The Philadelphia Story (George Cukor, 1940)

Give me Jimmy Stewart over Tom Hanks any day. Rear Window or Forrest Gump? Mr. Smith Goes To Washington or Cast Away? Vertigo or...fuckin'...The Terminal? Surely, these aren't real questions. The answers are way too obvious.

Stewart won his only Academy Award for George Cukor's The Philadelphia Story, one of the wittiest, most endearing films of its time, indeed, of all time. And Jimmy kills in it. As tabloid reporter Macaulay "Mike" Connor who goes on a weekend assignment to a wedding of some social elites, we get all Stewart firing on all cylinders. Whether he's playing drunk or really drunk, annoyed or enamored, it's a pitch-perfect performance. He's perhaps at his best playing against someone called Cary Grant. Have you heard of this guy? The kid's going places.

I don't think I could have had a more perfect introduction to the queen herself, Katharine Hepburn (if a somewhat embarrassing one: how I've never seen any of her films before this, I'll never know). To go from so-called "box office poison" to acquiring the rights to a film adaptation of Philip Barry's play of the same name, starring on Broadway and eventually the movie, it's just amazing. Her reputation reversed and the rest was history. You know that thing people say about "the role they were born to play." Yep. This is the one. It's really Kate's film.

This is the kind of Hollywood movie I can't get enough of: the vaguely slapstick prologue; the never-ending back and forth between characters; a quip at the end of every scene. The smile I had during the opening credits never left my face. How the hell has this not been remade yet? Seriously. The story is that classic, I can just see an update with Rachel McAdams and Matthew McConaughey. I'll give it a few years before I do it myself, I guess.

More than deserving of its six Academy Award nominations (and two wins) and decades of reverence. A true gem of classic Hollywood cinema. A perfect film. [A+] 112m, DVD (projected onto theater screen - not as cool as 35mm)