Magical experience watching THE PHILDALPHIA STORY in the 4K restoration with Chris and my sister amidst a goof size audience at the Cinema Moderne yesterday. Everybody laughed in all the right places, loudly at all the scenes I remember from childhood viewings (Virginia Wiedler, particularly wearing a huge diamond collar – a copy of Marie Antonoinette’s famous mammoth one —  dancing ballet, speaking French and singing ‘Lydia, oh Lydia, the lady with the Tattoo’) and pointed out laughs to me I hadn’t noticed viewing the film alone subsequently. I remember having a conversation with VF Perkins where he told me why he didn’t like it though I now can’t remember the specifics – was it the beginning? The characterisation of the husband to be? Yesterday, I loved it all. It’s got Hepburn, at her most beautiful, and filmed uber glamorously, Joe Ruttenburg puts eye-lights in her face, her lips glisten, her hair  — by Sidney Guilaroff –seems to float in little curls above her head; she’s at her most chic too, dressed by Adrian. James Stewart won the Oscar for it that year, and he is simply great – and what a year HE had (THE SHOP AROUND THE CORNER, THE MORTAL STORM, NOT TIME FOR COMEDY). Cary Grant still has that chubbyness around the face that made him so attractive. The goal was to revitalise Hepburn’s stardom, which it did, magnificently; how it did so – by ‘taming’ her, bringing her down to earth, humanising her – is something that so many of her later films would continue to do, not always this well or humanely. In the RADIO DAYS, Woodly Allen has a marvellous scene where an aunt takes a child to see a movie at Radio City Music Hall to convey the thrill and magic the movies then represented. There they watch the drunk scene with Hepburn and Stewart in THE PHILADELPHIA STORY and nothing personifies the sexiness, romance, beauty and glamour of the movies better. A farce, a screwball, a commentary on Hepburn herself, celebrity, the rich, the gutter press – I’ve been reading Will Straw’s NIGHTS IN FAIRYLAND about the Broadway gossip celebrity press, which connects beautifully to the blackmail plot in the film. Delightful.

José Arroyo