Critical Reception
According to Bosley Crowther, the film "has just about everything that a blue-chip comedy should have—a witty, romantic script derived by Donald Ogden Stewart out of Philip Barry's successful play; the flavor of high-society elegance, in which the patrons invariably luxuriate, and a splendid cast of performers headed by Katharine Hepburn, James Stewart and Cary Grant. If it doesn't play out this year and well along into next they should turn the Music Hall into a shooting gallery....Metro and Director George Cukor have graciously made it apparent, in the words of a character, that one of 'the prettiest sights in this pretty world is the privileged classes enjoying their privileges.' And so, in this instance, will you, too."
The Philadelphia Story was the last of four films starring Grant and Hepburn, the others being Sylvia Scarlett (1935), Bringing Up Baby (1938), and Holiday (1938). All but Sylvia Scarlett belong to a sub-genre of screwball comedy called the comedy of remarriage described by the philosopher Stanley Cavell as Hollywood's crowning achievement.
Read more about this topic: The Philadelphia Story (film)
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“Most critical writing is drivel and half of it is dishonest.... It is a short cut to oblivion, anyway. Thinking in terms of ideas destroys the power to think in terms of emotions and sensations.”
—Raymond Chandler (1888–1959)
“But in the reception of metaphysical formula, all depends, as regards their actual and ulterior result, on the pre-existent qualities of that soil of human nature into which they fall—the company they find already present there, on their admission into the house of thought.”
—Walter Pater (1839–1894)