The Scene That Reveals the Beauty of Classic Hollywood Cinema

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.

Relat­ed con­tent:

4,000+ Free Movies Online: Great Clas­sics, Indies, Noir, West­erns, Doc­u­men­taries & More

Down­load Vin­tage Film Posters in High-Res: From The Philadel­phia Sto­ry to Attack of the Crab Mon­sters

Mar­tin Scors­ese Intro­duces Clas­sic Movies: From Cit­i­zen Kane and Ver­ti­go to Lawrence of Ara­bia and Gone with the Wind

Every Frame a Paint­ing Returns to YouTube & Explores Why the Sus­tained Two-Shot Van­ished from Movies

When a Mod­ern Direc­tor Makes a Fake Old Movie: A Video Essay on David Fincher’s Mank

Ray­mond Chan­dler: There’s No Art of the Screen­play in Hol­ly­wood

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.