This year’s Classic Film Festival at the Fargo Theatre featured three romantic comedies.

Posted By Fargo Reviews ~ 15th August 2009

This year’s Classic Film Festival at the Fargo Theatre featured three romantic comedies.  The first, shown monday night, featured Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers in “Swing time.”  The shown tuesday night, was “The Philadelphia Story,” starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart(Jimmy top most of us) and Ruth Hussy.  The third, the more modern “The Way Were,” starring Robert Redford and Barbara Streisand, showed thursday night.  The rest of this review will be concerned with “The Philadelphia Story.”
The movie was produced in that golden year of cinema, 1940.  It is well to take in to consideration the situation in our country at that time. It was the eve of World War II and we were still in the throes of the Great Depression.  Many reviews and Broadway shows were about the rich and famous.  The public apparently liked these productions since they didn’t have resources of their own, they could go the movie or show and fantasize about being rich.
The Philadelphia is about a very upper class Philadelphia named, appropriately enough, the Lords.  Tracy Lord(Hepburn) is the heir apparent to her father’s fortune, having been divorced from her previous drunk of a husband, played by Cary Grant.  She is engaged to be married to George Kitteredge, also a member of the upper, upper Philadelphia Class.  A reporter and a photographer are smuggled in to the wedding proceedings, to cover the wedding for Spy magazine.  These two are played by Stewart and Hussey.
The movie was introduced as mad-cap comedy, and that it was.  The dialogue cracked with wit, with almost every line evolking laughter.  Unfortunately, the movie was filmed in black and white, as most were in 1950, or I could have spent the4 whole time gawking at the Lord mansion.  I gawked quite a bit in black and white.
Folks not supposed to be at the wedding are Tracy’s father, ex husband, and of course Stewart and Hussy.  But they all turn uup.  It’s no secret that things don’t go as planned, and I’ll leave out what happens in the end, which really isn’t as predictable as it might seem.
Well, they just don’t make them like this anymore.  The sharp dialogue seems to be a lost art, at least compared to this.  The acting was, or course, superb, including virtually everyone in the movie.  But what impressed me most was the character development: it was not a stretch to believe Hepburn’s character had been married to Grant’s, or that she intended to marry Kitteredge.
The movie is mostly dialogue and sets.  The story is complicated enough to make it interesting, I thought.  There’s very little action, but none was promised opr expected.  If you might like romantic comedy, this is one of the best.  If not, see something else.
Acting: A+
Story:  A-
Humor: A-
Casting and Character Development: A
Necessity to suspend disbelief: some, for most of us.