Kate and Cary, and so on

In the last month or so, Your Humble Blogger has enjoyed watching two of the three great Hepburn-Grant movies. There’s a fourth, 1935’s Sylvia Scarlett, but I’ve never seen it and it’s supposed to be terrible. In a period of three years, though, Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn made Holiday, Bringing Up Baby, and The Philadelphia Story. Bringing Up Baby was directed by Howard “His Girl Friday” Hawks from a Dudley “Stagecoach” Nichols adaptation of a Hagar “I was a Male War Bride” Wilde story; it’s magnificent and funny and I haven’t seen it for more than ten years, since a memorable showing at the Castro (“I just went gay all of a sudden”).

The two I watched recently were 1938’s Holiday and 1940’s The Philadelphia Story, both of which were directed by George Cukor from Donald Ogden Stewart adaptations of Philip Barry plays. And in some ways they are as similar as you might expect from that; Cary Grant plays a roguish but good-hearted charmer who moves in the upper class with an outsider’s cynicism, Katherine Hepburn plays a rebellious strong-willed somewhat tomboyish woman with a bit of a taste for rough trade and very serious father issues, the jokes are quick and witty, and much entertainment is derived from fish-out-of-water experiences of the not-rich in the mansions of the rich. There are men in tuxedos and women in outrageous gowns (and hats!), there’s a happy ending, and Henry Daniell plays a creep.

Digression: Christopher Guest’s magnificent Count Rugen is based on Henry Daniell’s Lord Wolfingham in The Sea Hawk, according to Leonard Maltin. I hadn’t known that, but having heard it, it’s obvious. Henry Daniell is one of those Central Casting people (his picture is fourth in the “Don’t Trust This Man” chapter of Warren B. Meyers’ invaluable Who Is That? The Late Late Viewers Guide to the Old Old Movie Players) I miss under the current Hollywood system. Of course, that’s like missing the old baseball system, under which players got screwed out of the profits of their performances, but which was in some ways better for the casual fan. The Philadelphia Story is full of those: Mary Nash, Virginia Weidler, John Halliday, even Roland Young is in this category, although I think he deserves more credit as a comic lead. They’re the people you instantly recognize, even if it’s the first time you’ve seen them. End digression.

Anyway, there are lots of differences between the two movies, enough that I find it hard to believe they are only two years apart. In Holiday, both the leads are clearly in their first loves; in Philadelphia, they are divorcées, sadder and (maybe) wiser, certainly more experienced. Both Cary Grant and Katherine Hepburn look much older in Philadelphia, in part because they are playing wearier characters, with wearier habits.

The big difference that I noticed, though, was where Holiday is a love story which almost completely ignores sex, Philadelphia is all on about it, often pretty explicitly. The plotlines hinge on sexual infidelity, real or imagined. The ex-husband complains that his ex-wife was what people later called ‘frigid’; she likes romance but pretty clearly thinks that men are only after one thing, and that thing is pretty nasty. She meets a rough sort of fellow with a sensitive side who, being played by Jimmy Stewart, is pretty damn jumpable, and she responds to that, flirting with him and teasing him sumpin’ awful. Meanwhile, both her ex-husband and her father excoriate her for her coldness; her fiancé reveals that he finds her attractive but not, you know, exciting (implying but not stating that he will look elsewhere for sexual fun); and she collapses in a funk, drinks a couple of gallons of champagne, and goes off with the equally drunk rough trade, culminating in a did-they-or-didn’t-they bit that, in those pre-war days, is always resolved as they-didn’t. The thing is, that they wanted to, and the movie admits that in many ways the wanting to is as important as the doing.

The fiancé dumps her for her suspected infidelity, but is willing to take her back when it turns out it didn’t happen. She dumps him, in part because he’s an idjit, but also because she’s realized that they are incompatible. She winds up back with the ex-husband, who is now willing to take her back, because she’s taken responsibility for her own life; it’s pretty clear that he’s expecting a better sex life in future, although I have my doubts. At any rate, I read the story this time as a story of a woman’s sexual awakening, which is pretty outrageous, isn’t it? But I don’t think I’m wrong.

By the way, one of the things that makes these movies gripping (more than just funny) are the scary performances by Katherine Hepburn, who portrays both women as just short of being institutionalized by their stuffy families. Or, rather, just a straw away from really going crazy. The moment in Holiday where she begs her sister to let her plan the engagement party is particularly memorable as a woman on the verge of a nervous breakdown. Even the final scene where she defies her father and goes after the fellow is a bit scary. Philadelphia has other moments, none of them so heightened, and of course the plot piles more pressure on her, making her escape into alcohol a plausible act of a put-upon woman on the eve of an ill-considered wedding, rather than the result of a shattered psyche. Still, she plays it for tears as well as for laughs. As a result, by the way, the happy endings of the two movies aren’t entirely convincing; it’s hard to imagine either couple happily married ever after. But I tend to forget, and think of her as ‘a strong woman’; both of these women are strong-willed, but both are very fragile, troubled, neurotic, and frighteningly close to breaking down.

                           ,
-Vardibidian.