The Great Dictator

Charles Chaplin resisted the coming of sound more successfully than any other filmmaker of the silent era, making a pair of mostly silent masterpieces after the rest of Hollywood had completely converted to sound. The Great Dictator was his first true sound picture, but even more more notably, it was the first American film to so directly mock and satirize Hitler and the Nazi regime before Pearl Harbor triggered the USA's entrance into World War II. It's a bold and daring film, an expression of defiance against dictatorship, hatred, violence and prejudice. The full extent of what was going on in German concentration camps and ghettos wasn't yet broadly known, at least when production on the film started in 1937, so some of Chaplin's comic set pieces are simultaneously unsettling and eerily prescient, dealing candidly and potently with the persecution of the Jews.

It's a viciously funny movie, a devastating satire that dares to make evil look ridiculous. Chaplin plays twin roles: the nasty and stupid dictator Adenoid Hynkel and an unnamed Jewish barber who seems like a last echo of the Little Tramp character who Chaplin had officially retired with the end of the silent era. While Hynkel, an egoist for whom power is the only goal, spreads war and persecution, the barber just wants to be left alone, to be free to live in peace and run his shop. Wounded in the first war and left in a coma, he slept through Hynkel's rise to power and wakes up as stormtroopers charge through the ghettos, painting the tag "Jew" on Jewish shops and homes, beating people and stealing from them.

The barber doesn't understand, and this is the most richly, deeply sad part of the film, this encounter between the innocence of the barber, this cinematic descendant of the Little Tramp, and the vile hatred of the Nazis. Chaplin's barber confronts the ideology of hate with genuine bafflement, confused as to why these people he's never seen before are harassing him in this way for no reason. He even mistakes a Nazi soldier for a cop, asking him to arrest another soldier. As the barber, Chaplin's voice is soft and whispery, an expression of gentleness and decency, the exact opposite of the blustery speechifying of Hynkel and the barked orders of the Nazis as they attack the Jews. The barber and the other Jews depicted in the film seem totally out of step with the rage and bile of the era; they just want to be left alone, to live their lives in peace.


The barber's disconnection from his era is epitomized right from the beginning of the film, in which he serves as a soldier during World War I. The opening scenes provide a general satire of warfare and military discipline, with Chaplin's hapless draftee stumbling through the fog of the battlefield, stoically following orders as they push him from one absurd scenario to another. Smoke drifts across the frame, swallowing up all the soldiers on both sides so thoroughly that at one point Chaplin falls in line with the enemy troops. This all plays out in an eerie hush that recalls the silent visual aesthetics of Chaplin's earlier films, a style he had by no means abandoned with his delayed acceptance of the sound era. The minimalism and starkness of this opening enforces the film's theme, highlighting the absurdity and ugliness of war so that when Hynkel appears, stirring up the people with an ideology that's committed to more war, to a constant state of war, his foolishness is very apparent.

Chaplin's Hitler caricature has a strange, childlike grace, like an overgrown little boy. Moved and chilled by his minister's grand dreams for the dictator's future conquests, Hynkel bounces straight up in the air and climbs the curtains, hanging there, and then he performs a remarkable dance with a globe balloon that he balances on his palm, light as air, gleefully letting it fly high up into the air. Chaplin plays the scene as silent pantomime, a brilliant parody of the dictator's fantasy of himself as a world ruler, both utterly absurd and chillingly, strangely beautiful. When the balloon pops, he breaks down and sobs like a little boy whose toy has been taken away.

The film is often most powerful in the scenes that rely on this kind of silent comedy performance. At one point, Chaplin's barber, overcome with terror, loses his voice and pantomimes an elaborate series of hand signals about the approaching Nazi stormtroopers — in times of great stress and emotion, he reverts to the silent era's method of communicating. Perhaps for that reason, the film is full of callbacks to earlier Chaplin films. The barber attacks a Nazi soldier with a paintbrush at one point, swiping white paint across his face, referencing the manic slapstick of Chaplin's early shorts. Hynkel's gibberish speech at the beginning of the film, delivered with uncanny mockery of Hitler's cadences although the language is a nonsense pidgin-German, recalls the nonsense song that Chaplin had sung in Modern Times, thus connecting the dictator's rhetoric to the singing waiter's silly tune. Chaplin's casting of Paulette Goddard as the barber's love interest Hannah also provides some continuity with Modern Times, especially since when she first appears her dirty face and raggy clothes seem like echoes of her "gamine" from the earlier film. It's as though Chaplin and Goddard's poor characters had been transplanted to Nazi Germany, crushed down by the fascist system even more virulently than they'd been crushed by the modern, industrialized society of Modern Times.

Indeed, Chaplin explicitly links the Nazi ideology to modernity and mechanization, calling the Nazis "machine men with machine minds and machine hearts" in the stirring speech that he delivers at the end of the film, breaking character for an extraordinary monologue in which Chaplin seems to be directly addressing the film's audience, pleading for sanity and decency rather than hatred and violence.

Films I Love #55: The Shop Around the Corner (Ernst Lubitsch, 1940)

Ernst Lubitsch's The Shop Around the Corner is a rich, moving love story, a very warm film despite its snowy Christmastime setting. Although the film is focused on the antagonism of the store manager Kralik (James Stewart) and new employee Klara (Margaret Sullivan) — and of course, their eventual and inevitable realization of love for one another — in many ways it's more about everything that happens around this slowly developing romance. The film is set in a small shop in Budapest, and the texture of this shop, the daily business of the workers who gather outside every day for friendly chit-chat, is the real matter of the film. The characters are well-defined but not quirky, with just hints of low-key exaggeration lending some humorous edge to the anxious, sputtering Pirovitch (Felix Bressart) and the smart-alecky errand boy Pepi (William Tracy), who really comes into his own with a chest-swelled swagger when he gets promoted to salesman. The film's humor is gentle and quiet, with not a hint of mean-spirited mockery except, perhaps, in its portrayal of Kralik's foppish rival Vadas (Joseph Schildkraut). The film continually belies the idea that humor must be edgy or aggressive in order to be genuinely funny, as Lubitsch earns smiles, chuckles and occasionally even full-throated guffaws from his careful development of these characters and their minor foibles.

What's especially striking about the film's humor is the vein of real, deep sadness that runs through the center of it. There's a sense of loneliness in both Kralik and Karla, who separately believe they've found love in the form of someone they've never even met face-to-face, someone they've only corresponded with through letters. There's more than a hint of desperation in both characters: they invest so much into their romance-by-pen, as though it represents the last chance they each have for happiness or romance. In the process, they don't realize that the object of their love is right in front of them every day, that their relationship consists of sparring angrily by day and writing loving, romantic letters to one another by night. As such, the film is about the ideal of love as contrasted against the more prosaic but also more tangible reality: it's telling that before Kralik can reveal himself to Karla, he must adjust her expectations downward by shattering the fantasy of the letters, preparing her not only for the revelation that he's her great love, but that her great love is only a flesh-and-blood man after all. Lubitsch also has a wonderful feel for the anxieties of money, for the pressures of the working class life and the fear of losing a job, and the film makes great use of the Christmas setting for its subtle commentary on consumerism and salesmanship. It's a beautiful, funny, emotionally complex masterpiece with so much heart, so much beauty, in every image and every line that, despite its modest, unassuming surface, it winds up being an almost overwhelming experience.

Dr. Cyclops

In its opening minutes, Dr. Cyclops promises something incredibly rare in the annals of trashy B movies: a lurid, creepy tale of sci-fi horror shot in gorgeous, eye-popping Technicolor, its sickly green hues and expressionist lighting schemes enhancing the schlocky horror of the premise. The film opens in a dark laboratory where strobing lights send ever-changing shadows flitting across the walls, while the mad scientist Dr. Thorkel (Albert Dekker) bends down over strange glowing tubes. The whole thing is bathed in green light, and the atmosphere is eerie and unsettling even before Thorkel's confrontation with his morally outraged colleague Dr. Mendoza (slumming character actor Paul Fix), who demands that Thorkel halt his mysterious experiments with radiation. Mendoza quickly meets a gruesome and horrifying end, with Thorkel using radioactive materials to mutate the other doctor's face into a skeletal death mask. It's a creepy, beautifully handled special effect, and this opening scene is just about the best horror movie introduction possible. Already it's apparent that the acting is stiff and the script ridiculous, but this scene seems to promise at least a film that takes full advantage of its Technicolor format and the possibilities of bringing color to an ordinarily low-budget shocker.

I think you know where this is going by now, though. The opening scene of Dr. Cyclops unfortunately seems to be where all of the ingenuity and imagination of the cinematographer and lighting crew were focused. The rest of the film provides plenty of for-the-time dazzling special effects and trick shots, but nothing with the aesthetic jolt of that unforgettable opening, nothing that provides the same frisson of sloppy, almost accidental beauty that characterizes the best B pictures. The remainder of the tale takes place in bright sunlight in a backlot jungle, eventually becoming a "shrinking" adventure story of the kind that would become so popular in 50s sci-fi cinema. The first scene turns out to be merely a prologue, with the bulk of the action taking place two years later, when Thorkel suddenly summons together a group of three scientists to assist with his research at an isolated South American lab: the proud Dr. Rupert Bullfinch (Charles Halton), pretty young Dr. Mary Robinson (Janice Logan), and the lazy mineralogist Bill Stockton (Thomas Coley). Before arriving at the mad doctor's lab, the trio meets up with the mule driver Steve Baker (Victor Killian) and Thorkel's Spanish assistant Pedro (Frank Yaconelli).

Upon arrival, the group is insulted to find that Thorkel wants them not so much for their scientific expertise, but only because his failing eyesight has prevented him from doing much of his routine lab work himself. He has them peer into microscopes for him, confirming some test results without explaining what he's doing, and then tries to send them off. Of course, the curious scientists stay on, and as such fall victim to Thorkel's crazed experiments: using radioactive materials, he is shrinking living beings, getting off on the God-like control he exercises over nature. He shrinks the whole group of scientists, including Pedro and Baker, and then tries to experiment on these new subjects. But despite the horrific opening, the premise plays out more like a light, even farcical adventure, never generating any genuine horror or thrills out of its shrunken heroes and towering villain.


The film has an odd, cheery tone that's reinforced in its incongruously bouncy score, and in the silly ethnic humor provided by Pedro's caricatured character. Once the group is shrunk down, they look ridiculous dressed in toga-type garments that Thorkel apparently made for them out of handkerchiefs; Pedro, on the other hand, seems to be wearing a diaper beneath his paunchy belly, accentuating his status as comic relief. Even more absurd is the sequence where, when the group gets some time away from Thorkel to plot and think, the men get to work customizing weapons and tools from whatever they can find, while Mary begins sewing and is apparently able to make whole new, more colorful outfits for the group while Thorkel is sleeping. This film is nothing if not intent on confirming stereotypes, often in the most ludicrous ways.

Thorkel himself hardly proves to be a particularly intimidating villain, either. His jovial manner with his victims is faintly absurd and funny, but he certainly never again seems like the creepy force of evil that he was in his first appearance. The film's appeal lies largely in its Oscar-nominated special effects, which were surely revolutionary for the time, combining rear projection and various double printing techniques with judicious use of miniatures and over-sized sets. These effects often convincingly portray the miniaturization of the doctor's victims, though the rear projection shots simulating attacks by chickens, alligators and cats are laughable today. Even the best effect shots — like the one where the mad doctor grabs the squirming Bullfinch in his giant fist — can't distract from the essential dullness of the film, its meandering plot basically just providing an excuse to get from one flashy effects sequence to the next.

Director Ernest B. Schoedsack, most famous as one of the masterminds behind King Kong, can't manage to bring any depth to this inherently thin material, despite some clumsy attempts to reference the tale of Odysseus and the Cyclops. Too much of the film is spent following around a group of miniaturized over-actors through one trick shot after another, all at a plodding, deadened pace. This would be par for the course for a lousy B-movie if it weren't for that opening scene, which for a few brief minutes promised something much greater.

Michael Shayne: Private Detective

Michael Shayne: Private Detective is a breezy, convoluted B-movie mystery, the first in the series of seven low-budget features based around pulp novel private detective Michael Shayne. Lloyd Nolan plays the gumshoe in all the films, the kind of wisecracking, perennially unruffled noir hero who provided the template for many a later Bogart role. Nolan gets to do a lot of heavy lifting here, carrying the film through a complex, twisty plot in which the contours of the mystery remain unclear right up until the final scene, a typical detective story parlor scene in which Shayne has to explain the whole thing to his baffled audience. What keeps the film moving in spite of its indifferent plotting and sketchy characterization is the overall good humor of the whole thing. Shayne is too much of a smooth operator to ever get too bothered by anything, even when he's accused of murder (multiple different times), gets shot at and knocked out by a shadowy thug, or has to go on the run from the cops. The stakes are obviously high, but Shayne is always ready with a side-of-the-mouth quip or a casual dismissal, playing fast and loose with the law whenever it suits him.

In this first installment in the series, Shayne gets sucked into an increasingly convoluted mystery when he's hired by his friend, a racetrack official, to watch over his wild, gambling-addicted daughter Phyllis (fresh-faced Marjorie Weaver, who has a hard time selling her supposedly out-of-control femme). Phyllis turns out to be more of a handful than Shayne had expected, especially when his attempt to teach her a lesson backfires and he winds up with a corpse on his hands and an obvious frame-up job pointing in his direction. Shayne has to spend the rest of the film juggling the suspicious police chief Painter (Donald MacBride), crooked casino owner Benny Gordon (Douglass Dumbrille), and horse owner Elliott Thomas (Walter Abel), all while babysitting Phyllis, trying to clear his name, and catching the real killer in the process.


So the film is a standard genre piece in many ways, and B-movie director Eugene Forde (who also handled a few of the Charlie Chan serial pictures) does little to spice things up. His staging is competent but unobtrusive. A scene where Shayne hides from an attacker, watching his feet from underneath a sofa, is about as fancy as the camerawork gets. It's also sometimes haphazardly plotted; the same scene has the mysterious thug fire a shot at Shayne, causing the detective to duck, but then the attacker walks by the place where Shayne is hiding as though he doesn't know anyone is there. There's little concern for plausibility, and both Shayne and the police are totally cavalier about the processes of investigation. Shayne switches gun barrels between guns, forges suicide notes, and, when it seems like he's going to get a murder pinned on him, simply throws his gun into the woods and retrieves it later. The cops are equally careless with procedure: they pick up so many objects and potential pieces of evidence, running their hands even over guns that could be murder weapons, that it's frankly hilarious whenever they talk about doing fingerprint analysis of anything.

The film treats the police as a bunch of bumbling buffoons, and the rivalry between Shayne and Painter frequently has the feel of the sparring between Bugs Bunny and Elmer Fudd, with the quick-witted detective often getting the best of the police chief, who soon enough does literal double-takes when he realizes he's been had. The humor is broad but frequently funny, and Nolan's rapid-fire delivery and easy quipping saves the film from being just another below-average detective picture. As a mystery or a thriller, it's quite shoddy, but as a comedy it's surprisingly good, especially whenever Shayne crosses paths with Phyllis' mystery buff Aunt Olivia (Elizabeth Patterson), who seems positively excited that she's involved in a murder case that she can't solve "by looking in the back of the book." Olivia gets a lot of the best lines, like when she climaxes her grotesque description of a murder mystery's set-up (the victim was strangled with piano wire and then decapitated) by exclaiming, "he was dead!" Patterson's comic repartee with Nolan is the film's best asset, and the film gets a lot of mileage out of its charismatic star, banter-heavy script, and game supporting cast.

Rebecca

The title character in Alfred Hitchcock's Rebecca, his American debut after a string of British thrillers, is a woman who is never seen onscreen, not even in a photo. She died before the story even opens, and yet her presence infuses every frame of the film. This invisible ghost hovers over the seemingly doomed love of a naïve young woman (Joan Fontaine) who, in contrast to the title character, is seen but never named. This woman, so unprepossessing that she barely has an identity, is quiet, unworldly, slightly clumsy, and painfully, awkwardly shy. She serves as a "paid companion" to an oafish and demanding society matron (Florence Bates) who fancies herself a sophisticate and loves ordering her young charge around. Despite her shrinking nature, this girl falls in love with the handsome, debonair, but deeply troubled widower Maxim de Winter (Laurence Olivier), whose wife Rebecca died in a boating accident not so long ago. The couple soon get married and de Winter takes his young bride back to his palatial home by the sea, where the spirit of the departed Rebecca still hangs over everything, smothering the second Mrs. de Winter (the only name she is ever called) with the impossible task of filling the shoes of this glamorous, beautiful, universally popular society lady.

Names are incredibly important in this film, and the script goes to great lengths to avoid giving the heroine herself a name — and also to point out her lack of a name and, consequently, lack of a clearly defined identity. In some scenes, she seems to be barely there, not introduced, not speaking, as invisible as Rebecca. When she first meets her future husband, he's introduced to her, but if he ever learns her name, Hitchcock is careful not to show that scene. Instead, he refers to her only as "my darling" and other pet names, and after their marriage, she's introduced to anyone else only as Mrs. de Winter, a name she shares, not incidentally, with the deceased Rebecca. She has no name of her own, only a name she's inherited from another woman, and she has no identity separate from her husband. When given the opportunity to introduce herself instead of being introduced, she says only that she is "Maxim's wife," self-identifying with a possessive noun that refers back to her husband rather than directly to herself. Maxim himself has an abundance of names — his full moniker is the ostentatious George Fortescue Maximilian de Winter — and Rebecca's ubiquitous name appears as frequently as though she were still alive. Her initials are still on bedsheets, handkerchiefs, note paper, address books, and all manner of other decorations around the house, and the new Mrs. de Winter continually finds herself inheriting these leftovers emblazoned with that bold, stylized "R."

Only the heroine is lacking in names, a fact that resonates on multiple levels: it intensifies her fear that she is stepping in for another woman who Maxim is obviously still preoccupied with; it betrays her lower-class insecurity about inhabiting the role of a society hostess surrounded by servants in this spacious home; and subtextually, it indicates a proto-feminist concern for the loss of female identity attendant to marriage as a general institution. Here, the loss of individual autonomy that often accompanies marriage — especially for the woman who sacrifices her name to take on her husband's instead — is exaggerated by the suspicion that this woman barely possessed her own identity to begin with. Fontaine plays her with a shrinking, hunched quality, always nervous, seemingly never sure quite how she should hold her arms, and in moments of especially great fear practically contorting herself into a pretzel. She looks as though, if she could implode into herself on the spot, she would. Hitch apparently helped wrest this performance from his star by encouraging the off-camera perception that everyone on the set hated her, and the result is a completely unglamorous star turn, shorn of the usual actorly confidence. The effect is heightened by the contrast with Olivier, as grand and stately as ever, towering over his new wife in stature and in self-assurance alike. She is so insecure that she seems to be looking for someone to think and act for her, which is why she puts up with her domineering boss, why she throws herself at a man who mostly seems distant and disinterested, and why when she becomes his wife she allows his servants to manipulate and control her.


This is especially true of the household's chief servant, Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson), who was fiercely devoted to the first Mrs. de Winter and resents the intrusion of a second. Anderson gives a wonderfully fiendish performance as the gaunt, sinister housekeeper, always lurking around and padding quietly through the mansion to surprise the lady of the house at inopportune moments. In one of the film's eeriest sequences, Danvers shows the new bride around her predecessor's huge, airy room, which has been sealed off ever since Rebecca's death and maintained in exactly the same condition as the former Mrs. de Winter liked it. The room is beautiful, and Hitchcock films it with light streaming through the tall, overpowering windows, capturing its austere beauty: it looks like a mausoleum, and Danvers' guided tour is like rifling through the bones of the dead. She leads the heroine through Rebecca's nightly routine, describing how she would undress herself while telling stories of glamorous parties, then take a bath, sit by the dressing table to comb her hair, and go to bed. She opens Rebecca's closets full of expensive clothes, inviting the younger girl to feel the plushness of a fur coat, and she even displays the dead woman's underwear, recalling, in a moment of deadpan humor, how it was specially made for her by nuns. The whole scene has a creepy necrophiliac undertone, like digging through a crypt: an intimate, personal violation. The room stands in for Rebecca herself, and Danvers' tour is a way of being with her beloved employer, touching and fondling Rebecca's possessions as though they were an extension of her departed flesh. The unsettling sexuality of it all comes to the fore when Danvers picks up Rebecca's lacy negligee, holding it out and admiring its delicacy and transparency. She places her hand inside it and says with lusty joy, "Look, you can see my hand through it." It's an obvious invitation to imagine Rebecca wearing the gown, to imagine a woman who displays her body so sensuously with such a flimsy barrier simultaneously covering and revealing her nakedness; the hand pressing against the inside of the negligee stands in for Rebecca's naked body.

This perverse but subtly masked sexuality is, of course, a perfect topic for Hitchcock, whose thrillers so often trafficked in dense psycho-sexual layering. The plot of the film is, in many ways, pure melodrama, and could've easily lent itself to overcooked hysterics in other hands, but Hitch truly makes the material his own. This is true not only of the second half, in which the plot unexpectedly morphs into a kind of typical Hitchcockian "wrong man" thriller — and not an especially interesting one either — but even more so of the sedate, subtle first half, in which the dread and suffocation of the heroine steadily increase. Here, Hitch's characteristic suspense is diffuse, building atmosphere not through any particular events but through a generalized aura of fear surrounding the characters. The film evokes the overbearing presence of Rebecca primarily with sheer technical skill: especially by photographing the unnamed new wife in spacious deep-focus compositions that isolate her within the house, which seems to stretch off into the distance for miles. The surroundings loom over the excessively modest new Mrs. de Winter, who is small and insignificant in her new home, her stooped posture and shy manner contributing to her diminishment. Even inanimate objects have more personality than her, as Rebecca's leftover clothes and decorations are given a totemic power that dwarfs the woman who now possesses them. The film itself, though, is as potent and haunting as its ghostly title character.

12/19: The Philadelphia Story

George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story is an epitome of stylish wit and charm, evincing the same concern with class and life decisions as Cukor's earlier (and much superior) Cary Grant/Katharine Hepburn vehicle Holiday. Hepburn plays Tracy Lord, a society heiress with a long history as a tabloid gossip mainstay, especially in regards to her marriage to and angry divorce from Grant's C.K. Dexter Haven (a brilliant high-class name if ever there was one). The opening scene perfectly captures the antipathy between these two, in a quick and wordless evocation of the end of their marriage: Hepburn breaks Grant's golf club over her knee, and Grant palms her face and shoves her backwards, after first feigning a punch. But when Tracy plans to get remarried, to the nouveau-riche George Kittredge (John Howard), Dexter returns into her life, dragging with him a pair of gossip-rag journalists who he plans to introduce as friends of his.

From then on, the film is a game of appearances and realities, with nothing ever quite what it seems. Dexter is seemingly out for revenge by showing up at the wedding and bringing sleazy journalists with him, but he actually has more altruistic motives in mind. And the journalists, Connor (James Stewart) and Liz (Ruth Hussey), must maintain their facades while gathering information about the Lord family. Meanwhile, Tracy sees right through her ex's ruse immediately, but is forced to accept the journalists as friends anyway, due to a blackmail plot by the tabloid's editor. All this is established with perhaps too much detail, and the first 20 minutes of the film drag ponderously with exposition that brings the plot up to this point. It's only then that the first genuine sparkle appears in the film, as Tracy and her sophisticated young sister Dinah (Virginia Weidler, in one of those annoyingly precocious little kid roles) playact before the befuddled journalists, hoping to present a super-exaggerated portrait of the society lifestyle for their benefit. This scene is hilarious, and the smooth-talking, constantly quipping Hepburn quickly proves a strangely compelling counterpart for the laconic Stewart.

The duo achieves an uneasy rapport almost as soon as they're onscreen together, totally different from Hepburn's already established rapport with Grant as her ex. In Grant, Hepburn has a true onscreen equal, someone with a sharp wit to match hers and an ability to trade barbs back and forth with ease. Stewart, in his best folksy personality, can be witty too, but his conversations with Hepburn aren't so much back-and-forth as give-and-take, up-and-down, going from periods of rapid-fire exchanges to more halting moments of withdrawal and uncertainty. The difference between the two male leads and their complicated connections with Hepburn provides the film's central spark and tension. It's telling that, from the very beginning, the prospective husband George is sidelined in favor of not just one, but two other leads. He's a stuffy cipher, a man who pulled himself up from nothing to be a successful businessman, and who has now totally bought into the status and self-importance of his new class. In contrast, both the impoverished Stewart and the born-rich Grant seem much more natural, relaxed in their skins and not overly concerned with appearances or traditions.

As this précis suggests, Cukor's interest in class is complex and not at all couched in the usual simplistic terms. The Lord family is undoubtedly upper-class, and they accept their privilege with casual ease, while Connor is nearly a pauper, a struggling writer working way beneath his talent just to pay the bills. Connor is understandably resentful of the riches around him at the Lord home, but his resentment cools as he grows to know Tracy better, although their discussions still often have a tinge of class warfare about them. This is especially apparent when Tracy offers Connor the use of a country house for private writing, and he rejects her by saying that the concept of wealthy patronesses has gone out of style. Connor just wants to be his own man, even if it means struggling, and this ultimately is the film's primary message. Both Connor and Dexter are comfortable with who they are, while George and Tracy aren't — Tracy, especially, seems uncertain about what direction to go in her life, or even what kind of person she is. She's repeatedly told, sometimes in insult, sometimes with the best of intentions, that she is a cold, distant, and self-centered goddess, and only Connor seems to see the warmth and intelligence in her.

Cukor deftly juggles this introspective subtext with the romantic interest of the central love triangle (actually complicated into a hexagon by the additional points of George and Liz), and a great deal of humor. The film is at its peak in the scenes between Connor and Tracy, especially a remarkable sequence in which the two of them grow progressively drunker and drunker over the course of a night as they ramble and talk and drink. The scene is a series of back-and-forth movements and gestures, with each of them moving towards each other and then backing off; several times, in the midst of quietly phrased arguments, their faces are close enough to kiss, and then they back away again. Cukor handles this beautifully, subtly increasing the romantic tension in the scene even as the tone of the dialogue largely remains friendly and unsentimental. When they finally kiss, the music soars romantically and then jolts to a halt, as though pausing to breath, and in the silence between kisses Hepburn simply whispers, "Golly." It's a moving, hilarious, wonderful moment, a perfect movie kiss. Without resorting to typical Hollywood grandstanding or manipulation, Cukor simply evokes the emotional depth of that kiss.

The Philadelphia Story abounds in moments like this, the result of Cukor's ability to organically combine witty dialogue, emotionally complicated characters (and performances to draw them out), and the subtle use of formal elements to gently nudge the scene towards its meaning. In this film, Cukor neatly shifts between light humor, low-key drama, and intellectual ruminations on identity, purpose, and the decisions made at crucial junctures in life. The film never quite settles into any of these modes, but it never quite feels disjointed either. Its story flows organically, and best of all, it doesn't rely on stock clichés or conventions. Its complex denouement somewhat defies the logic of Hollywood endings (though it's definitely a happy one), because it arises from the characters and their actions rather than from any clever twist or sop to audience expectations. The film as a whole isn't as dazzlingly fun as Holiday, which dealt with similar themes and ideas, nor is it as rigorous in developing these ideas. But it's still a fine work, and once it gets past the speedbump of the opening 20 minutes, it's very satisfying indeed.