‘The Philadelphia Story’ – where wit and love and class are as clear as black and white

‘My she was yar.’

When I was 13, my parents took me to a movie on the campus of Stanford University, where my father was a Knight fellow.

The movie was in a large auditorium with a stage, and the engineering students lofted elaborate paper airplanes from a balcony in a wildly cheered competition to reach the screen. After this came a short, a campy 1950s guide to dating etiquette that made everyone else howl with laughter, but made me blush in the dark, feeling like the world’s only virgin.

Then came the movie.

It was a story about an upper-crust woman, her impending marriage, and her distraction with two other men – her sophisticated ex-husband and an everyman newspaper reporter.

The dialogue was crisp and fast-moving, the characters easy to understand and boldly portrayed, and there was a final wedding scene that was so winning it made matrimony seem like mischief.

“So that’s what adulthood will be like,” I thought as we left.

The movie was “The Philadelphia Story,” and to this day it is required viewing for anyone who wants to understand me.

I’m not the only one who loves it: It is No. 51 on the American Film Institute’s list of greatest American films, it was nominated for six Academy Awards, and won Jimmy Stewart his only Oscar, as the egalitarian newspaper reporter.

I have not found adulthood to be like “The Philadelphia Story.” Grownups have gray mornings and boring lunches and professional compromises and slowly unfolding disappointments. Beneath it all is an undeniable human dignity that is the redemption we can only find when we stop seeking it. All of this is, in my opinion, better captured in other movies, like “Nobody’s Fool,” the Paul Newman film about a life not well-lived, but well-loved.

So why this movie?

Because it’s yar.

“It means, uh…easy to handle, quick to the helm, fast, right. Everything a boat should be,” Katharine Hepburn says, trying to define this brief adjective for her fiancee, who doesn’t get it, and never will.

Yar describes a boat she and Cary Grant once owned called The True Love, which they have romanticized. It lingers for them as an ideal.

Show a 13-year-old a black-and-white adulthood that includes champagne and midnight swims and romantic declarations, and it tends to stick – not as a cause of disappointment, but as an inspiring false promise.

Some of us need that dream of perfection to navigate adulthood by, a shining vision of elegance in the dark, gliding along, fast and right.