Grant and Stewart have always been two of my favorite actors. It's a shame that The Philadelphia Story from 1940 is the only movie in which the two of them appeared together. I had never been a big Kate fan, but her performance in The Philadelphia Story won me over. By the way, it was the last and most acclaimed of the four films in which Cary and the redhead co-starred, although 1938's Bringing Up Baby was critically acclaimed too, notwithstanding lagging ticket sales.
The Philadelphia Story was the only film in which Kate and Jimmy acted together. Their only other pairing of sorts was That's Entertainment, Part II from 1976, a documentary containing snippets of older films, mostly musicals, in which they separately starred.
The background for the production of The Philadelphia Story could, itself, be grist for another movie. In 1938 the Manhattan Independent Theater Owners took out an ad in the Hollywood Reporter which, among other things, disparaged Hepburn and labeled her as "box office poison." This was on the heels of Bringing Up Baby. Considering that she had, by this point in time, already won a Best Actress Oscar just five years beforehand for Morning Glory, and had also been nominated two years later for Alice Adams, this was strange criticism indeed. Kate could have let her resume speak for itself, but the spirited actress chose a different course of action. Shortly after the ad appeared she took to the stage to perform the lead role in The Philadelphia Story, which started with a national tour and eventually ended up on Broadway. She bought the rights to the script for $30,000, and flipped it by selling the movie rights to MGM for $175,000, with a provision that she would maintain control of the movie production. She then demanded and received another seventy-five grand from MGM to play the leading lady, Tracy Lord. (Note the inside joke, i.e., Hepburn's character bearing the first name "Tracy," a reference to Hepburn's long-time lover, Spencer Tracy.)
As Turner Classic Movies host Ben Mankiewicz described her, "Box office poison, perhaps, but front office brains."
*****
Here are the movies I watched at the Quentin Estates during the second quarter of 2016:
1.
All The Right Moves (1983 drama; Tom Cruise is a feisty high school
football star whose dream of escaping a life in the local Pennsylvania
steel mill town coincides with that of his vindictive coach, Craig T.
Nelson.) B+
2. Because They're Young (1960 drama; Dick Clark is a high school history teacher who, when he isn't hitting on school secretary Victoria Shaw, is getting very involved in the personal problems of his students Michael Callan and Warren Berlinger.) C
3. Breaking Away (1979 comedy; Dennis Christopher, a bicycle racer, and Dennis Quade are two of four "stoners," recent high school grads in Bloomington, Indiana, who have cultural clashes with the more affluent college guys.) C+
4. The Cardinal (1963 drama; Tom Tryon is a priest who, on the way to becoming a cardinal, encounters challenges involving a poor rural Massachusetts parish under the direction of Burgess Meredith, a black Georgia parish targeted by the Ku Klux Clan, a sabbatical in Vienna where he meets the fetching student, Romy Schneider, and the Nazis who have just annexed Austria.) C+
5. The French Connection (1971 detective drama; Gene Hackman and Roy Scheider are NYC detectives who follow leads pertaining to the prospect of a huge illegal narcotics shipment being smuggled into the city.) B+
6. The French Line (1954 musical; Texas oil baroness Jane Russell switches identities with model Joyce Mackenzie while on board a trans-Atlantic ocean liner, and suitor Gilbert Roland, a French playboy who appears to be interested in Jane, is kept in the dark.) C+
7. The Graduate (1967 comedy; an older family friend, Anne Bancroft, seduces recent college grad Dustin Hoffman, but their affair turns sideways when he meets her daughter, Katherine Ross.) B+
8. Jeremiah Johnson (1972 western; Robert Redford decides frontier town life isn't for him, so he lives high up in the Rockies among the elk, the hawks, the rabbits, the wolves, the bears, the Crow, the Flatheads and the Blackfoot.) B+
9. Kings Row (1942 drama; Robert Cummings studies medicine under the tutelage of girlfriend Betty Field's father, Claude Raines, then goes off to Vienna while his best buddy, Ronald Reagan, gets serious with a girl from the poor side of town, Ann Sheridan.) C
10. La Ronde (1950 comedy; narrator Anton Walbrook introduces and observes ten different sexual liaisons in a sequence in which one of the two parties from a given story is also involved in the next.) C+
11. Life Itself (2014 documentary; a biographical detailed overview of film critic Roger Ebert, including his days as a young aspiring journalist, his affiliation with rival and partner Gene Siskel, his commingling with the rich and famous in places like Cannes, and his terminal illness which he fought with the unflagging support of his wife, Chaz.) A-
12. The Philadelphia Story (1940 comedy; Katherine Hepburn, a wealthy high society divorcee, is about to marry John Howard, but she gets sidetracked by her ex, Cary Grant, and by a tabloid writer, Jimmy Stewart.) A
13. This Is Spinal Tap (1984 mockumentary; Rob Reiner is a documentarian who memorializes the final days of a fictional English band comprised of members Michael McKean, Christopher Guest and Harry Schearer.) A-
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