The Philaelphia Story is a 1940 romantic comedy film starring Cary Grant, Katharine Hepburn, and James Stewart, and directed by George Cukor. Based on a Broadway play of the same name by Philip Barry, with screenplay by Donald Ogden Stewart and an uncredited Waldo Salt, the film is about a socialite whose wedding plans are complicated by the simultaneous arrival of her ex-husband and an attractive journalist. It is considered one of the best examples of a comedy of remarriage, a genre popular in the 1930s and 1940s, in which a couple divorce, flirt with outsiders and then remarry – a useful story-telling ploy at a time when depicting extramarital affairs was banned in American film.