A while ago, Your Humble Blogger saw the two great Hepburn/Grant/Cukor/Stewart/Barry movies, Holiday and The Philadelphia Story. As I am interested in good writing for film and for theater, I thought I’d check out the original plays, and see how they compared. As it turned out, the library had States of Grace: Eight Plays by Philip Barry (New York: Harcourt 1975), so I read six plays I had never seen nor heard of in addition to the two in question.
The other six include three plays that are more or less “like” the two famous ones: You and I, The Animal Kingdom, and Second Threshold. They are all, more or less, about wealth, status, family, society and passion; they all deal with the competing pressures of conformity and individuality. They’re all different, they’re all fine, and they’re all inferior to Holiday and The Philadelphia Story. In other words, there’s no particular reason for anyone to ever revive them.
The other three are all very strange. There’s Hotel Universe, which starts like a standard sort of drawing room play, and becomes a strangely existential/O’Neill/Brecht meditation on youth, death and decision-making. Best left alone. There’s the odder Here Come the Clowns, which involves a search for the Divine, a dwarf, a transvestite, a magician, and Secrets. Good moments, but inchoate, and how often does Your Humble Blogger get to use the word inchoate. Again, best left alone.
The remaining one is a fascinating play called White Wings about the coming of the automobile age and the destruction of an older, better way of life symbolized by those much-missed paragons, the street sweepers. It’s certainly the most serious Broadway play I’ve ever read that has one of the characters played by two men in a horse suit. I would love to see this revived; it’s got a lot in it that is topical, far more now, I think, than in 1926.
Anyway, the thing I was going to write about was the way Donald Ogden Stewart adapted the two plays for the two great movies. In the process, I discovered that Mr. Stewart was a close friend of Mr. Barry, and that not only was the character of Nick Potter in Holiday based on Mr. Stewart, but Mr. Stewart originally played the role on Broadway. Interestingly, when Mr. Stewart adapted the movie, that role changed the most. From a rich idler to a college professor, from a bad example to a fish out of water. Other than that, he adds a couple of brief scenes that take place outside the Seton apartments, none of which are particularly memorable. Almost all the dialogue is preserved intact. There are two or three added gags that aren’t about the Potters; the handstands and the necktie bits, I think, both of which I liked. Other than that, all the changes are about Nick Potter, and that makes a big change in the movie.
In The Philadelphia Story, as well, the changes center on one character. In this case, though, they eliminate a character (Tracy’s other brother) and give all his stuff to Dexter. In the play, it’s Sandy that brings the journalists in (as part of a deal to hush up the father’s affair), and it’s Sandy that decides to get Mike drunk and get the dirt on the publisher, and it’s Sandy that writes the hit piece. In the movie, all that is Dexter. It gives him more to do, and it also makes him a more calculating character, and (I think) less sympathetic. There are other changes, too: Uncle Willie has been made more of a Roland Young character, the politics are a little more explicit, and the whole crazy business in the French language is absolutely new. The dialogue is mostly the same, particularly Hepburn’s dialogue, and the “innundo” as Dinah puts it, is all there.
By the way, the other Philip Barry play adapted by Donald Ogden Stewart for the movies was Without Love, my own favorite of the Hepburn/Tracy movies. Sadly, the play wasn’t in this collection.
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-Vardibidian.