Cary Grant: A Class Apart

"He was a commodity; you knew who you were going to see," Ralph Lauren says of the subject of Cary Grant: A Class Apart (2004), a documentary by Robert Trachtenberg. "If you wanted to be happy, you were going to see a Cary Grant movie," adds Lauren, who is interviewed in this admiring yet candid portrait of the "ultimate movie star" along with such other Grant friends and colleagues as Eva Marie Saint, Stanley Donen, Peter Bogdanovich, Jill St. John, Martin Landau and Dina Merrill.

Helen Mirren narrates the documentary, which also features the voice of Jeremy Northam reading passages from an autobiographical essay by Grant himself. Grant's widow, Barbara Harris Grant, and his third wife, actress Betsy Drake, also comment on Grant's unparalleled film career and often-conflicted personal life. Drake offers uninhibited, sometimes bawdy, reminiscences of Grant's affair with Sophia Loren during their marriage, his use of LSD and the long-standing rumor that he was romantically involved with one-time roommate Randolph Scott. Also included are analyses of Grant's appeal from biographers and film historians, and vintage interviews with two of Grant's most influential directors: Alfred Hitchcock (Suspicion, 1941; Notorious, 1946; North By Northwest, 1959) and George Cukor (Sylvia Scarlett, 1936; The Philadelphia Story, 1941).

BW & C-87m. Closed captioning.

by Roger Fristoe

Turner Classic Movies will give Cary Grant the star treatment in Cary Grant: A Class Apart, a new documentary by acclaimed filmmaker Robert Trachtenberg, premiering in June. The carefully crafted show profiles Grant with candor, offering a context for understanding the unique circumstances that created this screen icon and openly addressing controversies, including the rumored relationship with Randolph Scott.

As the documentary unfolds, we realize that the title is a clever play on words, considering Grant's own humble beginnings as well as his tremendous professional success and business savvy. He began life as Archibald Alexander Leach, son of a lower-middle-class family in Bristol, England. By age 16, he had aligned himself with a British acting troupe that performed in the United States, where he decided to pursue dreams of Broadway, then Hollywood. He was initially rejected after an unsuccessful screen test at Fox. Paramount, however, thought he had potential and quickly signed him to a contract that cast him opposite Marlene Dietrich, Mae West and Carole Lombard. After a loan out to RKO, Grant then went independent and, in a prescient stroke of genius, began negotiating for a percentage of the gross on his films before any of his contemporaries.

Grant also managed to create an image as the epitome of what the public thought a movie star should be, much as companies and individuals today create a brand. "He was a commodity," Ralph Lauren says. "You knew who you were going to see. If you wanted to be happy, you were going to see a Cary Grant movie." Perhaps this is why his raw talent and versatility as an actor were often overlooked. "He can be a sophisticated comedy-leading romantic man, he can be a suspected murderer who's a complex character and he can be an ordinary down-to-earth, simple family man. Now that's remarkable," said film historian Jeanine Basinger. Grant was twice nominated for an Oscar® but never won an award in the Best Actor category. In 1969, however, the Academy® gave him honorary Oscar® "for his unique mastery of the art of screen acting with respect and affection of his colleagues."

In his acceptance speech, he thanked six prestigious directors who had shaped his career: Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, Leo McCarey, George Stevens, George Cukor and Stanley Donen. But when he died in 1986, it was Billy Wilder, with whom he never worked, who said: "The model is gone - whom can we emulate now?"