Plot summary (with spoilers): We start our screwball comedy with the unhappily married C.K Dexter Haven and his wife, Tracy Lord. They're fighting. She breaks his golf club. He palms her face and slams her into the ground. No, really. He does. And the music does this sad trombone noise. Wocka Wocka!
Two years later, Dexter and Tracy are divorced, and Tracy's getting remarried to George Kittredge. It's two days before the wedding, and Tracy's mother and much younger sister are helping her get everything ready. Tracy's sister hates George and wants Tracy to remarry Dexter. Tracy's sister is like eight and totally precocious and says grown up things, like half of movie children and none of actual children. The Lords are super-uber rich, and the tabloids are interested in their wedding. Why rumor has it, an equally rich friend of theirs got married recently, and some tabloid photogs snuck into the wedding and snapped some pictures. Tracy's appalled that such a breach of etiquette would occur. I mean, really! Could you imagine living in such a world?!
Cut to the tabloid offices of Harvey Levin and associates. Macaulay Connor and his gal Liz are the top tabloid photographers, and their boss Mr. Kidd wants them to sneak into Tracy's wedding somehow and get some good shots. They say there's no way they'll be able to get in, but Mr. Kidd has their ace in the hole. C.K. Dexter Haven will introduce them as friends of the family and get the Lords to allow them to stay in the home over the weekend.
They show up, and Dexter flirts with Tracy and disparages the new husband and the repartee is witty. Tracy doesn't believe the cover story, and threatens to throw Mac and Liz out, so Dexter blackmails her instead. He says he has info that proves her father is cheating on her mother with a dancer in New York, and he'll publish that story unless she lets Mac and Liz cover the wedding for the magazine. So, all three Lords women go along with this, making nice with Mac and Liz, pretending to believe their cover story and Liz keeps snapping pics (winding the camera after every shot. Remember that? Winding?), infuriating Tracy.
They decide to go swimming, and Tracy and Mac flirt after she reads some of his poetry, until Dexter shows up again and she and Dexter fight the fight of two people who truly have some issues to work through and the upshot is, Dexter is resentful at Tracy for being a cold bitch and Tracy is resentful at Dexter for being such a drunken loser that he forced her to be a cold bitch. It's a pretty cool conversation, and at this point in the movie I honestly didn't know which guy she'd end up with.
The next day, the father Lord shows up and says enough of this balderdash, we're telling them the truth, and Tracy says well you're the reason we're in this mess and these are the things her father says:
1) I love your mother, because unlike most women, she understands that when a man is a philanderer, it's not a reflection on how he feels about her
2) The reason why I've sought the affections of a younger woman is because you, my daughter, are so unaffectionate
3) When you chastise me for cheating on your mother, you sound like a jealous wife
4) You're a perfectly lovely women, but you lack an understanding heart.
And Tracy takes this in and has tears in her eyes and feels bad because his words struck a chord.
Yes, that's right. The movie is not making the case that Papa Lord is a sick fuck, it is saying that he has a point.
Wow.
Wow, Olden Times. Wow.
Anyway, moving on. That night, there's a rehearsal dinner for the wedding, and Mac and Liz are there and Liz is still getting shots, and Tracy decides to get sloppy drunk. She slobbers all over George, who is disgusted and wants to leave. Then Tracy starts slow dancing with Mac and says she feels so free in his arms and begs him to tell her that she has an understanding heart. Run, Mac! Run like the wind!
But he doesn't run, and he gets drunk, too, and finally George drags her away, and Mac decides to go to Dexter's house. He shows up shitfaced and Dexter answers in his robe, and dare I hope this love triangle becomes truly three-sided? Alas no, Mac just gets drunker and stupider and then confesses that he has blackmail info on Mr. Kidd and spills it to Dexter and Dexter says he'll blackmail Kidd and then he won't be able to blackmail Tracy with the info about her wonderful father and then Mac and Liz won't have to cover the wedding. Mac is down with this because he likes Tracy, now.
Then Liz shows up looking for Mac. Dexter wants her to type up the blackmail info on Kidd. Liz says she can't right now, because she's got Tracy in the car and she's drunk and has to go home. Mac says he'll take her home.
So they get back to the Lord house, and Tracy reveals she and George fought and then she and Mac slow dance, and eventually kiss and then run off to the changing rooms to go swimming. Or "swimming". Or perhaps just swimming. It's unclear.
The next morning, the day of the wedding, George comes to find her and sees two champagne glasses and clothes strewn about and then Dexter shows up and they're both confused, and then see Mac and Tracy approaching. Mac is carrying Tracy in his arms and she's passed out and he's singing "Somewhere Over the Rainbow" (Wizard of Oz! AFI #10! Can't wait!). She nuzzles his neck and Dexter's smirking while George is fuming and then Mac carries her upstairs to her room and when he comes back down, George goes to punch him, but Dexter steps in and says he's still technically the keeper of Tracy's honor/vagina and punches Mac instead. George stomps off, and Dexter says he did it because he'd hit a lot lighter than George.
So, later in the day, Tracy wakes up and they're prepping the backyard for the reception and everyone's there for some reason, and Tracy has no memory of the night before until her little sister says she saw her swimming with Mac and Tracy then thinks she slept with Mac and George comes in and says the wedding's off and then Mac says he only kissed her and swam with her and George says okay that's fine then, and Tracy says no, you thought I wasn't virtuous and you obviously don't think much of me so hit the bricks. And George points out that she also thought that she slept with Mac, but Tracy comes back with "you should've thought more of me than even I thought of me", which is a pretty good one, really. So George leaves.
Tracy realizes the house is filled with guests expecting a wedding and she's mortified and Mac says, "I'll marry you!" and she turns him down and says Liz would feel bad. Did I mention Liz is standing right there? Because she is. So Tracy literally grabs Mac by the shoulders and kind of pushes him towards Liz and he goes willingly and Liz hugs him and smiles, thrilled that the one he wanted has literally pushed him into her arms. I think my brain is breaking.
So Tracy says still though, it's really embarrassing because all these people are expecting a wedding, and Dexter says why don't we give them one and they ask Mac and Liz to be the Maid of Honor and Best Man. They go inside and tell the preacher to marry them. He does, and man that must've been really shitty and confusing for George's family and friends sitting there.
Review: Wow, I don't know. On the one hand, the writing's very clever, there's some great one-liners, and Hepburn and Stewart in particular are really great. There's some fun stuff they explore with class differences, and how Mac and Liz are jealous of the decadent lifestyle the Lords live, and the movie is careful to have both Tracy and Dexter point out how class differences matter less nowadays than a person's character. I'm assuming this talk had some sort of cultural relevance in 1940 and it's cool that they put it in there. Tracy's character arc is strong, too, and her journey towards becoming a more affectionate person is believable.
BUT-there's some serious WTF stuff in here, stuff that I don't think can all be chalked up to the Olden Times way of thinking. I get that female chastity was romanticized to the point of fetishism back then and I can roll with that. But the father's comments bordered on incestual, and were fucking creepy. And both Mac's reaction to Tracy rejecting him was totally blase, and even worse, Liz's reaction to Mac proposing to Tracy in front of her was just plain dumb. It would be fine if this were balls-out farce, but it's not at all. There are silly, light moments, but just as many serious, character-driven ones. The way the characters acted in the third act made no sense at all. Even Tracy ending up back with Dexter was wrong. She had all the chemistry with Mac, and her marriage was over. But I guess the movie was saying she had to better herself before she was "worthy" of remarrying Dexter, and Mac was part of that process. Again, that's not wrong, not really, but it was done in a very weird and off-putting way. It just doesn't always work tonally.
Stars: Three out of five.
Next, "Midnight Cowboy", and then "Bonnie and Clyde".
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