The Philadelphia Story

Tracy Lord, a wealthy Philadelphia socialite, is about to marry George Kittredge, a self-made businessman who manages her father's oil interests. Her plans are disrupted when her ex-husband, C.K. Dexter Haven, arrives at the family estate shortly before the wedding, bringing with him a tabloid reporter named Macaulay Connor and a photographer, Liz Imbrie, who are there to cover the society event. The presence of these outsiders, and of Dexter, forces Tracy to confront how she sees herself and the people around her. The film is a romantic comedy built around the collision of the wedding party, the press and the former husband.

George Cukor directed the film, the seventh of the seventeen features he made, arriving after Gone with the Wind and before A Woman's Face. Katharine Hepburn plays Tracy, with Cary Grant as Dexter, James Stewart as Connor, Ruth Hussey as Imbrie and John Howard as Kittredge. Donald Ogden Stewart and Waldo Salt wrote the screenplay, and Joseph L. Mankiewicz produced it for Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

The film holds a 9.1 rating from 104 critics' reviews, while audiences score it 7.8 on IMDb from around 78,000 votes and 7.5 on TMDB from roughly a thousand votes. That gap suggests critics have long held the film in higher regard than general viewers, though the audience figures still indicate a widely seen and well-liked comedy.