August 28th
The elegant air and dark good looks, the instantly recognizable and often imitated manner of speaking, the impeccable grooming and fashion sense, the subtlety and effortlessness that looked less like acting than merely an affable personality on display – we all know this Cary Grant. But do we know the “real” Cary Grant? Who can say? By all accounts – friends, partners, co-stars, directors – he was a closely guarded, highly private, virtually unknowable person. He wasn’t so sure himself; according to author Marc Eliot (“Cary Grant: A Biography”), the star was once quoted: “Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant. I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until finally I became that person. Or he became me.”
So, if we want to “know” Cary Grant, then we must look to the films and performances, and the dozen chosen for TCM’s spotlight on the actor give us a good indication of the achievement and the appeal of the debonair gentleman who died at the age of 82, his looks and image still intact after more than 50 years in the public eye. And although his work may not scream “great actor” in the most obvious ways we associate with performers given to, let’s say, heightened effects, a carefully observed study of Grant in these films can at least begin to make the case that he was, in the estimation of many, “the best and most important actor in the history of cinema” (David Thomson, “A Biographical Dictionary of Film”).
He was born Archibald Leach in Bristol, England in 1904, under less than auspicious circumstances. With an alcoholic father and a mentally ill mother, his childhood, according to his fourth wife, Dyan Cannon, was “horrendous.” Little wonder, then, that he would spend most of his time away from home, gravitating toward show business. He performed as a stilt walker at age 10 and joined a theatrical troupe after being expelled from school at 14. Work in vaudeville took him to the U.S. in 1920, and he began acting on the legitimate stage a few years later, racking up more and better roles and a great deal of attention over the next few years. A successful screen test at Paramount in 1931 landed him his first feature film role (This Is the Night, 1932) and his new name, Archie Leach being deemed unsuitable for a young man already showing promise as a romantic lead.
For a few years, that was all he was required to do, and he did it very well opposite such top stars as Marlene Dietrich (Blonde Venus, 1932) and Mae West (She Done Him Wrong, 1933; I’m No Angel, 1933), each of whom later claimed she had discovered him. His success grew over the next few years and 20 pictures, but “Cary Grant” did not begin to fully emerge on screen until Sylvia Scarlett (1935), opposite Katharine Hepburn under the direction of George Cukor. The offbeat gender-bending comedy was a legendary flop in its time, but it made great use of Grant’s comic timing, athleticism and roguish nature, recalling his rough-and-tumble vaudeville years and suggesting there was something more complex and intriguing going on under the fancy dinner jackets Paramount wrapped him in.
The failure of Sylvia Scarlett was a setback for Hepburn and Cukor, but Grant came out unscathed, getting the best reviews. He was quickly snatched up by MGM to play opposite Jean Harlow, one of the studio’s biggest stars and leading sex symbol of the 1930s, in the World War I love triangle Suzy (1936). This is one of the few times Grant played an outright amoral cad but not the only time he sang on screen. He duets with Harlow (or rather her voice double) on the Oscar-nominated “Did I Remember?”
By 1939, Grant was firmly established as a romantic leading man (When You’re in Love, 1937; The Toast of New York, 1937) and a charming, skilled comic actor (Topper, 1937; Bringing Up Baby, 1938; Holiday, 1938). He had a chance to broaden his range with three movies released that year. Gunga Din is a rousing (and pretty darn racist) adventure tale set in India during British imperial rule. It was one of the year’s top grossing releases. In Name Only teams him with Carole Lombard and Kay Francis in a romantic melodrama with Grant at the center of a fraught love triangle. Even with all three stars playing against type, the film was popular with audiences and well-reviewed. Also that year, director Howard Hawks gave Grant one of his most memorable roles in Only Angels Have Wings as a sharp-tongued, risk-taking pilot driving Jean Arthur to distraction in a mountainous South American backwater.
Despite the Sylvia Scarlett debacle, Grant and Katharine Hepburn teamed together three more times. Bringing Up Baby and Holiday are considered classics today but did not do well at the box office when they were released. Their fourth and final pairing, however, was a smash, resurrecting Hepburn from box office poison status and earning six Academy Award nominations, with a win for Donald Ogden Stewart’s adaptation of a hit play by Philip Barry. The Philadelphia Story (1940) once again places Grant in romantic entanglements, this time as part of a love rectangle with Hepburn’s icy, imperious heiress, John Howard as the stuffed shirt she’s about to marry, and James Stewart as a reporter who crashes the wedding. Grant completely underplays as the bride-to-be’s ex-husband, graciously ceding the spotlight to his female co-star and to Stewart, who won a Best Actor Oscar.
When Howard Hawks decided to direct Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur’s hit stage comedy, “The Front Page,” first filmed in 1931, he had an inspired idea: keep the basic plot of a newspaper editor tricking his retiring star reporter into covering one last big story but transform the reporter into a woman who, in addition to being a crack journalist, is also the ex of the editor. The result was His Girl Friday (1940) with Grant and Rosalind Russell trading quips at the then unheard-of rate of more than 200 words per minute (vs. the usual 100 or so). The constant ad-libbing and overlapping dialogue made for a very challenging production but resulted in one of the funniest and most frenetic screwball comedies.
Speaking of screwball comedies, one of the best of the era, The Awful Truth (1937), brought Grant and Irene Dunne together as a well-heeled New York couple on the rocks. They teamed again as a married duo in My Favorite Wife (1940) to nearly equal comic effect. But the tone of their third pairing, Penny Serenade (1941), was quite different. In this tearjerker, they’re married again but far less glamorous, facing financial hardships and the death of their beloved adopted daughter. Grant received his first of two Academy Award nominations (the second for None But the Lonely Heart, 1944), giving a tender and convincing performance as a man who sinks into a deep depression and almost loses his wife.
If anyone could bring out the dark side of Cary Grant, it was Alfred Hitchcock. (He did the same for the genial James Stewart.) He cast Grant for the first time in Suspicion (1941) as a charming ne’er-do-well who may or may not be bent on murdering his shy new bride, Joan Fontaine, for her money. Hitchcock even managed to imbue a studio-mandated happy-ish ending with enough ambiguity to keep audiences guessing. Fontaine won an Oscar for her performance, the only one ever granted for a Hitchcock film. Things got even darker in Notorious (1946), a spy thriller/twisted romance in which Grant seduces Ingrid Bergman into espionage with one of the longest kissing scenes on celluloid. Director and star worked together again in the stylish and lighthearted To Catch a Thief (1955). In their final venture, North by Northwest (1959), Grant is the victim of some nastiness rather than the perpetrator, thanks to a bad case of mistaken identity. His character here is something of a dolt, adding greatly to the humor of the film. This is the one with those famous set pieces on Mount Rushmore and on a wide-open prairie menaced by a murderous crop duster. It also contains another lengthy kissing scene with a sexy Eva Marie Saint as that year’s icy Hitchcock blonde.
Grant was in full dashing rogue form in Mr. Lucky (1943) as a gambler out to swindle a charity who falls for a society woman (Laraine Day). Love and the plight of villagers in Axis-occupied Greece bring about a change of heart and purpose in Grant’s character, injecting a good dose of melodrama and war themes into the romance plot. The New York Times called it “a picture of many moods…all handled expertly.” It was RKO’s second biggest hit of the year. The dialogue is peppered with rhyming slang, most often associated with London’s Cockney population and winningly delivered by the star.
Every Girl Should be Married (1948), as the title suggests, is a rather outdated but enjoyable enough comedy with Grant as a confirmed bachelor doggedly pursued by a husband-mad shopgirl. (It would probably be a horror movie today.) Betsy Drake made her film debut here; a year to the day after its release, the two were married. The Writers Guild of America nominated the screenplay by Stephen Morehouse Avery and Don Hartman, who collaborated previously on The Gay Deception (1935).
Domesticity and fatherhood are not attributes usually associated with Cary Grant (his only child was born when he was 62), but two films put him squarely in the realm of family comedies usually associated with more homespun actors. In Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (1948), he plays an ad man living in a cramped Manhattan apartment with wife Myrna Loy and two teenage daughters. The couple decide to move to a big home in the country and end up in a “money pit” situation, offering plenty of opportunities for the actor’s comic takes on befuddled frustration. A little more in keeping with the usual Grant persona, Houseboat (1958) casts him as a State Department attorney long estranged from his wife and children. When she dies unexpectedly, he finds himself with three kids to raise on a leaky old houseboat, with the “help” of a young Italian woman (Sophia Loren) he hires as a housekeeper, despite her lack of any domestic skills. Hijinks and – despite a 30-year age gap – eventually marriage ensue. The screenplay was nominated by both the Motion Picture Academy and the Writers Guild.
Grant would go on to make only seven more films after this over the next eight years before retiring from acting in 1966. He was given an honorary Academy Award in 1970 for his “unique mastery of the art of screen acting,” a bit of an understatement and considered too little almost too late by the many admirers of his film work.
