The New Pictures

The Philadelphia Story (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer). Come on back, Katie, all is forgiven. This absolution was spoken last fortnight by one Harry Brandt, an independent Manhattan cinema theatre owner who two years ago gave Hollywood the jitters by proscribing Actress Katharine Hepburn and ten other cinemarvels as box-office poison. Mr. Brandt's reprieve came after watching the longest line in the eight-year history of the Radio City Music Hall queued up during a spell of foul weather to pay top prices for a view of Miss Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story. When, after its first four days, the film had set a new record for the period with 110,168 paid admissions in the nation's No. 1 movie house, Exhibitor Brandt's amnesty seemed wise.

The rebirth of the Hepburn movie career was neither an accident nor a Hollywood phenomenon. It was the result of careful planning by an astute young woman. Observant critics have long noticed that Katharine Hepburn's popularity waxed and waned in direct proportion to the similarity of her roles with her own personality. In Morning Glory and Little Women, which capped her early Hollywood success, she was full of the eager, well-bred enthusiasm she absorbed in a free-thinking but socially impeccable Hartford, Conn, family. Then in two dreary cinemadapted James Barrie plays, she slid into interpretations as heavy and lifeless as plum duff. Two years ago, she and Hollywood called it quits.

Miss Hepburn's ambition was too pressing to be doused even by such a setback. After a short stint on the stage with Jane Eyre, she found herself with just what she wanted--a sophisticated play about high life in Philadelphia's Main Line society with a glamorous, smart-talking leading role especially stitched to her lovely measurements by her friend, Playwright Philip Barry. With the backing of a onetime suitor, Aviator Howard Hughes, she bought herself an interest in the play, including movie rights. It ran a year on Broadway is still going strong after six months on the road.

Hollywood was interested from the beginning, and Owner Hepburn could write her own ticket. She demanded two leading male stars, an all-out production, $175,000 for the screen rights, $75,000 for her services as an actress. M. G. M. ponied up gladly after its bright young Producer-Writer Joseph Mankiewicz put together an acceptable trial script. It further offered that amiably stringy young man, James Stewart, plus Cary Grant, whose $137,500 fee was paid directly to British war relief.

The Picture. As haughty, high-strung Tracy Lord, imperious daughter of a Main Line first family, Miss Hepburn comes close to playing herself straight. In a choleric moment, Father Seth Lord (John Halliday) sizes her up with: "You have a good mind, a pretty face, and a disciplined body that does what you tell it. You have everything it takes to make a lovely woman except the one essential--an understanding heart. Without it, you might just as well be made of bronze." The Philadelphia Story weighs the personality of this fortress of femininity in terms of her love life, which consists of experiences in varying degrees of intensity with three very different young men. The action spans the day before and the day of her scheduled second marriage to an up-from-the-masses coal company executive (John Howard). Embarrassingly present is her ex-husband, C. K. Dexter Haven (Cary Grant), a Main Liner to the last tweed, whom she divorced two years before out of disgust for his alcoholic habits. Haven has brought along a reporter from a picture magazine (James Stewart) who represents the author's conception of the antithesis to well-mannered privacy--journalistic prying--but whom Tracy comes to think of as pretty "yare."

The result of all this high-priced maladjustment is terribly funny, terribly upper class. No one could have written it better than Playwright Barry, who has written it often (Holiday, The Animal Kingdom, et al.}. No one could have adapted it better than pink-faced, pink-thinking Scenarist Donald Ogden Stewart. Both writers learned the proper inflections of the polite in the best clubs at Yale. Woven into their saga of the supertaxed is a thorough discussion of snobbery, from which they spring to the conclusion that it is possible to have money and social position and still be nice. Converted to this reasoning is Reporter Stewart, who enters the Lord household muttering complaints about watching the privileged class enjoying its privileges, leaves with clear-eyed affection for the socialites.

This rebuttal for Society is itself not without a trace of snobbery. The strongest curse the authors place on the magazine they abhor is that it should be read only by the cook. C. K. Dexter Haven shows his broad mind to Tracy by admitting: "You could marry Mac, the night watchman, and I'd cheer you." The parvenu coal executive is first ridiculed because his riding habit is new and clean "like something right out of a store window." Contempt for his kind is expressed by Haven's: "A splendid chap, very high morals, very broad shoulders." And when the parvenu bridegroom leaves them all, sputtering: "You and your whole rotten class! You're on your way out--the lot of you--and good riddance," he is a howl.

Tracy acquires an understanding heart after getting tight, going swimming nude with the reporter, and remarrying the reformed rumpot.

In short, The Philadelphia Story lifts the daily drudge into a charming never-never land, with complete footnotes excusing its existence. And besides, it's a good, entertaining show.

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