1939 is widely considered the greatest year in Hollywood history. Back then, writes 1939: The Year in Movies author Tom Flannery, the so-called “Big Eight” major American studios “had a combined 590 actors, 114 directors and 340 writers under contract, each of whom worked an eight-hour shift every weekday,” plus half a day on Saturday. “It took an average of 22 days to shoot a movie, at an average cost of $300,000.” Annual grosses exceeding $700 million “made it easier to take a chance on ‘risky’ or commercially untested material.” From this industrial environment came forth one new feature for every single day of the year, including Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and Young Mr. Lincoln.
There’s one problem with this framing: The Philadelphia Story didn’t come out until 1940. In his new video above, Evan Puschak, better known as the Nerdwriter, uses that celebrated picture — and in fact, just one of its scenes in particular — to reveal the commercial-artistic genius of old Hollywood.
This was not, we must note, an individual genius: “We’re used to thinking about movies as the vision of one person, an auteur director, but the studio system of Hollywood’s golden age didn’t really work like that.” Despite the talent of George Cukor, who went on to direct A Star Is Born and My Fair Lady, “there’s really no auteur here, but rather a collection of top-tier artists and craftsmen coming together to realize a great story and elevate great performances,” all of who make important contributions to the scene examined here.
The collaborators identified by Puschak include cinematographer Joseph Ruttenberg, art director Cedric Gibbons (designer of the Oscar statuette), and costume designer Adrian Greenberg (known mononymously as Adrian). Nor can he ignore the work of the film’s three principal performers, a certain Cary Grant, James Stewart, and Katharine Hepburn. It may have been Stewart who won the Academy Award for Best Actor for The Philadelphia Story, but it was Hepburn who ultimately gained the most: having been saddled with a reputation as “box-office poison” in the thirties due to her famously cold screen presence, she seized the chance to portray a character who suffers for similar qualities of personality and is ultimately redeemed. She got her comeback — and we have a shimmering, witty monument to the most golden of Hollywood’s ages.
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Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His projects include the Substack newsletter Books on Cities and the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles. Follow him on the social network formerly known as Twitter at @colinmarshall.