, and her fiancée look even more weak and pathetic than the audience already knows he is.

Through an array of confusing switched identities with Tracy’s father and uncle, her energetic preteen sister always acting stranger and older than she is, lies, manipulates, and bonafide blackmails. Macaulay and Elizabeth become the immediate best friends of both Tracy and Dexter, since for some very odd reason the wedding of the year happens to have zero bridesmaids or groomsmen present throughout the entire movie…but I digress.

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As the day and night progresses, much wine flows, much truth is revealed about Dexter’s love for Tracy that never went away since most abusers always want another shot at their victims, and bride-to-be Tracy flirts with the reporter right in front of her dud fiancée, who leaves his own rehearsal dinner well before any of the guests do so we know what kind of fuddy-duddy he really is. Tracy and Macaulay get drunk and go skinny-dipping in the pool but this is 1940 so they just went “for a late night swim together.”

As Macaulay puts the unconscious Tracy into her bed in front of the still-awake preteen little sister. (Remember this is 1940 so he couldn’t have had access to Bill Cosby’s quaalude stash, and dating history of consensual sex that everyone believes so of course nothing really happened, wink, wink.)

The still-drunk Macaulay runs off with Dexter to write his article, and Dexter realizes Macaulay not only has blackmail materials on the National Enquirer editor to force him not to run a bad article about the Lord family, but he discovers Macaulay “swam” with Tracy and punches HIM in the face. Something tells me Dexter was a sparring partner with Joe Louis back in the day.

In the morning, the hungover Tracy wakes and believes she had premarital sex with not her fiancée, not her ex-husband, but the lying reporter she met and despised just 24-hours ago. She tells pretty much everyone, including poor Elizabeth who is no match for Tracy’s money or ability to take a right hook.

The fiancée pretty much throws in the towel and won’t marry a whore, but Macaulay shows up and tells everyone of importance to the story that he DIDN’T give Tracy the funky cold Medina, and they never consummated the marriage that is happening later today to the dumbass social climber.

So, everyone is relieved. The fiancée, who was conveniently off-screen for the reveal, comes back and basically tells Tracy that as long as she isn’t really a whore he’ll marry her anyway, gets kicked to the curb by the mercurial Tracy who has her eyes set on the now-saintly-looking Dexter again.

Macaulay and Elizabeth decide THEY are really in love since Macaulay must have been one helluva skinny-dipping machine at the National Enquirer bureau. So both couples get married at the same social gathering of the year in front of senators, governors and famous people but still no bridesmaids or groomsmen. I guess the story in Philadelphia is cheat and get rewarded, but play it straight and you’re written out of the script because you’re a worthless plot device anyway.

The End.

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