The Philadelphia Story is a 1940 romantic comedy film directed by George Cukor, starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart. Based on a Broadway play of the same name by Philip Barry, with screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart and an uncredited Waldo Salt, the film is about a socialite whose wedding plans are complicated by the simultaneous arrival of her ex-husband and an attractive journalist. It is considered one of the best example...
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The Philadelphia Story is a 1940 romantic comedy film directed by George Cukor, starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart. Based on a Broadway play of the same name by Philip Barry, with screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart and an uncredited Waldo Salt, the film is about a socialite whose wedding plans are complicated by the simultaneous arrival of her ex-husband and an attractive journalist. It is considered one of the best examples of a comedy of remarriage, a genre popular in the 1930s and 1940s, in which a couple divorce, flirt with outsiders and then remarry – a useful story-telling ploy at a time when the depiction of extramarital affairs was blocked by the Production Code.
The play was Hepburn's first great triumph after several movie flops had led to a "box office poison" label Howard Hughes purchased the film rights to the play and gifted them to Hepburn, his then girlfriend in order to control it as a vehicle for her movie comeback. Hepburn was unaware that...
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