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Home , Betsy Drake, Cathleen Nesbitt, Dolly Tree, Dyan Cannon, Franchot Tone, Genevieve Tobin

Cary Grant ~ 68 Films

Cary Grant is one of the most consistent stars from the Golden Age of the . Perhaps more than any other actor, he understood that what he was presenting to the public was an image. Quite famously, he has been quoted as saying, "Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." What this means for fans of the legendary actor is that when we sit down and watch one of his films, good or bad, we know what we can expect of Cary Grant. His long-lasting appeal is down to his striking good looks, his dashing poise and a natural gift for both romance and comedy. Cary Grant can make you laugh even while he sweeps you off your feet.

Archibald "Archie" Leach was born on 18 January 1904 at 15 Hughenden Road in the Bristol suburb of Horfield. He was the second child of Elias and Elsie Leach (their first having died in 1900). His father worked as a tailor's presser at a clothes factory while his mother was from a family of shipwrights.

Archie had an unhappy upbringing. His father was an alcoholic and his mother suffered from clinical depression. His father placed her in a mental institution and first told the nine-year-old that she had gone away on a "long holiday" and later that she had died. When Archie was ten, his father remarried and started a new family that did not include young Archibald. Little is known about how he was cared for, or by whom. Archie did not learn his mother was still alive until he was 31, when, shortly before his own death, his father confessed to the lie. He told Leach that he could find her in a care home. At this point she was 57. She eventually died, aged 95, in 1973.

He had such a traumatic childhood, it was horrible. I work with a lot of kids on the street and I've heard a lot of stories about what happens when a family breaks down, but his was just horrendous. And he never really dealt with those things. He tried to. That's the reason he tried LSD. He thought it was a gateway to God. (Grant's fourth wife, Dyan Cannon)

It is alleged that, after being expelled from school aged fourteen, Archie lied about his age and forged his father's signature in order to join the Bob Pender Stage Troupe, with whom he performed as a stilt walker. In 1920, aged sixteen, he toured with the group through the United States, entering through Ellis Island on 28 July. When the troupe returned home, Archie decided to stay on in the U.S. to pursue a stage career. He performed in vaudeville and then on stage at The Muny in St. Louis in shows such as , Music In May, Nina Rosa, Rio Rita, Street Singer, The Three Musketeers and Wonderful Night. Leach's previous experience as a stilt walker, acrobat, juggler and mime taught him "phenomenal physical grace and exquisite comic timing" as well as the value of teamwork - all skills that would benefit him in Hollywood.

After appearing in several Broadway musicals under his own name, Leach went to Hollywood in 1931 when he signed for Paramount. When advised to change his name, he proposed "Cary Lockwood", the character he had played opposite Fay Wray in a show called Nikki. The Paramount bosses decided that "Cary" was acceptable but that "Lockwood" was not and gave their new actor a list of surnames to choose from. He selected "Grant". Leach became a naturalised United States citizen on 26 June 1942, at which time he also legally changed his name from "Archibald Alexander Leach" to "Cary Grant".

Grant appeared as a opposite in Blonde Venus (1932) and his stardom was given a further boost when chose him to lead in two of her most successful films: and I'm No Angel (both 1933), the success of which reputedly saved Paramount from bankruptcy. The studio put Grant in a series of unsuccessful films until 1936, when he moved to Columbia. His first major comedy hit came when he was loaned to 's studio for 1937's Topper.

Another pivotal film in Grant's career was , which established his enduring screen persona as a sophisticated light comedy leading man. As Grant later wrote, "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and I finally became that person. Or he became me. Or we met at some point." Grant is said to have based his characterisation in The Awful Truth on the mannerisms and intonations of the film's director, Leo McCarey, whom he resembled physically. As writer/director Peter Bogdanovich noted: "After The Awful Truth, when it came to light comedy, there was Cary Grant and then everyone else."

The Awful Truth began what The Atlantic later called "the most spectacular run ever for an actor in American pictures". During the next four years, Grant appeared in several classic romantic and screwball comedies including Holiday and (both 1938, opposite ), The Phila- delphia Story (1940) with Hepburn and , (1940) with and (1940), which reunited him with , his co-star in The Awful Truth. During this time, he also made the adventure films Gunga Din (1939) with Junior and Only Angels Have Wings (1939) with Jean Arthur and and dramas (1941) with Dunne, and Suspicion (1941), the first of Grant's four collaborations with . Grant was a favourite of Hitchcock, who called him "the only actor I ever loved in my whole life". Besides Suspicion, Grant appeared in the Hitchcock classics Notorious (1946), To Catch A Thief (1955) and North By Northwest (1959).

In 1952, Grant co-starred with and in Monkey Business. In the mid-fifties, he formed his own production company, Granart Productions, and produced a number of films, distributed by Universal, such as Indiscreet (1958), (1959), (1962, with ) and Father Goose (1964). Grant was considered for the role of James Bond in Dr. No (1962) but the idea fell through due to his age. In 1963, he appeared opposite Audrey Hepburn in Charade. Hitchcock asked him to star in Torn Curtain (1966) only to learn that the actor had decided to retire.

Grant was the first actor to "go independent" by not renewing his studio contract, effectively leaving the studio system, which almost completely controlled what an actor could or could not do. In this way, he was able to control every aspect of his career, at the risk of not working because no particular studio had an interest in his career long term. He decided which films he was going to appear in, often had personal choice of directors and co-stars, and at times even negotiated a share of the gross revenue, something uncommon at the time. Grant received more than $700,000 for his 10% of the gross for To Catch A Thief, while Hitchcock received less than $50,000 for directing and producing it.

Though nominated for two , for Penny Serenade and None But The Lonely Heart (1944), Grant never won a competitive Oscar. He did, however, receive a special Award for Lifetime Achievement in 1970. Accepting the Best Original Screenplay Oscar on 5 April 1965, Father Goose co-writer Peter Stone quipped: "My thanks to Cary Grant, who keeps winning these things for other people."

Grant was married five times, first to Cherrill from February 1934 to March 1935, then from 1942 to 1945 to Barbara Hutton, who, following a $50

million inheritance from her grandfather F. W. Woolworth, was one of the wealthiest women in the world. The couple was derisively nicknamed "Cash and Cary" although, in an extensive prenuptial agreement, Grant refused any financial settlement in the event of a divorce. The pair remained the "fondest of friends". Grant always bristled at the accusation that he married for money: "I may not have married for very sound reasons, but money was never one of them." On 25 December 1949, he married Betsy Drake. He appeared with her in two films - Every Girl Should Be Married (1948) and Room For One More (1952). This would prove to be his longest marriage, ending in August 1962. In July 1965 he eloped with Dyan Cannon in . Their daughter Jennifer was born in February 1966. He frequently called Jennifer his "best production". Grant and Cannon divorced in March 1968. In April 1981, Grant married Barbara Harris, a British hotel public relations agent 47 years his junior. They renewed their vows on their fifth wedding anniversary and remained wed until Grant's death in November 1986.

Some, including and screenwriter Arthur Laurents, claimed that Grant was bisexual. Grant was allegedly involved with costume designer Orry- Kelly when he first moved to Manhattan and lived with actor off and on for twelve years. Richard Blackwell wrote that Grant and Scott were "deeply, madly in love." Scotty Bowers alleged in his 2012 memoir Full Service that he had been intimately involved with both Grant and Scott. biographer William McBrien states that Porter and Grant frequented the same upscale house of male prostitution in Harlem, run by Clint Moore and popular with celebrities. All of these claims were published many years after Grant had died. Barbara Harris, Grant's widow, has disputed claims that Grant had a relationship with Scott. When Chevy Chase joked in a TV interview about Grant being gay, Grant sued for slander, and Chase was forced to retract his words. However, Grant's one-time girlfriend Maureen Donaldson wrote in her memoir : My Life with Cary Grant (1989) that Grant told her his first two wives had accused him of being homosexual. In Chaplin's Girl, a biography of Grant's first wife Virginia Cherrill, Miranda Seymour wrote that Grant and Scott were only platonic friends. Former showgirl Lisa Medford claimed Grant wanted her to have his child, but she did not want children. Grant's daughter Jennifer wrote in her memoir Good Stuff (2011) that her father was not gay, but admitted that he "liked being called gay". In 2012, Dyan Cannon said that Grant was not gay. jokingly referred to him as a lesbian.

After the birth of his daughter Jennifer, Grant retired from the screen to focus on her upbringing and to provide a sense of permanency and stability in her life. But he remained active. In the late 1960s, he accepted a position on the board of directors at Fabergé. By all accounts this position was not honorary, as many assumed; Grant regularly attended meetings and his mere appearance at

a product launch would almost certainly guarantee its success. The position also permitted use of a private plane, which Grant could use to fly to see his daughter wherever her mother, Dyan Cannon, was working. He later joined the boards of Hollywood Park, the Academy of Magical Arts, Western Airlines and MGM.

Grant expressed no interest in making a career comeback and rejected all offers to appear in films and stage plays. He admitted in interviews that he rarely attended the theatre or cinema or kept up with what was on. In 1978 he told Times columnist Roderick Mann: "I probably have less than 70,000 hours left on this Earth and I'm going to enjoy every one of them." In the last few years of his life, Grant undertook tours of the United States in a one-man show, A Conversation with Cary Grant, in which he would show clips from his films and answer audience questions. Whilst preparing for a performance at the Adler Theatre in Davenport, Iowa on the afternoon of 29 November 1986, he felt unwell and was eventually persuaded to allow himself to be taken to the local hospital, where, following a stroke, he died at 11:22 p.m. the same night, aged 82. After cremation, his ashes were scattered over the Pacific. The bulk of his estate, worth millions of dollars, went to his widow Barbara Harris and daughter Jennifer Grant.

Film critic David Thomson referred to Grant as "the best and most important actor in the history of the cinema." To he was "the best star actor there ever was in the movies". concurred, declaring Grant "so far the best that there isn't anybody to be compared to him." Cary Grant remained one of Hollywood's top box-office attractions for almost 30 years.

Grant liked to poke fun at himself, saying: "Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant." In His Girl Friday he ad-libbed: "I never had so much fun since Archie Leach died." In Arsenic And Old Lace, a gravestone bears the name Archie Leach. According to a famous story now believed to be apocryphal, after seeing a telegram from a journalist to his agent asking How old Cary Grant?, Grant replied: Old Cary Grant fine. How you? In 2001, a statue of Grant was erected in Millennium Square, Bristol. In 2005, Premiere's list of The 50 Greatest Movie Stars Of All Time was headed by Cary Grant.

I will never look at this without remembering the quiet patience of directors who were so kind to me, who were kind enough to put up with me more than once, some of them even three or four times. I trust they and all the other directors, writers and producers and my leading women have forgiven me for what I didn't know. You know that I've never been a joiner or a member of any particular social set, but I've been privileged to be a part of Hollywood's most glorious era. (CG, Honorary Oscar acceptance speech, 1970)

THIS IS THE NIGHT (1932)

How did 28 year old Cary Grant make his first feature film entrance? You'd probably be a long time guessing that it was with a bag of javelins over his arm (above) and singing. His character, a Paris-based Olympic athlete, is being cuckolded by lounge lizard who, when challenged, claims it's all a misunderstanding and that his imminent trip to Venice was never going to be with Grant's wife but with his own. He then has to hire an actress to stand in for his fictitious spouse, and you can probably guess the rest. Based on a six- handed Avery Hopwood play (itself the revision of an earlier play), the story is slight but entertainingly performed and presented. Lili Damita (the future Mrs - see Fighting Caravans with ) is suitably winsome as the wife-substitute and Charles Ruggles and Young make the most of their louche roué / men-about-town parts. Grant doesn't have too much to do, but does it well. His cheating wife is least convincing of the leads. The film opens with and later relapses into a strange sort of symphonie méchanique (for more of the same, see Love Me Tonight, also set in Paris) and includes a nice running joke about Young's chauffeur / valet tearing Mrs. Grant's clothes off. My only complaint is that Young's disreputable character shouldn't end up with the girl, who deserves better. Even so, 78 minutes well spent.

IMDb: I always wonder when I see the lists of "the hundred best films ever made" etc. You see, there is one thing that I have discovered over the years of delving around in old films, and it is this. It is not possible to compile lists of the best films ever made for the simple reason that some of the best films ever made are lying forgotten on shelves in film libraries, and, sadly, some are lost. There are so many great films that the public never get to see. The critics will have you believe that a picture like This Is The Night

is not particularly good and only of interest to fans of Grant or Thelma Todd. People have forgotten all about it. The director, the star, the film are today forgotten. Then you play it. The acting is utterly superb, the comic timing superb. The film is cleverly and adventurously put together by the filmmakers. All the players, Grant, Todd, Young and Ruggles are excellent. It would be wrong of me to reveal the plot, but what I will say is that if you are not smiling or laughing at this movie from beginning to end, then there is something wrong with you / The film is near perfect, except for the miscasting of Young as the love interest - but perhaps that is the point of the matter: we do not always fall in love with / Grant makes his entrance into the world of cinema with a light step and a sharp wit - singing about apartment keys, no less! It's a memorable debut, followed by numerous other moments throughout the picture in which he demonstrates much of the early promise that would soon flower into full- throttle, megawatt star power. This Is The Night is a solid comedy of adulterous affairs with some surprisingly risqué elements. It still holds up perfectly well, let down only by its too-conservative ending / Witty and charming / Don't miss this pre-Code classic.

(1) Lili Damita (2) Charles Ruggles and Roland Young (3) Damita and Grant

SINNERS IN THE SUN (1932)

In this flyweight 70 minute drama, (above) and Chester Morris lead as star-crossed lovers Doris and Jimmie. When they part, he marries a rich girl on the rebound and she starts running round town and staying out late. Grant plays socialite Ridgeway, a small part giving him just two scenes and a handful of lines. The usual pre-Code quota of models in skivvies strike poses intended to titilate the punters, but given the quality of the script (from a Mildred Cram story) and despite lavish production values, they face an uphill struggle. Lombard, 23, here makes her fiftieth screen appearance!

IMDb: A terrible film, but Grant is a diamond in the rough / Boring and predictable / A bit simplistic but worth a look. In just his second film, 28 year old Cary Grant is reasonably good but nothing more / A beautifully written and sometimes magnificently played serious movie. Chester Morris and Carole Lombard love each other, but she is terrified of the corrosive effects of the life of poverty that she foresees with Morris, so they break up and drift into lives as a kept woman and a gigolo. The two are almost perfect in their roles; Chester Morris plays a character who is almost unable to phrase a clear thought and pulls it off beautifully, for a wonderful payoff scene. Miss Lombard only fails in one scene, towards the end, when she is contemplating suicide: I blame the heavy-handed direction of it rather than her performance. But the movie is riddled with wonderful performances: from the always excellent Alison Skipworth as Lombard's supportive mother, from Reginald Barlow as the father who gives her no chance and from Adrienne Ames and Walter Byron as the leading pair's likable seducers. Particu- larly good is Rita La Roy, an actress whom I have never noticed before, as a kept woman who kills herself. Alas, this was her best part in the movies - after her career faded out she sold yachts. Cary Grant is also present in a small role, in his second film, but if you're not paying attention to the soundtrack you could easily miss him: his voice was far more distinctive than his good looks at this stage of his career. There is a happy ending, but it feels forced, which is Sinners In The Sun's one flaw. Otherwise it is well worth your time.

MERRILY WE GO TO HELL (1932)

Journalist, drunk and would-be playwright (above, right) marries canned food heiress (centre). He thinks she's swell, but can't beat the booze. Though looking the part and nicely played, this Paramount soaper never quite rings true. In particular, the obligatory quasi-happy ending makes a nonsense of the film's acerbic drinking-toast title. Ninth-billed Grant has another very small part (as actor/Lothario Charlie Baxter). 83 anodyne minutes.

IMDb: Once you get past the appalling title, this is a good picture. It's a pre-Code film and must have been naughty in its day, but is tame by today's standards. It involves a fairly routine love story pulled out of the doldrums by director Dorothy Arzner and by exceptional acting performances from the two principals, Frederic March and Sylvia Sidney. An underrated, under-appreciated movie, especially if you enjoy solid acting and are a sucker for a pretty face / High grade pap / A not particularly inspired look at alcoholism and co-dependency. As I watched this film, I found myself struggling to believe the plot / The story verges into the melodramatic, but Dorothy Arzner gets some good performances from her stars and their support / A depressing bore / Funny drunks aren't realistic drunks. A real downer of a story, shocking in its choice of pre- Code sins / This highly underrated film has a lot to say about 'modern' relationships, drinking and feminism. Though extremely well acted, its highlight is the writing, featuring realistic characters and funny moments. It also includes one of the better performances I've seen from Sylvia Sidney, which is a little odd as it's one of her earliest / Wonderful and unsettling / Nothing too surprising in the plot, but good performances all around. Arzner has a good sense of pacing, so the film doesn't drag or slow down. Worth seeing, though more for actors than story / In spite of good actors rising above a decidedly average script, worth seeing as a curiosity.

DEVIL AND THE DEEP (1932)

A strong cast in the hands of a capable director put across a brisk (76 minutes) and heated look at suspicion and madness with some panache. The s & m come from "newly-introduced eminent English character actor " (above, left) who mugs and swaggers his way through what amounts to a dry run for his Captain Bligh to come. Stage-success, screen-flop Tallulah Bankhead (above) and young Gary Cooper co-star, with Grant - strikingly handsome - given a small part that helps establish Laughton's rampant paranoia. Some exotic North African settings and a claustrophobic finale aboard a stricken sub add value. Adapted from Maurice Larrouy novel Sirenes et Tritons. Good.

IMDb: In his Paramount debut, Laughton steals the film / Bankhead gives a crash course in how to hold a together, commanding every scene, inflecting every line with subtle nuances. When she must deal with menacing Laughton, the air between them vibrates with tension. He does his share as well, but seems mannered in a familiar way. Only the radiant young Cary Grant in a dazzling naval uniform steals attention from the leading lady in a brief appearance. Cooper, though persuasive as the romantic hero, soon gets submerged in a disappointingly shallow character. The eye is seduced by cameraman Charles Lang's repertoire of shadows, the heart is stirred by a star performance, but in the end the head may resist: the terse dialogue tries for Heming- way but remains stubbornly pedestrian and remarkably humourless. The devil is in the dialogue! / Cooper is wooden, awkward and handsome as usual and Grant does well in a smallish supporting role / Starts slowly but turns out dandy / Enormous fun. Charles Lang's expert cinematography is a master class in how to get major effect from minor effort but, even if less than high art, is most worth seeking for Bankhead shining, simmering, sulking, seducing, sinking and swimming / Laughton's performance reaches hysterical heights. This film should be better known.

BLONDE VENUS (1932)

Between 1930 and 1935, Austrian-born Josef von Sternberg directed German- born Marlene Dietrich (above) in seven films, including The Blue Angel, Morocco and Shanghai Express. The fifth (and the only one set in the U.S.) was Blonde Venus. Dietrich plays a doting mother, loving wife and ex-cabaret singer who sells herself to millionaire politician Grant to raise money for life-saving medical treatment for her husband. He's played by sobersides , who here as elsewhere (see the Stanwyck file) expertly hides the fact that he lost a leg in WWI. Grant, third billed, is once again "the other man" - the smooth and unprincipled third side in a love triangle - but his time is coming soon. Visually striking but overly sentimental. With Hattie McDaniel. 90 minutes.

IMDb: Acting under the flamboyant direction of her mentor, Josef von Sternberg, legendary Marlene Dietrich fascinates as a tender mother fiercely protecting her small child while spending her evenings as a seductive stage siren, captivating audiences in America and France. She is equally good in both postures, her perfect face registering deep maternal love and sphinx-like allure. Dietrich is incredibly gentle crooning an old German lullaby at her son's bedside, while the contrasting image of her emerging from an ape suit to sing Hot Voodoo in a nightclub is one of the pre-Code era's most bizarre images. Paramount gave the film lavish if slightly decadent production values. The live chickens flapping about in Dietrich's apartment during the French Quarter sequence are a nice touch / Two Brit actors compete for Dietrich's attention. Distinguished Herbert Marshall, with a voice like liquid honey, is ideally cast as her conflicted husband. Playing a chemist poisoned by radium, his face reveals his humiliation at having to be

supported by his wife; later, he manifests pent-up rage when he discovers her 'betrayal'. Cary Grant, on the cusp of becoming a major star, plays a powerful political boss whose arrogance mellows as he pursues Marlene's affections. Josef von Sternberg would, no doubt, dismiss this film as one of his lesser works, yet, to me, Blonde Venus defines his relationship with Dietrich. The combined attraction of the harlot-mother gives Marlene's acting both sexual radiance and that intimate, moody quality that is so unique to her. Just watch her in the scenes with her boy. She is lovely and glamorous yet totally attentive to the child's needs, protective and unselfconscious in a way that only Carole Lombard (see Made For Each Other) managed back in those days. Her presence is so strong that she makes the male stars seem awkward and rigid. Marshall (probably from lack of directorial attention) looks ill at ease while Grant sails through the movie unblessed by inspiration. This is Marlene's film through and through. The plot is silly beyond words (suffering in mink, writ large!) but she makes it memorable. Her close-ups in the scene at the railway station when she realises she has lost her family tell it all - a lost soul with nowhere to go but down. Von Sternberg (or some intrusive producer) tacked on a happy ending, but the movie really ended there. The rest is just wish fulfilment / Grant is like a knick-knack, good to look at but quite useless. He walks through the movie, beautifully dressed and photographed, but delivers his lines without any passion or belief. He spreads his charm with that nonchalance that will be his future and unforgettable footprint / It was during this film that Grant's appearance was altered when von Sternberg changed the parting in his hair from the left side to the right, where it remained for his lifetime.

Blond Venus ... is a muddled, unimaginative and generally hapless piece of work, relieved somewhat by the talent and charm of Marlene Dietrich and Herbert Marshall's valiant work in a thankless role. It wanders from Germany to many places in America, over to France and then back to New York, but nary a whit of drama is there in it. There is good photography, and for those who are partial to scenes in a theatre, there are some over which Mr. von Sternberg has taken no little care. But the pain of it is the dismal and suspenseless tale of a woman who sinks to selling her favours and finally ends by returning to her husband. There is scarcely any sympathy evoked for the characters, except for the little boy. Most of the scenes are unedifying, without possessing any strength or a common sense idea of psychology. It is regrettable that Miss Dietrich, Mr. Marshall and others should have been called upon to appear in such a vehicle. (Mordaunt Hall, , 26 September 1932)

MADAME BUTTERFLY (1932)

Whilst on two months shore leave in Yokohama, Lieutenant Pinkerton (Grant) "marries" geisha Cho-Cho San (Sylvia Sidney, above - see also Merrily We Go To Hell). Once back stateside, he weds his childhood sweetheart, not knowing that Cho-Cho is determined to await his return. Three years later, with the fleet back in port, the two meet again. She sees his wife, he does not see their son. He leaves, she takes her life. A tepid tearjerker. 82 minutes. Grant sings.

IMDb: A tragic, romantic story about loyalty and how some cultures don't understand others / Run of the mill / In 1900 opened a one act play at the Herald Square Theatre on Broadway for a successful month's run. It was based in turn on an 1898 short story of the same name by John Luther Long. Thus was Madame Butterfly born. The melodrama hit an emotional chord not only in the U.S. but around the world; in Italy in 1904 Giacomo Puccini used the story (and, some scholars suggest, actual events in Nagasaki in the late 1800s) for his Madame Butterfly, which was staged on Broadway five times from 1918 to 1948. This becomes significant when one sees how well the themes from the opera are used in this film version, a solid, still entertaining presentation of an important, touching play that holds heightened interest because of the world famous opera drawn from it / The screenplay makes little attempt to disguise its theatrical origin, although Russian-born director Marion Gering does a competent job of approximating the look and feeling of war-era Japan. If the film has a primary shortcoming, it is that it feels a little flat when performed as a straight drama. Although well-written and reasonably paced, the drama fails to soar to the appropriate level of intensity without the accompanying swell of the opera. But there is still much to recommend in this touching picture, primarily the terrific performance of Sidney, worth seeing on its own merit / A trifle slow at times / A curio / Good.

SHE DONE HIM WRONG (1933)

Set in an 1890s Bowery music hall, this redolent but dated period spoof runs just 62 minutes. Statuesque Mae West does her idiosyncratic stuff (some will love it, others not) with Grant in another small part that, while allegedly "star- making", is no more impressive than his turns in Devil And The Deep or Blonde Venus. Perhaps it's just that this Best Picture Oscar-nominated film was way more popular. Maltin's four stars seem to me one too many.

IMDb: Mae West (above) was a veteran of burlesque, vaudeville and the Broadway stage by the time she made her first film in 1932 at the age of 39. She Done Him Wrong was her second film and her first starring role in an adaptation of her Broadway hit Diamond Lil. It was a play that West had written herself and it played to packed houses on Broadway for years. Nominated for a Best Picture Academy Award, She Done Him Wrong made Cary Grant into an instant star. Mae went on to write nine of the twelve screenplays for films in which she was to star. Thus, all those great quotes we've heard that are attributed to her were not only said by her, but written by her as well. By 1935, she was the most highly paid woman in America. Full of the bawdy double entendre that became her trademark, this film is among her finest. West was the queen of sexual innuendo and suggestive dialogue and many of her lines (Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just glad to see me? / A hard man is good to find / Come up and see me sometime) have become part of Americana. The simplistic plot of this film is clearly no more than a vehicle for her enormous talent, leading up to the now famous proposal by Grant at the end. Mae commands every frame with her incomparable combination of sex appeal and ribald humour. Her sense of comic timing is impeccable, making the funny lines she writes that much more hilarious by the snide way in which she delivers them. Before this film, Grant had appeared in half a dozen

movies and was building a reputation as a solid actor. However, none of his early films gave him the exposure that She Done Him Wrong did, due to its wild popularity at the time. West handpicked him for the part saying that he combined virility with the bearing of a gentleman. She wanted someone who would epitomise the now famous line Hello, warm, dark and handsome. Though his role here is minor compared to hers, it made him a household name and bankable star. Among Mae West's best moments, this classic movie is a piece of film history that should not be missed.

Mae West : sassy, brassy, statuesque - a "natural star"

It appears that some modern day critics have forgotten what a great period film is all about. This very authentic replica of the Gay (18) Nineties is accurate right down to the horsehair furniture, gas lamps, Brooklyn accents and costumes. It was adapted from Mae West's Broadway hit Diamond Lil and, coupled with her other 1933 hit I'm No Angel, saved Paramount from bankruptcy. The film - West's favourite of all her twelve - was so loved by audiences that midnight showings were needed to accommo- date the crowds and was considered so lurid that seven countries banned it altogether. The film introduced the famed line Come up and see me sometime. Some of Mae's funniest work is here, and she sings three great tunes. Edith Head did all the costumes and directed. Modern times have dulled the bluntness of this film but in 1933, rest assured, it was an eye-popper / If you never understood why Mae West achieved lasting fame, watch this to see a natural star at work / A serious test of my patience. Mae's one-liners, although bordering on slick, were those of a person desiring a kick in the chops / A light hearted comedy that keeps you interested, smiling, and wanting to see it again. The camerawork and sound are superb for this time period / Worth watching once for a couple of reasons: first, the movie may be pretty bad but West is excellent. She also has a few nice musical numbers. Second, to see Grant in his first major role - yet little wonder this was his least favourite film. He looks terrible, as though made of clay. If not for that cleft chin, you'd struggle to recognise him.

THE WOMAN ACCUSED (1933)

Glenda (Nancy Carroll, above) has just found love with Jeff (Grant) when an insistent old flame re-enters her life. When she tries to give him the brush-off, he calls up a hitman acquaintance and is about to issue instructions for Jeff to be rubbed out when she stoves his head in. She then takes off with unknowing Jeff on a three day booze cruise - but the dead man's lawyer friend has worked out whodunit and sets off in pursuit. Fraught, improbable fun. 73 minutes.

IMDb: For Grant fans, a must see / Based on a serial in Liberty magazine to which ten well known authors each contributed a chapter, The Woman Accused is a scrappy, somewhat foregone she-didn't-mean-to-do-it with a few clever twists here and there. By and large, Carroll, Grant and John Halliday as Bessemer manage rather well / The performances are all agreeable, with a young Grant emerging as a formidable presence in the film's final quarter / Entertaining / Pretty good / Classy / Recommended.

* * * * *

The Woman Accused : Proof That It's Pre-Code:

 Someone gets murdered and someone gets away with it, even though accused. You may say that I'm spoiling the film, but, come on, it's not called The Woman Convicted, now, is it?

 Unapologetically decadent. Lavish parties, penthouse suites and a huge cruise ship with a boat on board and everything. Man, I didn't even know there were cruise ships in the '30s.

 The mobsters and the police are closely knit, though this may be because the police seem to be just a gaggle of morons.

 One fellow jokes: "A beautiful girl is supposed to be suing a banker for three million dollars. The real trick is finding a banker with any money!"

 Man forgives his future wife for previously living with a man.

 On a woman and a man left in a room alone together: "The way things are going nowadays, you don't know who's going to scream first!"

The Woman Accused is a murder mystery where (as in Columbo) we know the murderer. She's cornered by an old flame who knows how to push her buttons and finds a big red one where her new fiancé is concerned. He calls up a hitman to do away with the new fiancé and with a scream and surge of anger the old flame is dead.

Glenda is in shock about her new-found strength. Who knew a society belle had the ability to murder someone? It wasn't self defence, per se, but she was committing a murder to stop a murder. Morally, that should cover some bases, right?

In reading up on the Production Code, I came across a quote that summarised an article in The Nation denouncing some of the requirements of the Code. It argued that if film criminals could never be portrayed in a sympathetic way, then "law" and "justice" in films would come to mean the same thing.

As a culture, it's hard to argue that the perception doesn't persist. While we get films that dote on the criminal with the heart of gold, rarely are these the hardened career criminals and murderers like you'd find in the Warner Brothers

gangster pictures of the '30s. Bad guys nowadays still have a minimum height of good before getting onto the ride.

The Woman Accused doesn't directly linger on the culpability of a murderer, but it espouses a moral relativity that sounds good on paper: the life of a mob boss is worth less than that of a good man. Watch any movie made in the last 80 years: this hasn't changed.

But I'm letting the movie get away from me. The Woman Accused unfolds mostly in real time, saving us some transitions but keeping Glenda's recent deed at the forefront of her every action. Her darling new fiancé is Cary Grant, still in his serious acting days and a touch better here than in Born To Be Bad. He's planning on taking her on a cruise, and gives her a little bit to prepare.

It's at this point that Glenda gets called upstairs, as her old flame has not only returned from Europe but has generously moved in right above her. Nancy Carroll plays Glenda with big doe eyes, but when she loses control and hits the man over the head, her flash of anger works. The director Paul Sloane does something interesting with the murder itself, allowing it to be off centre, as she hits him just off screen, illustrating how Glenda has lost control to the point that the camera doesn't even know what's coming next.

The rest of the film can't really live up to its opening, as Glenda is whisked off on the cruise, and the police are called in by the corpse's friend. The police suspect Glenda but let her go on with her cruise - no need to bring her in quite yet, after all, she is rich and white - while the accuser goes aboard the boat, determined to bring her down.

The end of the film is unbearably silly. There's a mock trial staged by the accuser so convoluted that I'm sure any writer attempting this in a novel nowadays would be laughed out of the room. The accuser slowly morphs the mock trial into one using the circumstances of his friend's death and Glenda, cornered, fesses up to the whole thing. The rest deals with just how much punishment the murderer of a murderer deserves: believe it or not, it's precious little.

There's not much stopping The Woman Accused from being dismissed as a hoary relic. Despite odd bits of flair now severely out of style (such as opening credits for "The Man", "The Woman" and "The Accuser") and while it includes a few token thrills, the leaden second and third acts detract from them badly. This is just the type of film they now make TV shows out of.

Danny, Pre-Code.com, 11 June 2011

* * * * *

THE EAGLE AND THE HAWK (1933)

France, 1918: Fredric March (left, above - see also Merrily We Go To Hell) plays a conflicted American RFC pilot and Grant his more callous observer in this superior "war is hell" film that stands up despite some indifferent acting from the undercast. With Carole (Sinners In The Sun) Lombard. 73 minutes.

IMDb: The Eagle And The Hawk is a well-made, well-acted gem with decent aerial footage, a wonderful, anguished performance by March and a strong anti-war message. Its ending has a pair of surprises that are well worth the price of admission / One of the best films of its day, The Eagle And The Hawk contains March's most impressive performance, nicely set against Grant who had yet to make his own screen presence identifiable. Though only 73 minutes, the film does not have the feeling of slightness. Its tempo is impeccable / The dialogue is terrible, the acting bad, the plot predictable and all the Dawn Patrol clichés are there. But good fun and well worth seeing, if you like that sort of thing / The ending makes the movie / Grant plays very much against type. A few years later the public would never have accepted him in the part he plays here / A terrific, criminally underrated film ripe for rediscovery / Hard-hitting and emotional, one of the best films of its decade / March is fantastic. It's a shame he's not better remembered. Lombard's (part-censored) role is pretty pointless and doesn't mesh with the rest of the film / Fine viewing / The ending is stunning and unexpected / A sincere, believable antiwar film that gets its message across more powerfully than a hundred preachier others. Should be better known / Powerful and profound, this fine drama ranks up there with Wings and All Quiet On The Western Front / In the original ending, the camera pans out from the plaque to show Grant's character walk by with a bottle in a bag. He has become a hobo and seems to regret what he did / Amazing.

GAMBLING SHIP (1933)

Desperately drab B-movie fare has mobster Grant leaving Chicago after beating a phoney murder rap and hooking up on the train to with a gal who's not what she seems. Rival offshore casino boat owners clash, there's a bomb, some gunplay and the loving pair ride off together into the night - but a good cure for insomnia, even so. 70 minutes.

IMDb: A relatively routine crime drama that manages to infuse a rather thin plot with an average degree of tension and pathos. The film does perhaps take a bit too long to cover a far too familiar storyline, but it is reasonably well directed, and is made further palatable its adept cast, all of whom turn in highly respectable performances that manage to engage the viewer in the plights of the various characters. Cary Grant and Benita Hume are endearing as the protagonists attempting to escape their pasts, Jack La Rue and Arthur Vinton are convincing mobsters, and decent comic relief is provided by Roscoe Karns and Charles Williams. The slightly grating Glenda Farrell is the only major cast member who misses the boat while providing one of her usual tough gal characterisations that feels out of place in these proceedings. The film is not particularly memorable once it reaches its expected conclusion but its well-cast ensemble makes it reasonably enjoyable while it's playing / A tidy web of a plot. Deception abounds, but luckily the audience is the first to know. It's fun waiting for the characters to discover their mutual deceptions. Every principal character is a racketeer; there are no innocents. Grant's character is, of course, the most charming criminal of the bunch / A weather-beaten hulk that deserves to be decently retired from active service, Gambling Ship steers an erratic course in too familiar waters, takes a terribly long time to traverse a course accurately charted years an uncomfortable number of years ago and, in brief, could be scuttled with almost no loss to Broadway (NY Times).

I'M NO ANGEL (1933)

More fun than the less than fully realised She Done Him Wrong, Grant's second and last run-out with Mae West (above) gives him a better role - though he only appears in the 49th minute, he's good value after that. West wrote the screenplay as another starring vehicle for her character - presumably the only one she played - that of a brazenly suggestive bottle-blonde honky-tonk dame, a freewheeling showgirl with a heart of gold but sassy mouth, ready to fleece the saps for all they're worth. With Edward Arnold. 88 minutes. Very good.

IMDb: Mae West was an unlikely sex symbol. She was a small woman with a face that defied most standards of beauty and an unremarkable body - and by the time she hit film she was edging into middle age. But as West herself might have said, it ain't what ya got, its what ya do with it. If anybody knew what to do with it, Mae West certainly did and I'm No Angel finds her doing it in remarkably fine style indeed. West made a number of justly famous films during the , but this is arguably her best, salted with one memorable quip after another as she cracks whips, snubs snobs, frolics with her maids - "Peel me a grape!" - and waylays the willing Cary Grant with considerable aplomb. If you've never seen a Mae West movie but have always wondered what made her a great star, this is the film to see / A pre-Code comedy that has stood the test of time. The courtroom scene in which West acts as her own attorney is priceless / The great stars are inimitable. With the very greatest, such as the outrageous one-of-a-kind Mae West, nobody else even mirrors the style. Bogart, Hepburn, Dietrich, Cagney, maybe a few others - all you ask is that the story not smother what they do best. Here is West's finest movie, giving her the opportunities, sometimes denied elsewhere, to strut her stuff - all of it: suggestive dialogue, provocative poses, sashaying hips and a young Cary Grant to make her purr. The Production Code would not be far behind.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND (1933)

A pleasant though uneven trip with Alice through her looking glass and into Wonderland, where we meet Ned Sparks as Caterpillar, Edward Everett Horton as The Mad Hatter, W.C. Fields as Humpty Dumpty, Gary Cooper as The White and a great value Cary Grant as The Mock Turtle (in a part allegedly turned down by as beneath his dignity). Though his face is never seen, Grant's single three and a half minute scene is lots of fun. Though it will surely not be everyone's cup of tea and was a box-office flop, the film must be considered a success. 76 minutes.

IMDb: In a role difficult by any stretch of the imagination, young Charlotte Henry does very well as Alice, utilising the character's spunk and determination in holding her own against a supporting cast of seasoned veterans and inveterate scene stealers. Spirited and charming, with few hints visible of Victorian decorum, she is never boring. W.C. Fields has received much acclaim for his performance as Humpty Dumpty, and, indeed, his raspy voice and personality fit the character perfectly, but Edward Everett Horton's Mad Hatter and May Robson's Queen of Hearts are equally enjoyable - perhaps more so, as we can see their facial expressions / True to the sensibility of many early Paramount comedies, this Alice mingles giddy humour with a touch of lyricism, never cloying or saccharine, just endearingly sweet / I stopped with my head in my upturned palms to stare hard three times: at W.C. Fields to try and figure if it really was him I was seeing, at Grant to try and figure if it really was him I was hearing and at Cooper because his character was the best portrayal - the only one to seem to care for Alice, he was funny, gentle and oh, all those falls! / It's sad that so many dislike this astonishing film. Other Alices exist, but all fall short of the original stories. Paramount's faithfully adapted Christmas treat is still savoury after all these years.

BORN TO BE BAD (1934)

In this smart little pre-Code soaper, (above) plays a hard-nosed, scheming single mother who imparts her warped values to her seven year old son. After he is knocked down by an Amalgamated Dairies Inc. truck that just happens to be driven by company President Malcolm Trevor (Grant), the pair sue for damages, but after their lies are exposed in court, Loretta is adjudged an unfit mother and laddo is taken into care. Soft-hearted gent Trevor, married but childless, adopts him. In order to get the child back, Loretta cold-bloodedly seduces Trevor, only to have an abrupt change of heart when his loyal and adoring wife Alyce tells her a few home truths. Though its plot forces both lead characters to act improbably and unnaturally (thus not very credibly), the film as a whole is surprisingly good. 62 minutes.

IMDb: Grant does a good job as the male lead who is not a star, but who is supposed to support the acting of the lead. He comes off as thoughtful, kind and wise. Young, however, cannot quite pull off her leading role as the woman who, kicked around by life, decides to kick back / This flawed second feature sustains interest only thanks to the attractive stars. Still, not a bad way to spend an hour / A short but fascinating film - it's pre-Code and Loretta Young plays a tramp. It's also a pairing of two of the golden era's stars before they really hit the big time / Grant here is not quite yet the Cary Grant who is rightly a fable in the history of Hollywood, but he is of course handsome and well matched with Young / An uneven melodrama, Born To Be Bad stays afloat thanks to its talented cast and some interesting, surprisingly risqué pre-Code moments. It clearly takes place in some fantasy realm where logic is thrown out the window in lieu of standard plot devices. All of the good folks are ceremonious saints who only err when corrupted by a devilish woman like Young, whereas she inexplicably becomes a model citizen in the last reel just for having known such jake people. It makes no logical sense but proves blissfully entertaining camp cinema just the same / A very fast paced and enjoyable film likely to shock most audiences today because of its odd moral compass and less than likable characters / A fine film marred only by its weak, rushed ending / Young is perfect in this naughty pre-Coder / A fantastic film though drastically unbelievable in parts / A historical curiosity in which radiant Young delights.

KISS AND MAKE-UP (1934)

Dr. Lamar (Grant) is a celebrated Parisian beautician who comes eventually to realise that his work and existence are frivolous - but we take an hour of tedious viewing to get there. Despite some diverting musical interludes, the always welcome Edward Everett Horton (above - see also Holiday etc) and a gratuitous Keystonesque last reel car chase, there's precious little substance here. With Helen Mack (above - see also His Girl Friday) and Genevieve Tobin. From a Stephen Bekeffi play. 70 minutes.

IMDb: A very silly, virtually plotless comedy dealing with cosmetics / If you pick up on the parody, you'll see past the shallowness and find a handsome rom-com with plenty to enjoy / The movie includes two songs: the campy Corned Beef And Cabbage sung by Mack and Horton and Love Divided By Two, sung twice by Grant. In spite of his reputation as a debonair leading man, exemplary screwball comedian and fine heavy dramatic actor, Grant shows here how well he can sing, and how too sparingly he did it on screen. Kiss And Make-Up is the sort of harmless fun that results when writers throw in anything to stretch a story out to the required 70 minutes. It's a sort of offbeat film Grant might have looked back at and asked "Did I really do that?" / Vies with Once Upon A Time as Grant's worst film. The slapstick finale is truly one of the most wretched scenes of his wonderful career / Disarmingly silly. Mack is cute and funny, a kind of early Holly Hunter / A minor, ill- written, pre-Code funfest / An underrated, wacky screwball forerunner, the film benefits greatly from Grant who makes the most of this early chance to display his grand prowess at farce - one of the many qualities that inevitably made him a huge Hollywood star. Solid entertainment with a terrific end sequence / See it for dazzling young Cary, but don't expect too much.

LADIES SHOULD LISTEN (1934)

In 1933, prolific author and long-time PGW collaborator Guy Bolton adapted French play Le Demoiselle de Passy by Alfred Savoir into Ladies Should Listen. After a provincial run but no transfer to Broadway, the property was picked up and brought to the screen by Paramount, with Grant, Frances Drake (above) and Edward Everett Horton (see also Alice In Wonderland, Holiday and Arsenic And Old Lace). The conceit of the play is that telephonists know everything about everybody - and are also capable of falling in love by nothing more than eavesdropping. The result here is a bland and slight but consistently pleasant drawing room farce that, at 59 minutes, does not outstay its welcome.

IMDb: Julian de Lussac (Grant), an investor with an expiring option in Chilean mineral rights, is frolicking about with any and every beautiful woman in Paris. Unknown to him, his current amour, Marguerite and her crooked husband Ramon are plotting to part Julian and his mineral option. The woman who brings him to his senses is Anna, (Frances Drake) the switchboard operator of his apartment building. She knows every detail of his many affairs and has fallen in love with him via listening in on his phone conversations. She knows why each love affair occurred and why each ended. She also knows from her connections with other operators just what Marguerite and her hus- band are up to. Julian is flattered by Anna's adoration, but in no way returns it. From the time that her secret love is out in the open, Anna wages war on the evil couple trying to dupe Julian. Her weapon: the switchboard. A man with the morals of an alley cat just needs the right woman to show him the path to true love / Fine of its type and time / Acceptable romantic fodder / Nice old fluff / Of interest to huge Grant fans but no one else. A misfire / Agreeable, lightweight entertainment / Fun / Not bad.

WINGS IN THE DARK (1935)

This first of three films that Grant and (above) made together (see also The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer and Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House) tells a contrived and far-fetched tale in an entertaining way, courtesy of two stars easy in each other's company and on their best game. Aside from its major credibility deficit, one to enjoy. (See the Loy file for more.) 76 minutes.

IMDb: Some beautiful scenes between the two leads and a sense of genuine emotion on the screen before you / This movie shows that Grant had depth as a serious actor / Cliché at best but watchable, thanks to the know-how combination of Loy and Grant early in their movie careers / Not deep or original, but wild and exciting / Wings In The Dark is dated because aviation has progressed so much since the mid-thirties, and it pales beside the two classic screen comedies Grant and Loy did later. Still it offers an interesting glimpse of both stars in their earlier years and, for Grant, an unusual bit of casting / This movie has several amazing things going for it, and two of them have names: Myrna Loy and Cary Grant / This is a pretty good film with both actors turning in strong performances. Grant gets to show his dramatic flare - the man could really do anything. Now that I've seen so many of his early films, I'm convinced he had a nose job - his nose is definitely longer early on / A little-known '30s gem. Sure, there's a lot of hokum in the story, but Loy as a daring aviatrix and Grant as an inventive young pilot make it believable and compelling. Grant is working on new technology to enable pilots to fly and land "blind" when his eyes are seared by an exploding stove. Loy's growing affection for him runs into a cold, bitter barrier. But when she accepts a dangerous challenge, he literally rises to the occasion and becomes her eyes in the sky. Even some seemingly minor scenes, as when Grant reacts badly to the gift of a guide dog, have real emotional impact and some of the aerial stunt work is spectacular.

THE LAST OUTPOST (1935)

In WWI Kurdistan, British army officer Grant is taken by hostile tribesmen then freed by undercover Intelligence Officer Claude Rains, who then leads a band of threatened natives to safety. After breaking a leg, Grant is shipped back to Cairo for treatment. He falls in love with his hospital nurse and she with him - regrettably, however, she is already wed, and to none other than the same Claude Rains to whom Grant is so indebted. When the two meet again in the Sudan, the fuzzy-wuzzies are attacking in force, the relief column is heading for trouble and all seems lost. Who can save the day? Action, adventure, romance and some exotic locations combine for good though familiar fun. 76 minutes.

IMDb: Grant and Rains both give superb performances, with the scenes following their confrontation fraught with tension. Set during the Great War in a part of the world other than Europe, this is exciting from start to finish. Certainly there are a ton of clichés, but sometimes that is exactly what makes these movies so much fun / Plenty of nice action here to spice up yet another wartime triangle - but super Rains could make any kind of drivel look good / This underrated little film is extremely predictable but Grant and Rains develop a unique and genuine on-screen chemistry that infuses much of the picture with a invaluable sense of urgency and interest / A pretty bog-standard tale that you've probably seen done before - but what is absolutely wonderful about this movie is that the studio tried to save money by recycling scenes from an earlier, silent version of the same film. So there you are, watching what seems like a low- budget pot-boiler when suddenly you're thrust into a blurry, gritty shot of hundreds of natives moving very quickly and jerkily for a few seconds, then back to normal tempo and film stock. Okay, it's not much to write home about, but quite a fun effect.

SYLVIA SCARLETT (1935)

A young and vital Kate Hepburn (above) is the only thing this tiresome film has going for it. Adapted from a Compton MacKenzie novel and directed by , it runs 95 minutes that seem more like 300. Grant plays a Cockney con- man and she, with some ambivalence and partly in male disguise, one of his accomplices. Plot and script are wafer-thin and support players Edmund Gwenn and Dennie Moore hammy and grating respectively. Grant and Hepburn went on to co-star in three more films - Bringing Up Baby, Holiday and The Philadel- phia Story - all a great deal better than this justly forgotten dog.

IMDb: A disaster from beginning to end / Not for everyone, but what a film this is! / A series of unconnected events, tied together with the loosest of threads, with no real meaning. There is zero chemistry between the characters: Grant's is badly drawn and Hepburn's just screechingly annoying. The rest of the cast isn't much better, though I don't blame them. The screenplay is terrible and the film a trial to sit through / Hard to figure out whether the movie is deep or ditzy. I have my doubts - the abrupt change from con-men to vaudevillians would be hilarious if it weren't so bizarre - but I vote for the former / Not worth seeing - a real shambles / Weakly scripted and bursting with melodramatic affectation, it's hard to love this picture / A chore to get through. Maybe the worst picture Grant and Hepburn have on their filmographies. Contrived, fake, talky, addled, unfocused, unbelievable and annoying pretty much sum it up / Hepburn delights in this extremely unusual little film that makes the odd transition from caper comedy to coming of age romance, occasionally teetering back and forth between the two. A lost gem, very much ahead of its time / Sylvia Scarlett is not a lost or under- rated gem. Sometimes, a flop is just a flop - and some films are best forgotten.

BIG BROWN EYES (1936)

Grant plays a cop and (above) his quick-witted gal in this gritty little tale of jewel thievery, extortion, fraud and murder, in which justice is served ill by the courts but rather better by enterprising Cary and Joan. With Walter Pidgeon. 77 minutes of solid, well turned, genre entertainment.

IMDb: Mundane / Adequate / Watchable but unmemorable / The chemistry between Grant and Bennett is breezy and natural and despite some woefully leaden dialogue, the duo significantly better the film with their thoroughly winning performances / If you don't literally jump out of your seat during the scene in which Douglas Fowley exits the police station, you shouldn't be watching vintage movies. Raoul Walsh directs with admirable style, polish and economy. Production values are first class. A must / Lacking in entertainment value. Strictly second-rate despite a good cast / The mix of comedy and drama is an uneasy one / An uneven movie carried by Grant / Essentially trivial though with some nice touches / Well worth your time, this amiable blend of comedy, romance and mystery is one of the better examples of this odd genre combination. While not up to the tip-top standards of (but what is?) still a delight, very well written and surprisingly good / Grant a cop? Yes, and with enough charm and grace to make even this kind of part his own / A slick comedy, directed by Raoul Walsh, who gets the whole cast in sync like a Swiss watch. An unusual film for Grant, but his fans will like it / To get the most out of this nifty programmer, forget that it's a film with Cary Grant, who is still in work in progress here. Taken instead on the merits of its fast pace and action and crisp scripting, it provides an interesting peep- hole into the ins and outs of a '30s-era town, plus decent entertainment to boot / Well done and sharply acted. See it / Ultra-cool and a little bit before its time, I love this film / A total thrill, and something I hope to see again / Among the best of early Grant / A hardboiled and (two years post-Code) surprisingly provocative winner.

SUZY (1936)

A cracking little drama set just before and during the Great War, Suzy stars Grant in good form alongside (above), and, in the role of Grant's father, Lewis Stone. The action moves between , Paris and the French front, with Grant a flying ace, Tone an aeronautical engineer and Harlow romantically involved with them both. A little bit more resolution would have improved the end (though what's missing can be imagined readily enough) - otherwise Suzy, running 93 minutes, is just the job.

IMDb: An entertaining, well-made WWI era romance, Suzy features a routinely scripted but winningly executed love triangle with some espionage and spy action thrown into the mix. In the title role, Jean Harlow (arguably MGM's biggest female star at the time) gives a refreshingly natural and totally believable performance, and really carries the film with her considerable charm and screen presence. Franchot Tone and Cary Grant may draw some criticism for utilising improper accents, but both actors also contribute solid performances as the men in our heroine's life - Tone is touching as the idealistic charmer who truly loves Suzy and Grant is shockingly effective cast against type as smooth-talking but treacherous heel. The movie is further enhanced by the quiet strength of Lewis Stone, whose genteel toughness as Andre's father creates a moving relationship with Harlow as his neglected daughter-in-law. As a WWI period piece, the studio faced the obvious challenge of redressing the soundstages to reflect the 1914 setting and the MGM artisans contribute their usual high standard to the film. Suzy features the typical MGM gloss, although the budget does appear to be a bit more limited than the studio usually lavished upon a vehicle for one of their biggest stars. The sets and costumes are up to the usual MGM standard for the time, with Harlow's stunning figure showcased in several beautiful gowns (even if the style is

unarguably more 1936 than it is 1914). The film makes extensive use of various stock footage, notably ' 1930 classic Hell's Angels, most of which is reasonably incorporated into the finished film and succeeds in enhancing its scope. The film is based on Herbert Gorman's novel. The fact that its characters are very well developed by the strong performances of the cast gives the central love triangle more than usual tension and pathos and also renders Suzy's relationship with the Baron (Grant's father) as poignant as her love affair with either suitor. The film only wobbles a bit in the final third as too many coincidences involving the espionage subplot begin to pile up, and a slightly preposterous conclusion prevents the film from being a total classic (with four credited screenwriters, perhaps there were too many cooks in the kitchen). When its focus remains on its strong characterisations and the relationships of its leads, Suzy is absolutely terrific. Director George Fitzmaurice does an expert job of keeping the whole film on track and provides us with many breathtakingly beautiful moments, my favourite of which is a particularly lovely scene with Grant singing a few lines of the Oscar-nominated song "Did I Remember" to Harlow. Suzy is not only an underrated WWI drama but - almost - a masterpiece.

An excerpt from the Variety Film Review of 29 July 1936:

... In the original novel, Suzy was far from being the tender lamb she is made out to be in the picture, which dispenses with the bigamous angle. In the film much explanation does not quite acquit her of being too precipitate and her looseness militates against her. There are a number of other rough places the dialogue simply cannot smooth out. Dialogue is generally too flippant and forced to give conviction to the situations, but the story bristles with sure-fires, starting with a generous dressing room sequence, a race scene with Suzy betting on an outsider at 20-1 and bringing home the bacon, a well written scene in a war-time railroad station where Lewis Stone, as Andre's father, makes him be nice to Suzy, though Andre has played hookey all through a visit to Paris. There is some gorgeous flying stuff with cloud effects out of the files and a few feet of air stuff apparently made for this picture.

But all through the scenarists have put in the punch whether it belongs or not and the general effect would seem to justify this treatment. It's cheap, sometimes tawdry, but for the moment it appeals.

Miss Harlow works hard and generally to good effect. She lacks a little in the more serious moments, but Harlow fans do not expect more acting and are likely to be content. Franchot Tone has the job as the first husband and shades nicely from the carefree youngster of the earlier scenes to the more serious minded airplane expert at the front. On the other hand, Cary Grant contributes a fine performance as Andre, but cannot wholly overcome the handicap of his cheating proclivities. Lewis Stone is sympathetic as Andre's father, who comes to love his daughter-in-law, and for whose sake Suzy seeks to preserve the honour of the boy's name. Benita Hume is good, if stereotyped, as the spy, and Inez Courtney plays the chorus girl friend right up to the hilt. Her exit from the scene about midway is to be regretted, though she would have stolen too many of the later scenes had she been permitted to remain. This comedienne has been coming along in great style in pix of late. Photography, save for some library war stuff, is excellent, and the director made the most of the rich opportunities in the script. The one song is effectively handled.

THE AMAZING ADVENTURE (aka The Amazing Quest Of Ernest Bliss) (1936)

This modest British-made B-picture tells the tale of jaded millionaire playboy Ernest Bliss (Grant) who, when challenged by his doctor to get a job and support himself for a year entirely on earned income, takes work as an oven salesman then chauffeur. He puts the oven business back on its feet, buys both the car rental firm and his favourite blue collar restaurant, helps out his old friends and, bizarrely, evicts two squatting crooks from his empty flat, all while falling for working girl Frances Clayton (Mary Brian, above). Unsurprisingly, all works out happily in the end, to be speedily forgotten. 62 minutes. Thin.

IMDb: A simple Aesop's fable of human values and the importance of meaningful work starring an astonishingly beautiful man. Worth watching / Amiable but formulaic / 1936 marked the end of Grant's long apprenticeship and, of his films released that year, this is probably the weakest / Amazingly cheap but endearing. Though the plot is a bit silly, because of its charm and brisk pace it satisfies / Though Cary's performance is fine, the production values on this film are pretty shoddy. There was material for an A picture though - Capra should have done it and Jimmy Stewart would have been great had the setting been America. Grant, on the cusp, is still not quite the done deal / Harmless but dated / Very average / Not a great film though its heart is certainly in the right place / Lightweight and amusing / A nice film that leaves you happy / There isn't a dull scene in the film. Nothing is wasted in the effort to entertain and it all works very well. This is a taster of what was to come from Grant. He is just superb here. He and Brian have excellent chemistry together. A delightful little film and something of a forgotten gem.

WEDDING PRESENT (1936)

Grant and Joan Bennett (above) reunite (see Big Brown Eyes) in this pleasant that survives some more crass acting (this time from George Bancroft) to serve up a light-hearted confection that, well larded with charm, is hard to dislike. In his last film for Paramount until 1955, Grant gets to sing again, act drunk, turn lifesaver and generally have a good time, such that his audience are likely to too. Bennett again proves a worthy foil. 82 minutes.

IMDb: Screwball comedy is one of the most popular and enduring genres that came out of the 1930s and arguably Cary Grant remains its brightest star. Long before The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday and My Favorite Wife became part of his screwball canon, this seminal forgotten gem showcased his emerging talent as a light comedian. Wedding Present is an unheralded minor gem that would serve as a good opener on a double feature with His Girl Friday / Starts well but loses momentum and ends poorly, with some cruel, irresponsible and nasty behaviour. While I love Cary Grant films, I also have to admit that occasionally he made a disappointing one such as this or Once Upon A Time or Kiss And Make Up. Of course, he also made His Girl Friday, Arsenic And Old Lace, North By Northwest and a ton of classics to make us all forget about the few duds / Grant and Bennett are fine in the leads and even have respectable chemistry but are let down by the film's lack of narrative and structure / It's hard to impress on youngsters beyond a cartoonish awareness that women in 1930s society and film were extremely limited in options: homemaker, secretary, teacher, nurse, whore. If a woman was intelligent and witty and active, she was a reporter. Seeing and discovering was sexy. It's lost today, that effect. Imagine a film that presents a woman far beyond your experience, what you know from real life. Imagine her witty and sexually available - at least temporarily so - outside marriage, smart, full of humour and ready to play severe and grand jokes. It's impossible to do today where Angelina can fight, Tilda can control and Julianne can affect. But just imagine the cinematic power of a newsroom with such juice, they writing stories, we seeing them simultaneously. Oh how I wish we had such power to pull from in film today!

TOPPER (1937)

Grant plays second fiddle to (above) in this tired, laboured comedy about a pair of carefree spirits haunting a stuffed shirt banker to liberate him from his conventional wife and proscriptive routine. From a Thorne Smith novel. With Eugene Pallette and . 98 minutes. Dull.

IMDb: Plenty of social commentary, totally politically incorrect. My all-time favourite comedy / Good, clean, innocent fun / Grant usually kept just short of smugness in his dashing performances, but not in this early role. A real let-down / Unbelievably bad. Utterly lame. Painful to sit through / With a fine cast and some good and occasionally impressive special effect camera tricks, this is a decent fantasy feature. It makes its main gimmick work well while also telling a light but interesting story about the principal characters. The idea of ghosts returning to interact with the living is a simple and familiar one but in this movie it works pretty well / Delightful and original. One of the best things Hollywood ever produced at the height of the madcap comedy craze of the thirties / Outstanding / Underrated / A feather-light visual feast / Stale / A witty script and terrific work from the entire cast. Roland Young is divine in an Oscar nominated performance in the title role and Grant and Bennett are superb as the dearly departed couple. The film was followed by two sequels, a long-running TV series, a made-for- TV remake and a whole slew of imitators - although none approached the quality of the original. A delightful film that remains arguably the best supernatural comedy that Hollywood has ever produced / Badly dated? Yes, but ignore all the stuff that reflects a time capsule of 1930s values and attitudes. Watch it, instead, to enjoy performers whose like we will never see again / An odd story, oddly framed / A diverting trifle / Enjoyable fluff that rarely rises above the level of a / Zany, romantic, sexy and hilarious / Silliness beyond belief / A delicious piece of thirties comedy pie / If this is the best of screwball comedy, then the genre sucks. Let's be realistic, it's not funny / A must see for Grant fans / You will feel better for having watched it / Wonderful.

THE TOAST OF NEW YORK (1937)

Grant is second billed to Edward Arnold (above) in this fact-based film about the life and death of nineteenth century businessman, financier and speculator Jim Fisk. We follow his career from humble huckster beginnings selling soap through Civil War profiteering in cotton then into shipping and railroad stock and finally gold, culminating in a ruthless but ultimately unsuccessful bid in 1869 to corner the market and cause widespread financial panic. Grant (at his most handsome) plays Nick Boyd, Fisk's partner and rival for the love of aspiring actress Josie Mansfield (Frances Farmer). Though Arnold (see also I'm No Angel etc) is always good value, the story is of only moderate interest and the fiscal shenanigans hard for the uninitiated to grasp. With Jack Oakie. 105 minutes.

IMDb: Starts out as a whimsical joyride and ends with a thought-provoking meditation on the evils of greed. Arnold is grand / The Heaven's Gate of its day, Toast is a film that almost sank its studio (RKO). Though uneven in tone and historically inaccurate, it is still grand entertainment in the late '30s manner, with high drama and low comedy interspersed in about equal measure, with excellent performances by Arnold, Farmer and Oakie. Grant seems rather ill at ease in a role quite different from his usual screen persona / The further it strays from Wall Street, the less interesting this film becomes. At the centre of the drama is Jim Fisk, played by the avuncular Arnold - a larger than life performance entirely suited to the role. He largely dominates the film, overawing Grant (Nick) and Oakie (Luke), who are frequently reduced to the level of stooges. But the conclusion descends into bathos, Fisk's end not so much tragic as formulaic, with consequently little impact / Superficial but enjoyable / Disappointing / Dull / No great shakes / Dreadful / Hokey but fun. Worth a look if you like old Hollywood biopics.

THE AWFUL TRUTH (1937)

Grant and Irene Dunne bring this bright crossed-love comedy to life with a pair of sparkling lead performances. Though divorced from one another, both do all they can to foul the other's subsequent relationship, leaving the way clear for an eventual cosy reconciliation. The film garnered Oscar nominations for Best Picture, Director (Leo McCarey), Female Lead, Male Support (), Screenplay and Editing, though only McCarey won. 87 minutes. Very good.

IMDb: Nothing in this movie makes sense, and it really doesn't matter. It succeeds with its self-assured anarchy and the charm of its stars / A screamingly hysterical marital comedy that hasn't lost one iota of its punch in the eight decades since its release. Irene Dunne is amazing in a layered performance that is both subtly affecting and side- splittingly funny, sometimes within the same scene! The one in which she masquerades as Grant's floozy, nightclub dwelling sister is one of the brightest highlights in film comedy history. Dunne received a well-deserved Oscar nomination for her inspired work in this film, which endures as a reminder of why she was one of Hollywood's top actress during the thirties and forties. And see Cary Grant emerge as a superstar ...

The Awful Truth was a play by Arthur Richman that first appeared in 1922 and later served as the basis for several films. There was a 1925 silent effort, starring Agnes Ayres and Warner Baxter, and three sound versions. The first of those was an early talkie in 1929 featuring Ina Claire (who had headed the Broadway cast), and the last was a 1953 Columbia picture entitled Let's Do It Again with and . It was the 1937 version, however,

that was the definitive one. The Awful Truth is perhaps the quintessential screwball comedy. It certainly has all the key production elements including the genre's perhaps most identified actor (Cary Grant), one of its favourite actresses (Irene Dunne), everyone's favourite other man (Ralph Bellamy), Asta the dog (here called Mr. Smith), a key director (Leo McCarey) and the usual ridiculous but very funny plot. Except that in this case, there's even less plot than usual. Basically, everything depends on the lead couple. They have to be good because there's no safety net to draw our attention if they fail. There's no mystery angle like in The Thin Man, no musical or theatrical sub-plot like in Twentieth Century, no massive supporting casts of the sort that populate Capra's best work. No, there's just Grant and Dunne, starting off together at first as the ideal couple, then Dunne on her own with Grant trying to undermine her, then Grant alone with Dunne trying to undermine him, and then finally the two tentatively perhaps reuniting.

Cary Grant, Ralph Bellamy and Irene Dunne

The film is a triumph for the two stars who exhibit the excellence of their skills throughout. Perhaps no scene demonstrates that excellence better than the one in the nightclub where Lucy (Dunne) and Daniel (Bellamy) run into Jerry (Grant) who's there with new girlfriend, Dixie Belle. It turns out that Dixie Belle is also the featured performer and when she does her rather cheesy act featuring a song punctuated by some interesting wind effects on her dress, the reactions of the watching Lucy and Jerry (and Daniel) are worth the price of admission alone.

By 1937, Cary Grant already had some two dozen films behind him, but he was only just starting to really come into his own. Topper (Hal Roach) had been a big success and The Toast Of New York (RKO) provided more positive press, but it was with The Awful Truth that Grant confirmed his pre-eminence in the screwball genre. More gems would follow, including Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, His Girl Friday and The Story, but none topped The Awful Truth for its purity of form and none offered a Grant as free of the outrageous mugging that he was sometimes prone to. If you want to see why Cary Grant was the king of screwball comedy, this film is the one to watch.

Nowadays, too many people would say "Irene who?" but anyone at all in tune with classic American cinema won't have to think twice. Adept at comedy, but able also to turn her hand to serious drama with ease, Irene Dunne was already a star in 1937 with a string of major films behind her including a number of pre-Code titles and the more recent Magnificent Obsession (1935) and Showboat (1936). More significantly for The Awful Truth, she'd been a standout in the 1936 Columbia screwball comedy . She is top-billed in The Awful Truth and would remain so for a decade. Dunne's other screwball outing with Grant would be 1940's My Favorite Wife (RKO). Her opportunities to shine in The Awful Truth are many, but to me the most memorable sequence is her appearance at the Vances' where she pretends to be Jerry's slightly sleazy sister and performs a hilarious version of Dixie Belle's nightclub act.

Any appreciation of The Awful Truth would be incomplete without mention of Ralph "never-got-the-girl" Bellamy. Usually appearing as a naïve out-of-town visitor to the big city, Bellamy was the rebound-guy for divorced or jilted women in what seemed like countless comedies of the 1930s and early . His role as Rosalind Russell's prospective husband after her divorce from Cary Grant in His Girl Friday is perhaps his other best-remembered performance of this type. But it couldn't top his efforts as the innocent rancher / oilman visiting New York with his mother in The Awful Truth - efforts that included his initial appearance in the film where he's singing to himself, or where he manages to make a complete fool of himself dancing a lumbering jitterbug with Lucy, or his parting line to Lucy - Well, I guess a man's best friend is his mother - when he realises she may not be the innocent he thought. With those three in top form, what else do you need? Well, how about some delightfully witty dialogue, good physical comedy and stunning production design and costuming? Under the assured direction of veteran Leo McCarey, the film just zips along and is all over far too soon.

Barrie Maxwell, DVD Verdict, 25 April 2003

* * * * *

BRINGING UP BABY (1938)

Leonard Maltin again hands out a full house four stars in assessing this peach, and in contrast to Mae West vehicle She Done Him Wrong, fully deserved they are too, for it's a bona fide timeless classic - Grant's first (though far from last) truly great film - featuring a strong story in the hands of a more than capable director and two compelling leads at the absolute top of their game. Howard Hawks followed up this Grant collaboration with two more - Only Angels Have Wings and His Girl Friday - before coaxing equally definitive performances out of (among others) Cooper, Bogart and Wayne. Here, radiant Kate Hepburn (above) banishes the grim memory of Sylvia Scarlett with an irresistible Oscar- worthy turn. Baby is a Brazilian (!) leopard and George is Asta. Who could ask more? A film for the ages, with May Robson and Charles Ruggles. 98 minutes.

IMDb: Utterly sublime / Wild, crazy, hysterical, laugh-a-minute fun / A quite wonderful character comedy with Hepburn and Grant on insurmountable form. These delightful stars and anarchic, scintillating, comic material combine to make an unutterably fine film / A poorly received flop on release, Bringing Up Baby is screwball comedy to the max: absolutely absurd, crackling with dialogue moving faster than a bullet and unapologetically zany. Starring Katharine Hepburn in her only real foray into playing a "scatterbrained heiress" and Cary Grant as a befuddled palaeontologist whose life she disrupts from the moment they meet on a golf course, the story almost seems like deliberately crazy plotting. But, featuring one classic comic scene after another, Bringing Up Baby is a prime example of a film that has, though initially reviled - most notably because of the arrogant personality of its lead actress, then reputedly "box-

office poison" - over the years, with repeated views, gained strong critical praise. While its dialogue may be a little too fast for some tastes, the absurdity of the situation alone makes it worth watching, plus, of course, the remarkable chemistry of an athletic Hepburn and dashing Grant / In his glorious Bringing Up Baby, Howard Hawks ratchets screwball comedy up to its tautest and springiest level. In clumsier hands, screwball too often gallops into the frenetic, fraying the nerves, but Hawks, while maintaining a presto pace, never lets the mix-ups and misunderstandings grow implaus- ible - he just glides serenely to something else. With Hepburn and Grant he was blessed indeed, but the rest of the cast he assembles, both human and animal, can't be faulted either (with the redoubtable May Robson - below, centre - earning extra credit). And while he draws on stock characters and stereotypes that probably date back to commedia dell'arte - the stuffy professor, the blithe rich girl, her crusty dowager aunt, the bumbling sheriff - he freshens each one up, making them distinctive, memorable and endearing. Behind a pair of repressive spectacles, Grant plays the single-minded palaeontologist whose path crosses with that of madcap Hepburn, never again to uncross. The plot revolves around a leopard named Baby, a million dollars, an inter- costal clavicle bone and a dog named George who buries it ... Well, it all makes perfect sense while you're watching. Underneath all the antics, Hawks never loses sight of the pastoral romance that Bringing Up Baby at its core really is (at its most magical in the woods under a full moon, all captured exquisitely by Russell Metty's lovely photo- graphy). Grant's been rooting around in the dirt for so long looking for dinosaur bones that it takes him forever to 'get' Hepburn - an airborne sprite who never comes down to earth. (Their alchemy here is rarefied, in contrast to the commoner sort of reaction they kindled in the stage-bound Philadelphia Story.) Last but not least, the movie features the canine talents of Asta, ' lovable cur who appeared as himself in the Thin Man series. Here he plays George, who, barking his stubby tail off, has no qualms about tangling with Baby the leopard. Is there any question that this high- strung wire-haired terrier is and will forever remain (pace Rin-Tin-Tin and Lassie) Hollywood's top dog? How fitting that he should lend his considerable talents to Bringing Up Baby, the most exquisite comedy of the sound era.

HOLIDAY (1938)

After Sylvia Scarlett and Bringing Up Baby, it's Grant and Hepburn (above) in tandem once more for this second cinematic rendering - see also Holiday (1930) in the file - of Philip Barry's hit 1928 Life v. Money stage play. (The same author also wrote Paris Bound, and The Philadel- phia Story.) Though Harding and Hepburn bring quite different qualities to the role of Linda Seton - the one cerebral, patrician cool, the other a more earthy indomitable spunk - both infuse her with an enchanting allure that only stars can, and both were surely that. Grant as conflicted Johnny Case leads an accomplished cast that includes the inimitable Edward Everett Horton (below, left - see also Alice In Wonderland, Ladies Should Listen and Arsenic And Old Lace) reprising his 1930-version Nick Potter role and Lew Ayres as doomed wage slave brother Ned. 92 minutes. Recommended.

* * * * *

I have it easy. When asked to name the best film to come out of classic-era Hollywood, I don't need to waffle in indecision, because for me there is only one single, inevitable answer: Holiday, of course. Known more often than not as "that other film Cary Grant and Katharine Hepburn made in 1938," for one reason or another, Holiday has never quite seemed able to escape from the long shadow cast by the canonical, much-loved and much more famous Bringing Up Baby.

And don't get me wrong - Bringing Up Baby is an excellent film, and there are countless films from studio-era Hollywood that I dearly love, but Holiday always seems to loom large in my mind, even if the reasons why are hard for me to articulate. It certainly has something to do with the joy of witnessing two Hollywood icons working at the top of their game, capitalising on their effortless sexual chemistry, and I love the literary humour playwright Philip Barry gives the script, and how it compliments rather than clashes with the screwball-inspired physical comedy. It also has something to do with my appreciation for the script, which allows big ideas and tough issues to cut the laughs short with a cutting poignancy. And I endlessly marvel at the elegance in which perpetually underrated director George Cukor mixes and balances all of these elements with an effortless grace. Yes, there are plenty of reasons why this film is great, but there's just something that makes Holiday - dare I say it? - sublime.

Holiday actually takes place between two holidays. At the beginning of the film, Johnny Case (Grant) and Julia Seaton (Doris Nolan, below, left) are just arriving back from a trip from Lake Placid where in a whirlwind romance they have met, fallen in love and decided to marry. It is only back in that the happy-go-lucky Johnny finds out that Julia is one of "those" Seatons - one of the oldest and wealthiest families in New York - and it doesn't take long before ideological differences begin to poke holes in Johnny and Julia's starry eyed romance. However, Julia's sister, the high-spirited Linda (Hepburn) thinks Johnny is a refreshing jolt to the stultifying atmosphere of the family's privileged lives, and sets out to vigorously promote the pairing to the sisters' stuffy and money-minded father (Harry Kolker).

As the wedding day approaches, it becomes increasingly clear that Johnny might abandon his idealistic dreams and settle down to a conventional life working at the Seaton family's bank. Will Johnny recognise the better course for his life - and more ideal life partner - before it's too late?

While doing some research for this review, I made an unexpected discovery: it seems that Holiday is also the favourite film of my favourite working film critic,

Stephanie Zacharek. In 1997, for a feature Salon did called "Reel Dreams: Personal Bests", Zacharek wrote a short piece on why the film is so special to her and I would like to use her opening lines as the springboard to launch my own celebration of this marvellous film:

There's almost no movie that makes me as wistful as Holiday does, and I can't figure out exactly why. Even after it's over, even after I know disaster's been averted, that Cary Grant didn't futz up and chose the wrong partner, I still feel unsettled, as if the move has somehow cut too close for comfort. It's just that a mantle of sadness hangs over this most stylish of comedies - weightlessly, like a silk web - and afterward, I always feel as if it's quietly drifted onto me, too. Holiday never cheers me up, but it always opens me wide.

I feel inadequate of any kind of elaboration, mostly because Ms. Zacharek nails so completely my own thoughts and emotional reaction to this film. Perhaps that helps explain why Holiday has never quite received the attention or praise that it deserves -the source of its beauty and emotional resonance always seems to remain elusive. Holiday doesn't make audiences laugh like the other screwball comedies Grant and Hepburn were paired in, and it doesn't hit its audience over the head with its tragedy like latter-period Hepburn and Grant films such as Long Day's Journey Into Night and An Affair To Remember. Rather, after about five viewings, I've come to realise that Holiday is deliberately obscure regarding its tone and intentions. On the surface, the film might come off as remarkably frivolous, but I'm always surprised at the lump that has formed in the back of my throat as it barrels towards its conclusion. Zacharek is absolutely right - despite the happy ending, there's something to Holiday that makes one contemplative, if not deeply, indescribably sad.

That's what makes Holiday such a hard sell - it's a tragedy wrapped up in a comedic package. Its readily apparent refinement - the incredible Seaton family mansion, the upper-class social delicacy and discretion, the amazing gowns - serve as smoke and mirrors that hide the script's vicious fangs, as Holiday sets two overarching American ideologies against each other and allows them to mercilessly rip each other apart. Julia and her father represent the common goal of accumulating great material wealth, and they inevitably lock heads with Linda and Johnny, who dearly hold onto their right to life, liberty, (and most importantly) the pursuit of happiness.

Much of Holiday is dedicated to demonstrating how this clash of life philoso- phies can trap and destroy all those involved, and the two characters most in danger of being crushed are Linda and her younger brother Ned, played with heartbreaking despair by a young Lew Ayres (below, right). Linda mentions to Johnny at one point that Ned had been a promising musician before his father

had forced him into the family business, and as a result it seems Ned has given up on life, living his life in a constant alcohol-induced haze. So when Ned is unable to break free of his domineering father's grip on his life, turning his back on the escape route Linda offers him, it's a moment of complete emotional devastation. It also marks the point in the film, when characters' futures are in chaos and entire lives are on the verge of being shattered, that it seems Holiday has become something more than a film, and that, somehow, something nameless and vital and real is about to break apart.

Though the film always remains swathed in its polished classic Hollywood patina, the gloves are off and it's delivering savage, unflinching emotional blows, and the only consolation is to witness the only two characters still capable of escaping at the film's close - Linda and Johnny - finally break away once and for all. The kiss between the two during the film's final fadeout not only gives the happy realisation that true love has finally conquered, but one is also left with the impression that two vibrant lives have narrowly avoided complete and utter destruction.

Zacharek finishes her analysis of this film with a brief anecdote about how several days after watching it for the first time she found herself wandering listlessly around a video store, yearning for another Holiday. Finally, her husband had to tell her simply "There isn't one." And that, to be honest, about sums it up.

Jesse Ataide, DVD Verdict, 29 March 2007

GUNGA DIN (1939)

This influential ( Jones and more), big budget, stirring and occasionally spectacular though overlong RKO epic imagines the circumstances in which Rudyard Kipling's 1892 poem Gunga Din came to be written. The lead roles are taken by Grant, Victor McLaglen and Douglas Fairbanks Junior (above) with Indian water-bearer turned hero Gunga Din played by unconvincingly blacked- up white American Sam Jaffe. Lots of people love this, including Leonard Maltin, who gives it a full four stars (making it one of seven Grant films so honoured) but the middle drags, it's all a bit knockabout and I've yet to see Fairbanks shine in anything. There's some decidedly token love interest for the ladies, with that story thread concluding most unsatisfactorily. Still, though suspect on historical, ethnic and gender bias grounds, a romp undeniably. 117 minutes.

IMDb: One of the greatest "entertainment" movies ever made, Gunga Din has every- thing: a good script and story, epic sweep, fantastic acting, inter-character chemistry, charisma, pacing and coherency - and how many films can you say that about? / A trio of buddies, sergeants all in the British Army, carouse and brawl their way across Imperial India. Intensely loyal to each other, they meet their greatest and most deadly challenge when they encounter the resurgence of a hideous cult and its demented, implacable guru. Now they must rely on the lowliest servant of the regiment, the water carrier Gunga Din, to save scores of the Queen's soldiers from certain massacre. Based as much on The Three Musketeers as Kipling's classic 1892 poem, this is a wonderful adventure epic - a worthy entry in Hollywood's Golden Year of 1939. Filled with and humour while keeping the romantic interludes to the barest minimum, it

grips the interest of the viewer and holds it right up to the sentimental conclusion. It is practically fruitless to discuss the performance nuances of its three stars as they are really all thirds of a single organism - inseparable and, to all intents and purposes, indistinguishable. However, this diminishes nothing of the great fun in simply watching them have a glorious time. (It's interesting to note, parenthetically, that McLaglen boasted a distinguished WWI military career; Fairbanks would have a sterling record in WWII - mostly in clandestine affairs and earning himself no fewer than four honorary knighthoods after the conflict, while Grant reportedly worked undercover for British Intelligence, keeping an eye on Hollywood Nazi sympathisers.) The real acting laurels here should go to Sam Jaffe (below, left) heartbreaking in the title role. He infuses the humble man with radiant dignity and enormous courage, making the celebrated last line of Kipling's poem (You're a better man than I am ...) ring true. He is unforgettable.

While it is fashionable to condemn anything that portrays favourably European colonialism generally and the British Empire in particular, a little historical knowledge will show that Kipling's poem, as well as this superb film, are hardly the reactionary racist screed that some would have you believe. Gunga Din is a regimental bhisti - a water carrier - and in 19th century India that meant he had a job, food and a place to sleep in a very brutal society. Considering that he was also an untouchable - a member of India's lowest caste - this was something. Colonel Weed is correct in saying "he had no official status as a soldier" - bhistis were non-military auxiliaries. As for his loyalty to the British, there were many Indians - and not only maharajas and princes - who preferred British rule to that of their fellows. Yes, Gunga Din is "men-as-buddies" flick. Just enjoy it - it is a rousing tale - and keep the PC nonsense out of it. The bad guys lose in the end while the best man is recognised for his virtues - and you don't get that it in real life! / A mix of action, adventure, comedy and drama the like of which is rarely seen these days / A classic / Don't miss it / Arguably the best film of its kind.

ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS (1939)

In a South American backwater, Geoff Carter (Grant) runs a shoestring flying operation, forever short of pilots and teetering on the verge of bankruptcy. When Bonnie Lee (Jean Arthur, above) steps off the banana boat and decides to stay, Carter plays hard to get. There's one more trip needed to get the mail contract, but the weather's closing in. Hawks-directed hokum entertains thanks mainly to its charismatic stars. With Rita Hayworth. 116 minutes. Good.

IMDb: Arthur was always a kind of goofy and appealing actress. Grant is unconvincing - though his wardrobe throughout is a riot - but the film's characters are familiar enough types to make us feel comfortable with them, and the flying scenes are exciting. Well worth watching / While the cast (especially Thomas Mitchell as veteran pilot Kid) are all superb, it is Hawks who turns a rather ordinary plot into an extraordinary film / The film establishes a wonderful sense of uncertainty. Life can fall apart at any moment and we should be ready. Sadly, it doesn't recognise that preparation for this involves growing closer to others rather than pushing them away. Still, it is unique in its time and setting as well as its characterisation of lost Americans late in the Depression. Hawks was one of America's great directors of intelligent, adult films, but the misogyny and general antipathy of this film leave it a notch below his strongest work / Grant is unable to get into his tough guy persona and in a scene requiring some tenderness and tears, he is weak / The reviewers who claim that Grant doesn't play it serious enough are exactly missing the point - his seemingly breezy, actually brittle facade is the Lost Generation attitude. This is one of the great tough romances in which the real romance is with death itself. Angels is one of the greatest works of art to sneak out of the studio system in the guise of glamorous entertainment / Creaky and dated / Glorious.

IN NAME ONLY (1939)

Alec (Grant) is married "in name only" to Maida (, above left). They live together as an apparently happy couple until he meets and falls in love with widowed single mum Julie (Carole Lombard, above, right - see also Sinners In The Sun and The Eagle And The Hawk). Scheming Maida then does all she can to prevent the two making a life together. For its first 80 minutes, the film is a superior sudser with lovely performances from Cary and Carole (formerly Mrs and now Mrs ) sweeping all before them. In the last reel he takes improbably sick and it all gets a bit teary and melodramatic, but despite the high Kleenex quotient, In Name Only is 92 minutes rewardingly spent. Lombard made just four further films before her untimely death.

IMDb: Practically perfect. This heart-wrenching tale of forbidden love is one of the most satisfying weepies ever. Polished, expert and ultimately very moving. Don't miss this one / A little cornball in parts but overall it works / One of the great tearjerkers with three stars at their very best / Timeless / A forgotten classic / Take an interesting story about two more or less doomed lovers, add a much-deserved happy ending, cast three leads against type and hire some top-notch support. Then hand it over to a competent director, spend some money for plush production values and demand some snappy lines and lush camera work. What do you get? Not just a 40 carat weepie but one of the great love stories of all time / A forgotten gem - lovely / Classic Hollywood at its best / In this brilliant soap drama, Grant plays a man deprived of marital love who in striving for true love is frustrated by a vixen of a wife. I've seldom seen him in such a sad-faced role / Francis steals the show / I know this line is old and tired and said all the time but they just don't make 'em like this anymore / This film goes beyond typical love triangle theatrics to show just how mean-spirited divorce can get, although here the Kay Francis wife character gets a wonderful comeuppance. Highly recommended / Grant and Lombard, two actors meant to play opposite one another, were both better known for comedic than dramatic roles, but together pull this off very convincingly. It's a shame they didn't do more drama / Maida great impression / A fast, smartly written, involving drama, expertly played / Lombard shines / A joy from beginning to end.

HIS GIRL FRIDAY (1940)

Hit Broadway comedy The Front Page, about tabloid hacks on the police beat, was written by former Chicago reporters Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur and first produced in 1928. (Interestingly, the story of 1939 film Gunga Din, by the same writers, hinges on the same plot device of trying to dissuade some- one from leaving their job.) The Front Page was adapted for the screen in 1931 and 1974 under its original title and, with a romantic sub-plot added, in 1940 as His Girl Friday. It has also been produced on radio, TV and as . In this frenetic, mile-a-minute Howard Hawks adaptation, Grant and Rosalind Russell (above) turn in dazzling performances as Morning Post editor Walter Burns and his ex-wife (just back from Reno) and ex-ace reporter Hildy Johnson. At the start of proceedings, she's engaged to insurance salesman Ralph Bellamy (see also The Awful Truth, in which he plays a very similar patsy role) but, of course, a combination of Burns' scheming, circumstance and her irrepressible journalistic instincts conspire to bring her to her senses. Hawks (see also Bringing Up Baby and Only Angels Have Wings) had great difficulty casting this film. While the choice of Cary Grant was almost instantaneous, the casting of Hildy was a more extended process. At first, Hawks wanted Carole Lombard, whom he had directed in screwball comedy Twentieth Century, but the cost of hiring her - now a freelance - proved too expensive; Columbia could not afford her. Katharine Hepburn, , Margaret Sullivan, Ginger Rogers and Irene Dunne all turned the role down, Dunne because she felt the part was

too small. When Jean Arthur refused, the studio suspended her. was reportedly also considered. Hawks then turned to Rosalind Russell. In her autobiography, Life Is A Banquet, Russell wrote that she thought her role had fewer good lines than Grant's so she hired a writer to punch up her dialogue. With Hawks encouraging ad-libbing on set, Russell was able to slip in her writer's work. After Grant cottoned on, he greeted her each morning with "What have you got today?" He, too, ad-libbed, describing Bellamy's character by saying "He looks like that fellow in the movies, you know - Ralph Bellamy!" Columbia studio head Harry Cohn thought the remark too cheeky and ordered it removed, but Hawks insisted that it stay. When Grant's character is arrested for a kidnapping, he describes the horrendous fate suffered by the last person who crossed him: Archie Leach (Grant's own birth name).

His Girl Friday is noted for its rapid-fire repartee, using overlapping dialogue to make conversations sound more realistic. Although overlapping dialogue is specified and cued in the original play script, Hawks told Peter Bogdanovich:

I had noticed that when people talk, they talk over one another, especially people who talk fast or who are arguing or describing something. So we wrote the dialogue in a way that made the beginnings and ends of sentences unnecessary; they were there for overlapping.

To get the effect he wanted, with multi-track recording not yet available, Hawks had his sound mixer turn the various overhead mikes on and off as many as 35 times in a scene.

The film is a 92 minute, old school, harum-scarum delight.

IMDb: A gloriously funny romp, rightly remembered as one of the fastest-talking films ever made / One of the screen's finest comedies. Grant is fantastic and Russell equally brilliant in full comic mode. These two are on camera often and their dialogue together is like a frenzied waltz. Trying to follow every exact word, gesture and snarl is quite a task. Boy, does it sizzle! Well ahead of its time, the film also offers an interesting view on feminism thirty years before the concept became common currency. Making "Hildy Johnson" a woman to enhance his story was the best decision Hawks could have made / Hollywood favourite The Front Page has been remade many times - thrice under its original title, as a TV series, two TV productions and as the film Switching Channels. Plus, of course, His Girl Friday, possibly the best of them all / One of the true gems of Hollywood's most prolific era, with incredible pacing, acting, photography and that authentic, gritty feel associated with hard-boiled, anything for a story newspaper folk. Long one of my favourite films, His Girl Friday deserves to be watched over and over again, both for its great acting and also for all the dialogue that goes by so fast you can't catch it all in one pass / The best film version of The Front Page, and one of the funniest films ever made. The entire cast shines / Every good thing you've heard about this movie is true. One of the first films of the '40s and a highlight of the decade.

MY FAVORITE WIFE (1940)

This lumbering farce only flies at all because none of its characters will tell the truth, as common sense demands, making it an 88 minute investment offering too little return. Grant plays lawyer and father of two Nick Arden. Seven years after his wife Ellen (Irene Dunne, above, centre - see also The Awful Truth) supposedly drowned in the Pacific and just a few hours after his marriage to Bianca (, above left), Ellen reappears, leaving Nick with two wives and one quandary. Complications ensue when he learns that Ellen spent the seven years alone on a desert island with Burkett, played by Randolph Scott (second right above), a significant figure in Cary's life (see page four), appearing with Grant for the second and last time. True love prevails, of course, but the whole, while nicely played by all concerned, is ill-conceived and flat.

IMDb: A fine example of those early Grant farces in which he gawps, double-takes and mutters to himself as only he can / A Shakespearean masterpiece of farce, My Favorite Wife features shared rooms, opening and shutting doors, frustrated sexuality, mixed identities and wonderful flashes of whimsy such as the Burkett diving sequence that results in some of the most bizarre, incongruous, and side-splittingly funny visions ever seen on film / I was disappointed by the dismal treatment of Bianca. It wasn't her fault that Ellen wasn't dead, yet she is treated so rudely and offhandedly that I found it irritating and frustrating. In addition, the film was often simply not funny / Hopelessly outdated. Dunne and Grant are always fun to watch and there are some good bits here and there, but the "wrapper" storyline just doesn't cut it anymore / The expressions on Grant's face alone make this worth watching. He is delightful and the film just plain hilarious / Poorly written / Entertaining from beginning to end, with all the ingredients that make up a rom-com. Truly the yardstick for any subsequent romantic comedy.

THE HOWARDS OF VIRGINIA (aka The Tree Of Liberty) (1940)

This film, a boiled down version of Elizabeth Page's The Tree Of Liberty, follows the fortunes of Matthew Howard (Grant) from his early childhood in colonial, pre-revolutionary America through to the eve of Independence. Born a poor farm boy in class-conscious Virginia, he finds work (with the help of his friend Tom Jefferson) as a surveyor and quickly marries Jane Peyton, belle of the local aristocracy. Facing down prejudice from both sides of the class divide, he establishes a thousand acre plantation, sires three children - the first of whom, because lame, he spurns - goes into politics and then the army. Unusually for him, a miscast Grant fails to inhabit his character. His acting is unsubtle and his accent wanders alarming between English, Irish and American. The film, while moderately interesting, falls short of enthralling. Richard Carlson as Jefferson and Martha Scott as Jane both outshine Grant. 111 minutes.

IMDb: A catastrophic, emotionally unstirring period piece that engages top talent for all the wrong reasons / Howard is less a complicated man than a simple cipher / Grant donated his $40,000 salary to the war effort and continued to use his career to support the cause of the Allied forces fighting for freedom in Europe / Grant, cast against type as Matt Howard, takes a bit of getting used to in buckskins, but I liked his character- isation. In point of fact, to see the real Grant on screen, look at None But The Lonely Heart, Gunga Din or Sylvia Scarlett. That's Archie Leach. Cary Grant was the best role Cary Grant ever played / Interesting but not entertaining. Sadly, the script is weak, the acting uneven and the moral lessons unsubtle / The banal dialogue that closes the film is enough to make anyone wince. Possibly Grant's worst film / I liked this movie despite Grant's dreadful miscasting. His performance beggars all description / Tripe.

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY (1940)

George Cukor successfully transfers a hit Philip Barry play from stage to screen - as with Holiday (1938), so too The Philadelphia Story, with Oscar-nominated Kate Hepburn (above) reprising her 1939 Broadway role opposite Grant and James Stewart (above) in this peerless Pennsylvania high society rom-com. Though nominated five times, Stewart won his only Best Actor Oscar here. The Best Screenplay Award went to Donald Ogden Stewart, with Picture, Director and Supporting Actress (Ruth Hussey) all nominated also. Another Maltin four star special. 112 minutes. Highly recommended.

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What exactly does it mean when they say They don't make 'em like that any more? Usually it's in reference to movies of the '30s, '40s and '50s - movies like Casablanca, The Maltese Falcon or indeed The Philadelphia Story. As much as one feels that the statement has any validity (and I feel it does), I think it refers to a pretty complex combination of factors, including the power of the studio system, the comparatively limited (or localised, as in non-global) reach of the media in that period and the more parochial expectations audiences had of their 'stars' then, when they generally turned up to a James Stewart movie expecting to see much the same James Stewart they'd seen before, rather than a James Stewart who had lost four stone, grown a beard and learned ju-jitsu in order to play a rebel Tibetan monk. If I had to boil it down to one tangible

quality, however, I'd have to say innocence. The so-called Golden Era of Holly- wood occurred before the advent of mass-media marketing, GDP-sized budgets and obsessive audience testing. It's not that performers of this era didn't mug any less grossly than today or that there weren't scads of terrible films, or that Hollywood was any less of a soulless, ruthless, talent-gobbling machine. But the cinema was still a relatively new invention and the audience's relationship with it had yet to be coarsened by repetition and betrayal. So films like The Philadelphia Story, even in their haphazardness and cliché, carry a sort of lovely scent with them, a whiff of something almost never detected in today's multi- plexes, and that is charm.

Following her divorce from boat designer / playboy C. K. Dexter Haven (Grant), wealthy Pennsylvania socialite Tracy Lord (Hepburn) is on the eve of her next wedding to self-made businessman George Kittredge (John Howard). Haven still has designs on her and tries to discredit the union by arranging for two reporters from Spy magazine to be invited to the Lord family home: struggling writer Macaulay Connor (Stewart) and snapper Liz Imbrie (Hussey, above). The two hapless journalists are pulled into a sequence of acid exchanges involving Haven, Tracy, her younger sister Dinah () and Uncle Willie (Roland Young). That evening, Tracy is forced to confront aspects of herself she has always denied and, during a long party, finds herself strongly attracted to the secretly sensitive Macaulay. As the wedding day dawns, Tracy has to choose which of the three men she will spend the rest of her life with …

Wealthy, high-spirited, sporty, upper class young socialite, the role of Tracy Lord could have been written for Hepburn - and it was! Philip Barry originally wrote the stage play The Philadelphia Story for Hepburn and it was a huge

success, helping return her star to the ascendant after a period in which she'd been deemed 'box office poison'. Hepburn's lover Howard Hughes bought her the film rights, allowing her considerable control of the forthcoming movie project, though not enough to get her choice of leading men: having wanted Clark Gable and , she got Cary Grant and James Stewart - hardly a bum deal. Cukor had already worked with Hepburn and Grant (and on a Barry / Ogden Stewart piece, no less) in Holiday so was a natural choice to direct and Joe Mankiewicz came in to produce. How could it fail?

It didn't. In fact The Philadelphia Story succeeds on just about every level. The way in which the idle rich of Philadelphia manipulate the less well heeled into being audiences for their grandiose personal dramas - as if they are incapable of even swapping barbs without witnesses - is immaculately drawn. The film is also quite daring for 1940, intimating Grant's alcoholism and Hepburn's frigidity. The way these issues are referred to indirectly, even poetically, is quite fascinating. It's another of those instances where having to work in a much more censorious age forced the filmmakers to employ ingenious methods to get their points across, with sometimes bewitching results.

It's also an example of perfect casting: Grant as the suave and smarmy divorcee, Stewart as the chippy writer with the hidden poet's heart and Hepburn as the icy socialite heading for a fall. But don't think the terrific cast ends with the three leads; there isn't a dull or ill-starred performer anywhere, standouts being Virginia Weidler as Tracy's precocious younger sister Dinah and Roland Young as the amorous and amoral Uncle Willie. British actor Henry Daniell's deliciously acidic tones also grace the film in an early scene, in his appearance as publisher Sidney Kidd.

Most importantly, the script is extremely funny. There are many utterly brilliant exchanges in The Philadelphia Story, sometimes almost surreally dry. For instance, early in the film Haven enters the office of Sidney Kidd, publisher of sleazy Hello! predecessor Spy magazine. He regards him coldly:

Kidd: I understand we understand each other. Haven: Quite.

Or when Haven meets Tracy for the first time with her current fiancé, George Kittredge:

Haven: You should have stuck to me longer. Tracy: I thought it was for life but the nice judge gave me a full pardon.

Or when Haven approaches Tracy and Connor, who are taking breakfast before a swim:

Haven: Orange juice? Certainly. Tracy: Don't tell me you've forsaken your beloved whiskey and whiskeys?

Or when Liz calls at Haven's house to fetch Connor, who is drunkenly forcing Haven to type a letter to Kidd:

Liz: We've come for the body of Macauley Connor. Haven: Can you use a typewriter? Liz: No thanks, I have one at home.

And so on - terrific, spot-on dialogue, perfectly delivered. Hepburn's extraord- inary voice, which makes one think of purring cats, burnt treacle and polished wood, lilts archly throughout the film. With Grant's famously ironic tones and Stewart's Pennsylvanian drawl thrown into the mix, the three leads weave a kind of hypnotic music simply through talking. This film is a delight.

Richard Curtis's Love Actually (2003) carried the unbelievably arrogant tagline The Ultimate Romantic Comedy. Such an appellation could, in contrast, be truthfully applied to The Philadelphia Story. The casting is perfect, the script dazzles and the chemistry between its leads could hardly be bettered.

Nat Tunbridge, The Digital Fix, 20 April 2005

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PENNY SERENADE (1941)

Told in flashback, Penny Serenade serves up a long, slow and glutinous account of a couple's adoption and loss of a child, with the whole redeemed (or spoiled, depending on your point of view) by the unnecessary addition of a deus ex machina "happy" ending. Tearjerking treacle, though good of its kind, it stars Irene Dunne (above) in her third and last collaboration with Grant (see also The Awful Truth and My Favorite Wife). Grant's performance earned him a first of two Oscar nominations (the other for None But The Lonely Heart). During her 41-film career, Dunne was nominated no fewer than five times (including for The Awful Truth) but, like Grant, never won. 117 minutes. For genre fans only.

IMDb: If you can watch and not blubber, you're probably from another planet / Falling in love, best friends, career challenges, pregnancy, miscarriage, infertility, adoption, death, separation - it's all covered in this one sweet little film, and all told in a way that reminds us all how important music is as it sets the soundtrack to our lives. This lovely film may not be Citizen Kane, but is definitely worth your time / A cute first ninety-five minutes is ruined by the last twenty. Oh, you've just lost your child? No problem, here's another. Children aren't goldfish! Crass and insensitive / A dreary, manipulative and depressing little film that gives good tearjerkers a bad name! / A perfect example of how pace and editing can make or break a movie - and this one doesn't quite make it / Boring, sentimental tosh in which the leads are too old for their parts / Grant is pitch perfect in his entirely assured performance, especially during his moving monologue before the judge / The film's comic and tragic elements do not sit easily together and the ending is a particularly implausible way of providing a "happy ending" / Overlong and overblown with a forced and stale plot. Only the presence of the two great stars lifts it above the level of mediocrity. The ending in particular is unconvincing.

SUSPICION (1941)

Though bounder Johnnie (Grant) marries country mouse Lina (Joan Fontaine, above) for both love and money, it's the latter he's most in need of, though not, since he's averse to work, honestly earned. So he sponges off his friends, steals cash from his employer and even surreptitiously sells his wife's treasured heirloom. Then his well-to-do best friend Beaky dies mysteriously and Lina's suspicions begin to grow. Though Suspicion gives us the chance to see Grant finally flex his serious acting muscle, it does so too diffidently, for in Before The Fact, the 1932 Francis Iles novel on which the film is based, Johnnie is a thief, forger, embezzler, serial adulterer and double murderer. Grant's character, in contrast, is merely feckless - Hitchcock's twist being that ultimately the worst of Lina's fears prove to be unfounded. Apparently someone (accounts vary) believed that audiences would be reluctant to accept Grant as a killer - but it's surely the book that tells a more coherent, convincing and compelling tale and it seems a shame it wasn't more faithfully filmed. All the same, Suspicion - the first of four Grant / Hitchcock collaborations - was well enough received to be Best Picture Oscar nominated. It also scooped for Fontaine her only Academy Award. 99 minutes. Good though disappointingly faint-hearted.

* * * * *

Harmless liar or murderous cad? Lina thinks that her new husband may be planning to kill her for her inheritance and her suspicion is eating away at her marriage. One of Hitchcock's earliest films on American soil finds him doing what he does best - coyly playing with audience's expectations and taking tension to the absolute breaking point. Made the year after Rebecca and starring the same leading actress, Joan Fontaine, Suspicion shares the stage with Spellbound, Notorious and the aforesaid Rebecca as

one of the acclaimed director's best films of the 1940s. Despite the infamous studio tampering and a less than meaty plot, the film is thoroughly Hitchcockian, a textbook example of suspense both entertaining and absorbing. Suspicion has the distinction of feeling like a Hitchcock of old, but with a better budget, star power, and solid visual imagery. Like several of his earlier British films, it is almost a pure exercise in tension, uncomplicated by political contexts and world events that would sometimes serve to draw the viewer away from the immediate action on screen. The film even boasts a similar atmosphere to his British films, with a European setting and a polished cast of English supporting actors.

Suspicion's straightforward plot is a classic model of the way Hitchcock expertly presses his audience's buttons as he slowly cranks up the pressure in each successive scene. Presented through Lina's viewpoint, which shifts from blind love to acute paranoia throughout the course of the film, the viewer is forced to question Johnnie's motives at every turn. This makes for some memorable moments, including an anagram game with Scrabble tiles, in which Hitchcock puts you directly in Lina's chair. Point-of- view shots slowly reveal words like "doubt" and "murder," which leads to a frightening fantasy of Beaky plummeting to his death from the very cliff that their business was devised to develop. As Hitchcock steadily and beautifully builds to the film's climax, Lina turns into a blubbering victim-to-be of her own accord and Johnnie ascends the stairs to the bedroom with a potentially poisoned glass of milk. Although the conclusion is famous for suffering under studio tampering and is usually cited as a weak compro- mise in light of the scripted ending, the first ninety minutes of suspense are far more important. There is a reason the film is called Suspicion and not Fears Confirmed or Doubts Eased, as the true enjoyment in the film comes from an awareness of the sly methods that Hitchcock is using to play with our perceptions.

Fontaine gives a virtual repeat of her performance from Rebecca: a reserved young lady who impetuously and unknowingly marries into a dangerous situation. Although this performance garnered her the 1941 Academy Award for Best Actress, most feel that the nod was more to make up for her loss the previous year, and I'd have to agree. She certainly does a fine job as her nagging doubts drive her increasingly mad, but she is completely overshadowed by Grant who is wonderfully ambiguous as womanising gambler Johnnie. Grant projects a steady threat of violence, as though he could go over the edge from debonair to deadly at any moment. Hitchcock heightens the sense of danger as much as possible, forcing his audience to constantly wonder if "Monkey Face," his cute pet name for Lina, is as cruelly mocking as it implies or if his intention in grabbing his wife-to-be on the top of a cliff is to toss her off or to fix her hair. It is surely on the strength of his performance here that Grant went on to appear in three more of Hitch's finer films, Notorious, To Catch A Thief and North By Northwest.

Eventually, though, this unrelenting emphasis on the nature of Johnnie's character starts to get tiresome. Not much seems to happen in the film that isn't meant to throw further uncertainty on Johnnie's character, from the mysterious disappearance of Lina's father's antique chairs to a speedy car trip along the dangerous cliff. Like most of Hitchcock's pictures from the early 1940s, Suspicion is enthralling, but overlong, just on the cusp of wearing out its welcome.

Paul Corupe, DVD Verdict, 11 October 2004

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When his Paramount contract expired in 1937, Grant chose not to sign with another studio. Instead, by selecting his own films, scripts and directors, he put his personal stamp on the screwball comedy genre. As sophisticated as his characters seemed, they were never above a pratfall, setting Grant apart from other leading men of the time and making him the perfect foil for the comic hi- jinks initiated by screwball's wacky heroines. Grant and his co-stars operated on the same plane, neither quite gaining the upper hand. He converted screw- ball comedy into a two-character, upper-class, adult slapstick parlour game. Though his first hit was Topper, it was The Awful Truth that made him a star. For the next three years, Grant appeared in a succession of hits - Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, Gunga Din, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, My Favorite Wife and The Philadelphia Story - each of which honed his image to a fine gloss. By 1940, Cary Grant had become an archetype. But, after this amazing string, his career faltered, courtesy of films that were either atrocious mistakes (Once Upon A Honeymoon), bland fantasies (The Bishop's Wife) or wholesome pap (Room For One More). When Grant tried something different, something closer to his roots, as the poor East End drifter in None But The Lonely Heart, he was working against a persona that was so implanted and perfected that his characterisation seemed ineffective and forced. He had become so much of an ideal that to play a normal person on the screen seemed impossible. Instead, his best roles resulted in his playing off his film image, exposing it and exploiting it, particularly in his work with Hitchcock. Critic Pauline Kael suggests that were it not for Alfred Hitchcock, Grant might have slipped into latter day obscurity. It was Hitchcock who rescued him from the sentimental forties glop like Penny Serenade where he was mired after his thirties screwball heyday ... Many find Suspicion and Grant's character, Johnnie Aysgarth, problematic. There is that pesky ending dictated by the studio's refusal to see Grant as a murderer (cheating, lying and stealing apparently being acceptable to execs). The tacked on ending is jarring but doesn't compromise Grant's performance as much as some would suggest. Whichever way it ends, the significant part of the story is that Lina thinks he is going to kill her - the drama, whether real or imagined, is played in her mind. What other actor could make her resistance to flee in the face of her fears so believable? ... Aysgarth is one of the few Grant characters who actively goes after a woman. But never, in his pursuit of mousy Lina do we see him as a victim of love. Even as the hunter, he is still the love object. Grant's Aysgarth is a festival of the irresponsible and the irresistible, exuberantly bearing mink coats and puppies while continuing to indulge in his more nefarious habits. He smoothly plays the darkness beneath the light.

Hitchcock.tv / Elisabeth Karlin, 16 January 2011

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THE TALK OF THE TOWN (1942)

George Stevens (Gunga Din, Penny Serenade) directs Grant for a third time, Jean Arthur (Only Angels Have Wings) joins him for a second time and Ronald Colman (above) for the one and only time in this seven times Oscar nominated drama cum treatise cum rom-com about justice, the theory and practice of law and, naturally, who gets the girl? Grant plays a man who, while standing trial for arson and murder, breaks jail and hides out in Arthur's house, just before Harvard law professor Colman occupies it as a summer tenant. He initially declines to become interested in a minor local court case but is brought to realise that the law is more than merely a dry, academic subject of study. Like Gunga Din or She Done Him Wrong, this is another Grant film that, while perf- ectly pleasant and well played, struggles to justify four Maltin stars. 112m.

IMDb: Absolutely delightfully enjoyable / A lot of the suspense that might have been put into the story was bled out by the philosophical approach the film takes - but that's part of the fun! It gets rolling, and you can't quite tell where it's going. Watching Grant mug suavely and Arthur speak like she's ad-libbing, you just have to sit back and enjoy it. It's not interested in manipulating its audience so much as presenting real characters in a compelling story. I loved it! / Despite the witty script and the winning combination of three great stars - Grant, Arthur and Colman - something is seriously wrong with this sophisticated story that strikes an uneven balance between comedy and drama. It's unpredictable - and that's usually a compliment - but this time it's not because you have no idea where the story is going until you're halfway through, and even then you're not quite sure. The somewhat dated story and screenplay were both nominated for Oscars, along with technical nominations and Best Picture (at a time when ten films were nominated for that award rather than today's five). Strangely enough, the film has fallen

between the cracks and is seldom ever talked about or mentioned by film buffs recalling the greats of the golden years. Perhaps it's that, despite its significant social commentaries having to do with law, justice and fugitives, it is so strangely offbeat in conception that it doesn't fit a particular category of film. Grant is in fine form as a man hiding from the law who takes refuge in Arthur's house. She as a teacher and Colman as a stuffy lawyer come off second best in what seems like a muddled script, Oscar nominated or not. Something is definitely missing - and it's that missing ingredient that may have led to it being considered a forgotten film. For me, more of a curiosity piece than anything else / The plot is almost secondary and not incredibly ingenious. What makes this film so great is the brilliant script and interaction between the three leads. I don't think Grant was one of the better actors of his day. He has been funnier (Bringing Up Baby), more cynical (Notorious) and more dramatic (Only Angels Have Wings) but in my opinion this is his best overall performance. Colman was simply a brilliant actor who didn't have enough chances to shine in a film like this, and Arthur was never more adorably inept. This absolutely fantastic film is one of the most underrated and unjustly forgotten of the studio era / A movie with a little bit of everything - comedy, drama, romance, social commentary, suspense and mystery - plus three of the most charming stars ever to grace the screen / Flawless Arthur at her zenith / Until 12 Angry Men (1957), the best movie about the philosophy and reality of the law / Social commentary either elevates the value of a film or bogs it down, and with comedies it is generally the latter. The Talk Of The Town is no exception; while it is a fun film that has much to admire, the pretensions of the filmmakers often get in the way of what could have been a masterpiece of comic suspense. The tone becomes almost unbearably preachy at times and some of the monologues on "justice" and "the pursuit of truth" are excruciating. Thankfully, the good people at Columbia hired just the right people to star in this classic example of skilled performers triumphing over flawed material / The film's issues are timeless, making it all the more important to see it whenever the chance arises.

Jean Arthur and a temporarily-bearded Ronald Colman

ONCE UPON A HONEYMOON (1942)

Remarkably clear-sighted and forthright about the Nazi menace, this uneasy made-to-order mix of propaganda and entertainment pairs Grant for the first time (see also Monkey Business) with a non singing, non dancing Ginger Rogers (above). Unfortunately, the film, directed by Leo (The Awful Truth) McCarey, sinks itself from the off by presenting the Rogers character as a remarkably stupid and selfish American showgirl on the make, who, within twenty film minutes, metamorphoses into a clued-up, would be double agent, impossible to warm to. Walter Slezak as her husband, "Hitler's fingerman", performs creditably but the whole is cold, calculating, contrived and not worth the effort of finding. 115 minutes.

IMDb: Grant's worst film - the jokes are terrible, the story is ludicrous and the ending so stupid! / Thin on plot but high on patriotism / A delightful diversion. Don't miss it / A major dud / This bi-polar attempt to balance tragedy, farce and flippancy tips over more than once / Although an intriguing curiosity, the film never resolves its schizoid tension. The Nazi characters are more cartoonish that frightening and what comedy there is is overshadowed by the sincere attempt to portray the threat to European Jewry. The ending is abrupt and doesn't really resolve anything. Grant and Rogers do their best but their efforts are ultimately in vain. The scene where the Allied agent tries to prove his American heritage is painful / A hapless mess that has to be seen to be disbelieved / Students of film could hardly see a more exact example of filmmakers attempting to explore a topic that is just too much to handle with so little understanding and a resolution yet to come / RKO's surreal attempt to blend Hollywood glamour with Nazi evil is woefully miscalculated / Comedy in the face of tragedy - a worthy effort.

MR. LUCKY (1943)

In this enjoyable film, draft-dodging gambler Grant plans to fleece a War Relief charity of big bucks but has a change of heart, courtesy of a girl he meets and a letter from Greece. He comes up with lots of "Australian" Cockney rhyming slang, learns to knit and eventually takes a bullet for his pains, but all ends happily, of course. With and Henry Stephenson. 100 minutes.

IMDb: Beautifully photographed in black and white with lots of interesting shadows and fog - the director's remarkable eye helps turn what could have been just a vehicle for Grant into a real work of art / A great Grant movie that never takes itself too seriously. The plot is easy to follow and the acting well done / An interesting character study and welcome change from more usual Grant fare / Including many moments that match Grant's best, Mr. Lucky is funny, fast paced, easy on the eye and blessed with a great supporting cast. What's not to like? / Once again, as in Suspicion, Grant plays a rat who has rehabilitation forced on him by a craven, populist script. Yet, since Mr. Lucky was RKO's second biggest hit of 1943, it's clear the studio knew what it was doing in not letting his character remain a heel. Try as he might, Grant struggled in vain to persuade studios to see him as anything other than an urbane charmer. Eventually he surrendered to the power of his image and just went with it / A wonderful and some- what surprising picture in which Grant plays against type and Day is stunning / One of Grant's finest films / A light, romantic drama, full of more tense moments than comedic ones, with the best scene Cary's "repentance" in the church / A magical movie - one of the best I've seen / A delightful slew of romance, comedy, drama, conmen, gambling, crime, socialites running charity balls, knitting, Cockney rhyming slang, war and, most of all, heart. Those who consider Grant's acting skills overrated should watch this film. Fully transported into his character, he brings us right along for a real surprise.

DESTINATION TOKYO (1943)

A solid, morale boosting sub saga, not excessively gung ho, though, of course, the Japs get it right and left in the end. Captain Grant leads his crew across the Pacific and into Tokyo Bay to land spies ashore to recce ahead of a seaborne air attack, with a doctor-free, by-the-book appendectomy and extended (and, by now, very familiar) depth charging sequence thrown in for good measure. With an overacting . 129 minutes. Surprisingly accomplished.

IMDb: The warmth and togetherness of the crew is a very true depiction of life inside a WW II submarine / A top-notch underwater fiesta / Made during the height of the war and before it was a foregone conclusion that the Allies would prevail, Destination Tokyo shows a surprisingly detailed (if romanticised) portrayal of life in the Silent Service. The characters are finely drawn with a craftsman director's skill and are the archetypes for subsequent films, not derivative cartoons. An invaluable bona fide classic / A memorable epic which, like Casablanca, tells a story with a sense of urgency, rooted in reality, that we cannot recreate today / A crackerjack movie with a workmanlike cast in which no one disappoints. You'll find every cliché in the book, very nicely buffed, some of which had not yet become clichés. The film is not a thought piece; is craftsmanship not Art, but one you won't quickly forget / Despite the toy boats and cut-price special effects (remember, too, this was wartime and a very long time ago), this excellent film stands up well beside later sub classics such as Das Boot or Run Silent, Run Deep / This film is important both because it is based upon the success of a real sub in action (the USS Wahoo) and because it was one of the early submarine films of WWII / Every sub film eventually falls back on the same clichés and Destination Tokyo is no different / This gritty, tightly plotted film moves with a pace that never flags despite its lengthy runtime. It neither stretches credibility nor once descends into simplistic propaganda, managing to avoid much of the ugly racism that mars many other war-themed movies from this era. Grant, cast against type, gives a masterful performance with aplomb / Both Grant and the film are terrific.

ONCE UPON A TIME (1944)

Grant marks time in a feeble fable about Curly the dancing caterpillar. With its end never in doubt, surely 's sanity was! This pap for the war-weary has not aged well. With (above) and Janet Blair. 88 minutes.

IMDb: A wonderful story for grown-ups and a fairy tale for kids The redemption of Jerry Flynn (Grant's character) is a joy to watch / Even with one hundred and fifteen credited actors, the real star in this movie is Fantasy / The rather fanciful plot is a wonderful metaphor for life and love. Very heart-warming with a brilliant ending / What was Cary Grant thinking? / Grant had the uncanny knack of making even the most hollow tripe seem like cinematic high art, but the genuine surprise in this film is not how irrepressibly charming he is, but how willingly he steps into the unbecoming role of the villain who eventually chooses goodness over celebrity - a subtle bit of advice that most stars of today would do well to heed. Once Upon A Time is not high art, but remains nonetheless an enjoyable film hemmed in by a finely wrought performance / Once Upon A Time, based on a successful radio play by Norman Corwin called My Client Curly, is a minor Cary Grant comedy that came out just before his greatest performance as Ernie Mott in None But The Lonely Heart / Throughout, there is a beautiful philosophy of faith / A box-office disaster in 1944, the film has not improved with age / You'll love the obvious but surprise ending. Yes, that's a contra- diction, but just watch it for yourself. A great and the kind they can't make anymore, for, if they did, you'd probably be disappointed because Curly just wouldn't live up to your imagination / One of the schmaltziest, sappiest, dumbest films I have seen in some time - and it stars Cary Grant at the height of his career! / I'm a huge Grant fan, so I'm glad I saw this excruciating movie. However, I don't care to watch it ever again / A fine family film that holds up well / Grant effortlessly carries this mildly entertaining offbeat gem / Shallow and tedious / A long 90 minutes / Really?

ARSENIC AND OLD LACE (1944)

Hollywood has probably always kept its eye on Broadway, on the lookout for both emerging talent and potentially lucrative properties. Thus, when Joseph Kesselring's Arsenic And Old Lace premiered to acclaim in January 1941, was quick to buy the screen rights. Though he completed his adaptation just before America entered the war in December 1941, the film could not released, by prior agreement, until the play finished its Broadway run in June 1944. Grant leads a well-versed cast (both old ladies and the mad son were in the stage production) with aplomb. Though his acting is broad - he himself thought it horribly so, often citing Arsenic as the least favourite of all his films - he was instructed by Capra to give just such a performance, which the material stands perfectly well. Indeed, for a wartime audience, the film is just what the doctor ordered - and a tonic still. With Priscilla Lane (above), Edward Everett Horton (see Holiday etc) and . 113 minutes. Recommended.

Differences between play and film: The play is set entirely in the Brewsters' living room, so there are no visits to the judge or the doctor or the street outside. Also, the play is set in early September whereas the film is set on Halloween. The idea of Mortimer writing anti-marriage books was wholly a film invention - in the play he was simply a drama critic. Mortimer and Elaine are engaged in the play rather than just married (and it's implied that they've indulged in a bit of premarital fun, which would have been against the Production Code in the 1940s). Neither would the Code have countenanced Mortimer's triumphant shout in the play: I'm not a Brewster, I'm a bastard! which became in the film I'm the son of a sea cook! In the original Broadway play, played Jonathan, but since the producers wouldn't release him to

make the film, Raymond Massey assumed the role on screen. Consequently, when the policeman tells Jonathan that he looks like Boris Karloff, it was a lot more meaningful in the play because the actor actually was Boris Karloff. Finally, the play has an entirely different ending where Mr. Witherspoon from the sanatorium ends up being the aunts' final victim by sipping some of the poisoned wine as the curtain falls.

IMDb: Led by the perfectly cast Grant, the film barely pauses for breath, stopping only briefly to put a bit of creepy menace into the otherwise insane plot. An out and out joy / So hilarious. A true classic / One of the best comedies of all time with dark humour, frantic situations and excellent performances / Capra wonderfully combines slapstick, screwball, antics and sharp dialogue to produce a gem / An inspired black comedy. Capra keeps things moving at a breakneck pace / Grant pulls off the comedy coup of his career with the performance of a lifetime / Black comedy was never better than this. Timing, delivery, choreography - perfect. Enjoy! / What fun to see a different side to Grant, and, despite his own reservations, how great he is / More than seventy years on, Arsenic And Old Lace will still fracture the funny bone in you / Superb.

John Alexander, Jean Adair and , who all reprised their stage roles in Frank Capra's screen adaptation of Arsenic And Old Lace

NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART (1944)

John Ford's How Green Was My Valley (1941), winner of five Oscars including Best Picture, was based on the 1939 best-selling first novel of Hendon-born Richard Llewellyn. No surprise, then, that his 1943 follow up, None But The Lonely Heart, was snapped up for adaptation too - though with less obviously profitable results. RKO's production is low-key and moody, befitting the piece, perhaps, but its quasi-profound narrative fails to compel. It concerns Ernie Mott (Grant), a quixotic, free-thinking but narrow drifter who returns briefly to his East End roots, only to be trapped there by his mother's terminal illness and his own inability to break away. Though well cast, acted and shot and projecting an authentic sincerity, this dated film is finally hard to warm to. 113 minutes.

IMDb: A fine old film. In Ernie Mott, Grant plays one of his most substantial roles. Set in the underbelly of between-wars London, this multifaceted story has engrossing characters and a story that draws us in. The inconclusive ending puts it more or less in the category of 'slice-of-life' drama - but what a slice! Worth watching / In both Mr. Lucky and None But The Lonely Heart, Grant's character starts out being cynical in the sense of guys who are prematurely disappointed in the future. He lives like a dog that will succeed by biting and outfoxing everyone. Then he is humanised - but without loosing his cynical edge. On the contrary, we see here a key into the elegance that was Grant. He lives by denying and accepting society - a suave, cool-hearted knave. You can see that he denies society for the very reason that he is convinced it will not fail: because he accepts life's contradictions. He gets on with it. Most important of all, he is loyal to the few good things in life. In short, we were fortunate to have Grant and Mr.

Lucky and None But The Lonely Heart - Grant-branded jewels cast in timeless celluloid / Grant's Ernie is a combination of dark brooding and sanguine pathos - but all the cast are excellent and bring the poetic language of the script to life / Be a victim or be a thug. Suppose you don't want to be either? A great movie / Painful but interesting, memorable but depressing / This earnest turn at portraying Cockney life quickly becomes a fascinating story with strong characterisation. The initial narration, a touch overdone, gives a tantalising glance at future events that never appear in the film. At first, Grant seems to be playing his part with a strange over-zealous streak but we rapidly understand that this is the nature of his Ernie Mott - a happy-go-lucky sort with a brooding sense of social injustice. Everything bad comes with a dose of sugar, a kiss if you like, to sweeten the experience and make life seem better than it really is. This is one of those pictures that plays out like a languishing soap opera - insightful and compassionate with moments of excitement. This would probably work today as a remake, though I suspect the directors would play up the sex and violence to such a level that the real essence of 'want and need' would be lost / A unique film, showing a side of Grant rarely seen, though his charm still comes through, even without the usual polish / Probably the closest thing to an Art film that Grant ever did, Heart oozes with atmosphere and character study while remaining strangely static in terms of dramatic thrust / Not your typical funny or adventurous Grant film but, rather, a serious and touching portrait of a man trying to do the right thing for the first time in his life. A well made drama in which Grant (Oscar nominated for the second time) gives one of his greatest performances / Grant's talent shines through despite a weak screenplay and ham-fisted direction. As you watch the film you sense that he wasn't acting so much as revealing who Cary Grant truly was - not the suave, debonair gentlemen cat burglar seducing but the street-wise kid who grew up in the rough, a sweet Cockney hustler with a talent for joyful mimicry. This was the real Grant, no acting, and, on that level, this is a most wonderful film and a fans' must-see / When Grant tried something different, something closer to his roots, as the poor East End drifter in None But The Lonely Heart, he was working against a persona so implanted and perfected that his characterisation seemed ineffective and forced / Ethel Barrymore, returning to the screen for the first time in a decade as Ernie's mother, is superb / Like the equally typecast in Nightmare Alley, Grant here drew great critical reviews only to find the public wouldn't buy it / Grant's ineptness, because so rare, is revealing. It suggests a conflict, seen especially early in the film, between being "Cary Grant", being that Archie Leach-type character he spent his entire life disguising and delivering what the part required. Maybe something personal was at stake, but that doesn't necessarily result in a good movie, as this unsatisfying vanity-project flop confirms.

NIGHT AND DAY (1946)

Directed by (Angels With Dirty Faces, Casablanca etc), this soft focus, saccharine, drama-lite Cole Porter biopic was released two years before the composer's best-remembered musical, Kiss Me, Kate and eighteen years before his death in 1964, aged 73, making it not only heavily fictionalised (in respect of his war record and sexuality especially) but incomplete. Grant, always easy on the eye - and now in colour! - turns in his usual polished performance but non-Porterheads would do well to pass. With Jane Wyman. 128 minutes.

IMDb: Long on great music and everything looks wonderful in glowing - but if you want a Porter bio, try the library / You might think that, with 27 Cole Porter songs to exploit and a large cast of top-flight singers and dancers to present them, Hollywood couldn't miss - yet this purported biography of the composer-lyricist responsible for possibly the best popular music of the 20th century sinks to a level of mediocrity, so far as the "dramatic" material is concerned, rarely equalled in the long history of bad films about real people / That Hollywood biopics pick and choose facts for presentation should be no surprise, but this movie actually perverts circumstances. A very poor effort / The acting, sets, songs and music are pleasant enough - but hardly anything shines / Though the biographical aspects of this quaint movie fall way short of accuracy, that should not affect one's enjoyment of watching a well directed musical with Cary Grant and lots of other very good actors, including Jane Wyman, a smart looking Ginny Simms, many fine specialty dancers and, of course, "Introducing " even though hers was a small part / Lavish but plodding. Fails even as fiction / Keep an open mind and enjoy / Porter, flawed as he was, deserves a less flawed biopic than this / Check this picture out to see a prime example of screenwriters, a director and a star who work hard to suggest what they cannot actually say.

NOTORIOUS (1946)

Grant's second Hitchcock turn casts him as Devlin, an American Secret Service agent tasked with escorting Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman, second left above) down to Rio so she can infiltrate a clique of German businessmen to find out what they're up to. Alicia is chosen for the job following her German father's conviction for treason against the U.S. (though she herself is loyal). She quickly not only establishes herself within the group but agrees to marry boss man and former admirer Claude Rains (above - see also The Last Outpost). After discovering her true allegiance, he and his mother (Leopoldine Konstantin, above) set about poisoning her. Alicia becomes aware she is being poisoned, but what can she do? Can Cary save the day? Written by Ben (Gunga Din, His Girl Friday) Hecht, Notorious is weakly plotted (though Hecht and Rains were both Oscar nominated) and fails to thrill - though many love it. 97 minutes.

IMDb: Thrills, romance, humour and compelling drama - the very definition of a perfect film / Grant gives one of the great understated performances of this or any film. He lets subtle things such as the way he moves his eyes or tilts his head convey more than words ever could and his chemistry with Bergman is all the more erotic for being so subtly expressed. Less is definitely more / Grant, who could be charming, sophisticated, urbane, serious, funny and downright goofy in the many roles he played, was one of the most underrated actors of his time. His "wooden" acting here was required by the part and (presumably) director / An enjoyable film spoiled by its ending / The ending is perfect: suspenseful, quietly poignant and quietly powerful with a sense of irony that is subtle through rich. Brilliant / Ignore the "uranium ore" guff. Hecht's highly symbolic, literate and penetrating script is nothing less than a dark fugue on alcoholism and the invasion of privacy with the Oedipus complex in all its ardour woven in too.

THE BACHELOR AND THE BOBBY-SOXER (aka The Bachelor Knight) (1947)

Fun story about 17 year old (above, centre) getting a crush on Grant, a footloose artist twice her age. In the course of scheming to get her over it, elder sister Myrna Loy, a judge (above, right), falls for him herself. The worst thing about this film - the best of the three Grant-Loy pairings (see also Wings In The Dark and Mr. Blandings) - is its clunky title. 95 minutes. Good.

IMDb: An all-star cast deliver the Best Original Screenplay of 1947 / Nothing terribly original but a pleasant diversion. Grant is entertaining as always and Loy fits the judge role nicely. Hard to believe that this movie, in which Shirley Temple plays a high schooler, was actually toward the tail end of her film career. What a waste that we didn't see more of her later / The only problem with the film, given its great cast and very funny script, is that the comedic element triumphs at the expense of the romantic. There aren't half as many scenes between Grant and Loy as I would have liked, and although Loy is convincing in her portrayal of Margaret - you really do believe that her character has fallen for Grant's - it certainly isn't with the help of the script. The film really belongs to Grant and Temple, who both get to show off their comic talents to great effect. While Loy makes an excellent straight woman, it is a shame that we didn't get to see more of her, or more of her character interacting with Grant's. All in all, great fun, laughs and cast - but romance? Well, that would probably have to come from another film / Loy does wonders with her role as Judge Turner, Grant brings his natural elegance to the part of Richard Nugent - just watch him in the picnic competition - and Temple is a sweet Susan, the girl infatuated with Dickie. In minor roles, Rudy Vallee and are perfectly cast / One of Grant's best comic roles, and Loy is excellent. Temple absolutely shines as the wilful yet innocent little sister full of romantic dreams of an older man, and steals quite a few of the laughs. If you fancy a

light-hearted caper, this truly delightful film is for you! / A bit dated. I don't think you could make it today with the same charm and innocence, but a joy to watch on its own terms. Highly recommended / Clever without being profound, with characters that are unusually believable and well-developed / Grant gets many chances to show off his flair for physical comedy, Temple is no less grating as a young adult than she was as a child and Loy, though in the movie a lot, is never given much to do. I've long since decided that Myrna Loy was one of the most underused actresses of her time. I'm still looking for a film that really allows her to strut her stuff / Good, old-fashioned, silly fun. Not one of the deeper or more sophisticated films Grant ever made, but cute and enjoyable. Playing his part very broadly, Cary is, at times, quite immature and goofy - and it is in these moments that the film is at its best. Not Arsenic And Old Lace - but what is?

Ah, the 1940s: a simpler, more innocent time … sort of. Can you imagine a studio today greenlighting a project in which, say, Tom Hanks is sentenced by a judge to date Hilary Duff? Neither can I. Imagine the protests by incensed parents and religious groups. While The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer steers clear of the more prurient possibilities inherent in its setup, it is hardly ignorant of them. Grant's gadfly, Richard Nugent, has less than pure motives in suggesting to Susan Turner she'd make a good model for his artistic study of American youth, but said motives don't involve the seduction of an underage girl. He just wants to get rid of her. Nugent is a man clearly accustomed to manipulating women both with his looks and by telling them what they want to hear. This time, his little white lies land him in a heap of trouble. And that's the secret charm of the film. This is not, after all, a romantic pairing of Cary Grant and Shirley Temple, but Grant and Myrna Loy. Judge Turner's method of

torturing and humiliating Nugent proves she's his equal in both intellect and playfulness. Like all screwball couples, Nugent and Turner are opposites - she the rational legal scholar, he the impetuous and intuitive artist - and we recognise immediately how perfectly they match. Ultimately, the film is an extended metaphor about the youthful exuberance of romantic love, the idea that a gloriously unselfconscious willingness to look and act a giddy fool is the lone province of children and lovers - even when those lovers are attractive and successful professionals in the throes of middle age.

The Bachelor And The Bobby-Soxer's first great asset is an Academy Award winning script by Sidney (I Dream Of Jeannie) Sheldon. Silly as the film's conceit is, Sheldon so packed his script with sharp, snappy dialogue, the actors aren't compelled to linger on funny lines or play them up like punchlines. The laughs unfurl almost continually and seemingly without effort. This consistently droll tone tides us over between the set pieces that offer the film's big laughs, including an opening courtroom sequence in which the hung-over patrons of the Vampire Club spar verbally with one another, and it becomes clear to audience and Judge Turner alike that the source of all the strife is Richard Nugent's carefree romantic manipulation of nearly every woman in his sphere of influence. One of the funniest sequences in the film, it also quickly and effortlessly establishes character and sets us up for the introduction of Nugent's entanglement with the underage girl. But the scene that ensured the film's fame and prestige (and probably won Sheldon the Oscar) is Nugent and Judge Turner's first date. As the two attempt to have dinner at the Vampire Club, their meal is interrupted by a series of unwanted guests, including Susan and her would-be boyfriend Jimmy, assistant D.A. Tommy Chamberlain and a brash couple from the opening courtroom sequence, each of them with his or her own bone to pick with Nugent. The scene is a perfectly-timed building of comic chaos and, set in the third act, toys with our eagerness to see Grant and Loy finally united.

Cary Grant's coupling of leading man good looks with impeccable comic timing and delivery proves indispensable here. Despite the quality of Sheldon's script, without Grant, around whom the entire setup coalesces, none of it would have worked. All of the actors handle the comedy with aplomb, but Grant is the powerhouse, and he's given ample opportunity to display the full range of his comic talents, from wry intelligence to goofiness infused with charm by his looks. And Richard Nugent escapes sleaziness in no small part because of the actor portraying him. How can we fault Nugent if a 17-year-old girl happens to fall in love with him? He looks like Cary Grant!

Dan Mancini, DVD Beaver, 28 June 2004

* * * * *

THE BISHOP'S WIFE (1947)

Released a year after Frank Capra's It's A Wonderful Life and covering much the same ground, this simple, charming, beguiling film (Oscar nominated for Best Picture and Director) deserves to be much better known. stars as a stuffy, conflicted bishop who prays for divine guidance and gets it in the form of Dudley (Grant), an angel in human form. The bishop's wife (Loretta Young, above - see also Born To Be Bad), his household and assorted townsfolk all benefit from Dudley's benign presence. Only the bishop himself resists. From a Robert Nathan novel, this whimsical Yuletide fantasy warms the heart. Niven and Grant allegedly swapped roles a few weeks into shooting, which was inspired thinking on someone's part. 105 minutes. Highly recommended.

IMDb: What a pleasure to revisit this Henry Koster gem. Everything works in the most unexpected way. The mystic magic of the story is utterly contagious. The unexpected musical number on ice skates by Grant, Young and James Gleason made me want to see it again straight away and thanks to the new technologies I was able to do it on the spot. There was a remake of this movie a few years ago, remember? No, probably not. Denzel Washington in the Grant part and Whitney Huston in Young's. To see both films back to back should be a masterclass in film anthropology that proves without a doubt that with the passing of time we have lost something invaluable. I don't know what it is. Maybe there isn't a word for it yet. What I would love to share with all of you is the joy that The Bishop's Wife brought to me. Even Gladys Cooper's upper class monster has a moment of exquisite redemption. Not to be missed / Everyone loves Dudley, the bishop's new assistant - especially the bishop's wife! What follows is a joyous film that showcases the best talents of each of its three stars: Grant gets to flash

those pearly whites of his and be charming, Young gets to look beautiful while torn between a depressed husband and fun-loving Dudley and Niven (below, left) gets to showcase his British stiff upper lip while displaying some very funny slapstick pratfalls. It's a charming movie with lots of holiday atmosphere - boys' choirs singing, park skaters skating, city shoppers shopping, etc. Only a Scrooge wouldn't love this film! / Movie books classify The Bishop's Wife as a fantasy, but there is so much more to it than that. It is a love story, a comedy, a drama and an all around inspiring 100 minutes rolled into one. A film to treasure, indeed / A sweet little romantic dramedy, perfect for a Christmas night curled up before the TV, that tells a story genuinely intelligent and real / Grant's Dudley is just a little bit roguish, a little bit dark - a very human sort of angel. It's mostly the smaller moments he sneaks into the film and his performance that make The Bishop's Wife compelling. Fans of his won't leave it disappointed.

This is the sermon written by Dudley and delivered by the Bishop at film's end:

Tonight I want to tell you the story of an empty stocking. Once upon a midnight clear, there was a child's cry. A blazing star hung over a stable and Wise Men came with birthday gifts. We haven't forgotten that night down the centuries. We celebrate it with stars on Christmas trees, the sound of bells and with gifts - but especially with gifts. You give me a tie, I give you a book. Aunt Martha has always wanted an orange squeezer and Uncle Harry could do with a new pipe. We forget nobody, adult or child. All the stockings are filled. All, that is, except one. We have even forgotten to hang it up - the stocking for the child born in a manger. It's His birthday we are celebrating. Don't ever let us forget that. Let us ask ourselves what He would wish for most and then let each put in his share: loving kindness, warm hearts and the stretched out hand of tolerance - all the shining gifts that make peace on earth.

MR. BLANDINGS BUILDS HIS DREAM HOUSE (1948)

This inconsequential comedy takes 20 minutes to establish that the Blandings' NYC apartment is too small for them and doesn't get any more interesting (or amusing) after that. Old hands Grant and Loy (above, left) play commendably, but in a piece so uninvolving that it's hard to care. 94 tedious minutes.

IMDb: Pleasant entertainment / Not "screwball" or "madcap" but witty and intelligent / I hate to quibble over movies like this that don't try very hard to be anything other than light comedy, but I wish there was more Grant and Loy and less (above, centre). I like him well enough, but anything that keeps the other two from trading banter is just taking up space. This also includes the first ten minutes, with its quotidian silence and very, very, very low-intensity humour / This classic movie feels more manufactured than others of this period / Good old fashioned comedy without the cursing and gratuitous sex / Slick and perfectly paced. One for the whole family / Bland bland bland. Mr. Blandings never takes off. There's a bunch of ideas but none is pushed so far as to arouse more than some condescending smiles. Everyone does his job but to no avail. The script is poor and directing ineffectual, which you feel from the very first scenes. A minor, thoroughly forgettable, family comedy / A light and airy film showcasing how life should be / A fantastic showcase for Grant's bewildered man of America, a part he always played so well / The script has a perfect ear, the director's timing is impeccable, and the sophisticated style of the stars gives the entire production a polished sheen. Grant, Loy and Douglas are all brilliant, but this is much more than a star vehicle. It's one of the best sophisticated comedies Hollywood ever committed to celluloid. And 66 years on, the story is all too true / Grant had the knack of making the wildest situations seem believable at the time, and even somewhat sophisticated. Loy's charm and elegance complement him well / Frivolous entertainment at its best / A real disappointment. The only thing that makes Mr. Blandings worth seeing is the short segment near the beginning that brilliantly satirises life in the Big Apple / There are very few old movies I dislike, but this one just doesn't work for me / Far better than godawful '80s remake The Money Pit / Myrna choosing her colours is a hoot!

EVERY GIRL SHOULD BE MARRIED (1948)

If you make due allowance for its more innocent 1940s take on life, Every Girl ... is a mild romantic comedy about a woman who sets out to prove to a man that he's not better off being a bachelor, as he thinks he is, and succeeds to their mutual benefit. But taken at 21st century face value, it's a creepy tale of lying, stalking and calculated manipulation in which the woman schemes to get what she wants no matter what, with a result that makes no dramatic or moral sense. Nonetheless, making her screen debut, Betsy Drake (above) does indeed land her man (Grant), using her mutt of a boss Franchot Tone (see also Suzy) as a cat's paw - and in a case of life imitating art, on Christmas Day 1949, the same Betsy Drake became (until August 1962) the third Mrs Cary Grant. The two appeared together in one further film (Room For One More), the fifth of her eleven career screen credits. 84 minutes. Poor.

IMDb: Grant goes from bemused to betrothed in the space of 80 minutes, but to the viewer it seems an eternity. Possibly the worst film ever made / A product of its time, this film made me very uncomfortable as a woman of the new millennium / Drake plays the stalker, an unabashed user of people, alternately pathetic and manipulative, Grant her victim, alternately angry and oblivious. Vastly disturbing - I haven't been able to look at classic romances with the same suspension of disbelief since / This was a big success when new, but today isn't even worth putting on DVD / I'm among millions who consider themselves Grant fans, but I can't think of a single reason to recommend this abysmal film / An anachronism, but fun. Highly entertaining / Drake ruins any humour in this drier than mummy-dust stinker / A cute and intelligent comedy. Give it a break / A quaint depiction of a bygone era with different social mores / Delightful.

I WAS A MALE WAR BRIDE (1949)

After an hour or so's vapid flimflam in post-war Germany, French army captain Grant marries U.S. army interpreter Ann Sheridan (above). When she is posted home, red tape decrees that the only way Grant can travel with her is as a returning soldier's "bride". Cue lots of tedious "Where do I sleep?" nonsense and a short Cary-in-drag sequence that, whilst amusing, is far too little pay-off for all that's gone before. From the director of Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, this Howard Hawks "comedy" is woefully leaden. 105 minutes.

IMDb: This mediocre comedy needs faster pacing, funnier lines and for Grant to act more like a man and less like a sheepdog. His "I'm not even going to try to behave like a French officer" attitude didn't convince me of the reality behind his situation. His co- star was also rather a non-presence in the film / Wow, did I hate this movie / This is a stultifyingly slow, dated, clichéd, predictable film, a horrible waste of time for anyone hoping to discover another great Grant picture. The set-up is laboured, the twists are forced and Sheridan's performance is deadly boring. It's inconceivable that this star (Grant), director (Hawks) and screenwriter (Lederer) also teamed up on the sublime His Girl Friday. The one thing War Bride has going for it is the on-location shooting but it's as if Hawks spent all his energy capturing that and forgetting about comic timing. The worst of Grant. A stinker / It does not belong in the Grant canon, but is worth one viewing / Average to poor / The only drag in this movie is the feeling of sitting through it / Twenty minutes of funny plus eighty of failed jokes and sad filler / An incredibly weak wartime farce with a slight screenplay seemingly written around the title (and the commercially comic idea of placing a peculiarly butch and graceless Grant in drag) / A total travesty parading as Art / A big disappointment / Not a great film, perhaps, but an important lesson in how to ground satirical comedy in reality and reap the benefit / Grimly fascinating, though don't expect to laugh / Unwatchable.

CRISIS (1950)

Whilst holidaying in an unnamed Latin American country, renowned U.S. neuro- surgeon Grant and his wife are taken into custody by the despised ruling junta. Tyrannical president Farrago (José Ferrer, above) has a brain tumour, but since his unpopularity makes it dangerous for him to leave his HQ, Grant is ordered to operate on the spot. He is willing to do his best for his patient. Unfortunately, however, the revolutionaries snatch his wife and declare that either Farrago must die or she will. A decent though unexceptional drama. 96 minutes.

IMDb: Unusual and curious / The informed, eloquent script and surprise ending make for worthwhile entertainment. A remarkable film / A tense and often intelligent drama, slightly out of Grant's usual debonair range, that doesn't deserve the obscurity it seems to be buried in / A strong, forthright piece of work / A nice little political thriller, ahead of its time in dissecting Latin American political reality / A tense little film, not typical of Grant's oeuvre, with a pleasing climax / When, in None But The Lonely Heart, Grant attempted to break away from his light leading man image and do something with more drama, the film drew great critical notices but died at the box office. In Crisis, he tried again, with the same result / Excellently played, by Grant and Ferrer especially / This plodding, ham-fisted drama that rushes from climax to climax before ending abruptly without any real resolution or conclusion is single-handedly salvaged by Grant, whose blockbuster performance successfully draws the viewer away from the plot to focus on his character alone. Towering above indifferent material, he is a joy to watch / Ordinary and dull / Interesting though not very exciting / Begs to be remade / The screenplay's main weakness is the fact that Grant does not receive the message such that his moral dilemma is not as harsh as it could have been. Nevertheless, Crisis is a strong debut from great director Richard Brooks / A solid little drama that has held up over time.

PEOPLE WILL TALK (1951)

Based on Curt Goetz's play Dr. Praetorius, this film takes an intriguing tale, told in its last twenty minutes, and prefaces it with an hour and a half's implausible and unengaging guff. Written and directed by Joseph L. (All About Eve, Julius Caesar) Mankiewicz, with Walter Slezak (Once Upon A Honeymoon) and Finlay Currie (above). An incongruous message movie, dated and overrated. 110m.

IMDb: Grant is smooth and relaxed and the film gets better with each viewing / A very well hidden film that should be up there with North By Northwest, Citizen Kane and the like. For its time, People Will Talk took on the most controversial topics of the day including abortion, unintended pregnancy, HUAC and McCarthy-style witch hunting, taxpayers subsidising farmers not to grow food - the list goes on. Perhaps most up front is the defence of American individualism which was then (and may be now even more) under attack. All of this is presented very cleverly, often with wholesome comedy. A great, nearly perfect film / This is unique film is superlatively written, offering amusing dialogue, social insight and enlightened views of science, women's issues, social mores, the nature of success, materialism and the urge to destroy what we can't comprehend. Grant is at his warm, compassionate and wryly witty best / Contrived dialogue, poorly drawn characters and clichéd, unmotivated scenes obscure the fine arguments it seems this movie was trying to make. Hokey and unbelievable / This beautiful film, far ahead of its time, presents a thoughtful, intelligent commentary on the issues of the time, eerily relevant not only to the conservative '50s but to just about any era since / Superb Grant was never more star-like than in this unheralded picture. I can't remember a performance of his that touched me so / A pretentious museum piece / It might have been fine back in the McCarthy era but sixty years on just doesn't work / A strange and off-putting film, clumsily trying to be all things at once. Not recommended / Sweet.

ROOM FOR ONE MORE (aka The Easy Way) (1952)

Grant and real-life wife Betsy Drake (above, left - see also Every Girl Should Be Married) play soft-hearted foster parents in this sentimental film based on an Anna Perrott Rose memoir. She's thankfully less gushy this time around and he's his usual assured, irreproachable self, but the material is bland. 95 minutes.

IMDb: Enjoy seeing the kind of lives people used to lead when life was honestly worth living / Terrific family fare / Very entertaining and touching in its own way, though it plays like a well written sitcom / Unless you're totally jaded, you and your children will enjoy this heart-warming tale / Below Grant's best, but worth viewing / This plays less like a Grant film and more like a pilot episode of some less interesting version of The Waltons. Mediocre / Grant is one comical guy, but sexy too! / I really liked the movie - you'll laugh and cry - but the book is better / Pretty depressing. What is it about us that we need to be reassured in such reduced terms? / One of a series of films in which the married and domesticated Grant is more in evidence. Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House and Houseboat fall into the same bracket. It was a new dimension for an older star and Grant handles it well / Professionalism gets it by, but it's a sticky haul / An enduring family classic / Grant is more relaxed in this film than any other. A rare role departure that works / A nostalgic film, showcasing the best of human kindness and dignity, that will tug at your heart. You'll have a tear in your eye, but come away feeling better / I've been a grouchy, childless curmudgeon for 40 years, so why I tuned into this I don't know. The listing (children, family, adoption, disability ...) warned me not to. Once on, though, I was hooked. Yes, it was freighted with sentimentality and blatant homilies about adoption and the Scouts, with eye-stinging scenes enough for anyone - but written so deftly and performed with such perfect understatement (children included) that I was easily able to forgive the more obvious "message moments". It melted my icy heart, dammit. Next Sunday I'll watch the golf.

MONKEY BUSINESS (1952)

Screenwriter Hecht (His Girl Friday) and director Hawks (Bringing Up Baby etc) are back on form in this innocent but wholly delightful farce about a dreamy research chemist (Grant) struggling to concoct an elixir of youth. By escaping from its cage and randomly mixing chemicals at a bench, one of his chimps not only hits upon the right formula but also manages to introduce it into the office water cooler. Cue hi-jinks involving a haircut, a sports car, a night in the bridal suite, a young Marilyn Monroe, a paint fight, a baby and, best of all, a scalping. With Ginger Rogers (see also Once Upon A Honeymoon). Excellent.

IMDb: Classic comedy with no foul language or crudity. Oh, joy! / A laugh-a-minute marathon of science fiction hocus-pocus brought to life by Grant, who is outrageous in his antics especially when reverting to childhood, Rogers, who gets to cut a rug in what becomes almost a parody of her dances with , and the always wonderful Charles Coburn. Sex pot Marilyn Monroe adds spice, with all pretty much upstaged by Esther the chimp / The humour is fast-paced, the lines fly like a buzz saw. If you don't find this film hysterical, your funny bone is out of whack. See a laugh doctor right away. Oh, and as a bonus you get to hear Cary croon / Grant is evidently one of Hawks' favourite actors, and for good reason - he makes the trippiest dialogue sound perfectly natural and plays science geeks and debonair reporters with equal conviction. His Barnaby here recalls to mind Bringing Up Baby’s David Huxley. Just as David is kick- started to life by Susan, so Barnaby is youthened by the elixir and in both films it's enchanting to watch the transformation take place. Initially, Grant's Barnaby is stuffy, absent-minded and somewhat stern - in effect, all 'grown-up'. But the moment the elixir takes hold, the change is miraculous yet believable. Watch in delight as Barnaby flips an effortless cartwheel, drives like a daredevil and conducts a chorus of children in a rousing war song. The joie de vivre Grant infuses his character with is almost palpable - a wonderful performance from a superb actor / Classy Grant is inspired / Love it.

DREAM WIFE (1953)

Grant and (above) play an engaged couple who fall out when he feels she puts her work at the State Department before their relationship. So instead he seeks the hand of a young and traditionally compliant Arabian prin- cess he met whilst in Burkistan on business. Her father accepts and sends the girl to America to prepare for the wedding. A limp and predictable "comedy" with Walter Pidgeon (see also Big Brown Eyes). 95 long minutes.

IMDb: Grant and Kerr make a wonderful screen couple and the first thirty minutes are good but from then on it's obvious where it's going, the funny scenes become scarce and I just wanted it to end / Utter junk / This is where Grant and Kerr - marvellous to watch - first displayed the chemistry that worked so well in An Affair To Remember. This plot, however, is silly and the comedy lacklustre / A concept (Islam's quirks are seen as comic and innocently charming) and script so incompetent one wonders just what they were thinking / Miserable / A shallow film in which Grant gives a very subdued performance. Once the plot becomes kooky, you can't help but want it all to end. A second-rate effort filled with lousy writing, clichés, sitcom-like plotting and dumb situations - but it's still Cary Grant! / Putrid / Really boring with a stupid, unbelievable plot. Worse than that, Grant looks and acts so peculiar. He appears to be bone thin - his suits just hang on him - and in some sequences his expressions and body language border on the effeminate. This is not the dashing, debonair, sophisticated man we've all become accustomed to seeing in so many films / There's no excuse for such schlock. What a mess / A fascinating look at our culture's post-WWII attitude towards women and the Middle East. The movie showcases the big message of get-the-women- back-into-the-kitchen that followed the War and also Hollywood's gross ignorance of Islamic peoples and their religion. Dated, implausible, silly, fascinating fun.

TO CATCH A THIEF (1955)

Grant stars with Grace Kelly (above) in this tale, from a David Dodge novel and set on the beautiful Côte d'Azur, of a former expert jewel thief turned heroic French Resistance fighter now suspected of carrying out a series of daring cat burglaries in and around Cannes. In order to clear himself, Grant has to catch the real thief before the police take him. In I Was A Male War Bride, Grant plays a Frenchman without making any attempt at an accent or "European" mannerisms. Here he not only does the same, but is also able to pass himself off as an Oregon lumberman with no questions asked. That Grant, now over fifty, should court Kelly, 25, does not seem incongruous, which is testament to the care he patently took of himself throughout his career. And he continues to act with such ease, grace and charm that he remains a treat to watch, even when the story, as in the costume ball sequence and elsewhere, gets a little slow. With Jessie Royce Landis as Kelly's mother. 106 minutes. Good.

IMDb: A bit of a departure for Hitchcock, somewhat lighter and with less of his trade- mark suspense, thoroughly enjoyable just the same. Cary Grant was playing Cary Grant by this time, and no one could do it better. And Grace Kelly, what eye-candy! The snappy dialogue with the sexual innuendo is done perfectly and huge kudos to Brigitte Auber (Danielle) who was gorgeous and very good. As an interesting aside, Grant's character, while pretending to be someone else, claimed to have been an American circus acrobat, which Grant sort of was early in life (albeit English, not American). With his accent, Grant could really never be mistaken for an American, even though he usually played one. Also, it was a little eerie to see Kelly driving so fast along those Riviera cliff-side roads, in light of what happened to her later. Anyway, this film is a must for fans of Hitchcock, Kelly or Grant / This somewhat languid romantic thriller is probably Hitchcock's most beautiful film. Grace Kelly is well displayed in delicate and perfectly fitted summer dresses and evening gowns that show off her exquisite arms and shoulders with, opposite her, one of Hollywood's most dashing leading men. The cinematography (which won the film's only Oscar) is clear and sparkling, bright as the dream of a princess to be, always focused without a hint of darkness anywhere. Even the night-time rooftop scenes seem to glow / Escapism at its most delicious.

AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER (1957)

Co-writer / director Leo McCarey (The Awful Truth etc) and Deborah Kerr (The Grass Is Greener etc) both pop up again in this visually pleasing but super schmaltzy romance with musical interludes. After taking an hour to fall in love whilst crossing the Atlantic, playboy Cary and devoted fiancée Debs part with their significant others and begin supporting themselves, only to miss their pre- arranged meeting atop the Empire State Building (an idea recycled in Sleepless In Seattle) when she's hit by a car on the way there. The script then has Grant take off back to Europe without even bothering to find out what went wrong, which rings very false. Otherwise matters play out exactly as one would expect. 115 minutes. Hopeless romantics will enjoy thoroughly, others not so much.

* * * * *

Hailed as one of the most romantic and passionate films of all time, An Affair To Remember is a remake of a 1939 film called Love Affair. Both films were directed with flair by Leo McCarey. Critics seem to be divided on which is superior, though to many audiences there is no contest. The latter version from 1957 starring Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr has become (to them) a beloved classic, and its status was given a boost in the early 1990s when Nora Ephron worked it into the story of her Sleepless In Seattle. On top of that, the film was remade yet again in 1994 with Warren Beatty and Annette Bening under its original title. Several years ago, the named the film in the top five of their 100 Years, 100 Passions list. That's quite an honour, but is it really deserved?

The film is primarily centred around the relationship of two people, with the first half showcasing their growing attraction on a luxury liner and the second presenting the inevitable obstacles that keep them from coming together.

Nickie Ferrante (Cary Grant) is a suave, sexy playboy who always had the problem of generating a monogamous relationship. McKay (Deborah Kerr) is a mature, mesmerising nightclub singer who is in a serious relationship. Despite the fact that Nickie is travelling back to the U.S. to marry an American heiress, he is unsure if the relationship will remain stable because of his Don Juan reputation. Terry is charmed by Nickie, though she doesn't want to become a target of the paparazzi by getting involved with him. Both try to avoid each other, but it doesn't last for long.

The story takes an interesting turn when Nickie invites Terry to meet his grandmother in a brief stop in France. Grandma Janou (Cathleen Nesbitt) takes an immediate liking to Terry and the film's high point comes when Janou plays the piano and Terry (actually it was Marni Nixon) sings sweetly in French. Soon after getting back on the ship going to New York, Nickie and Terry surrender themselves to each other, though must face the reality of going separate ways when the cruise comes to a close. So, they make a pact: after six months, if they are still in love, they will meet at the top of the Empire State Building. Nickie shows up, but while he's waiting, something happens to Terry on the street below and the reunion never happens. Will their love truly bring them together again and make their affair one to remember? Duh!

While that last word sounds kind of harsh, even I have to admit - as a fan of films, including romantic ones - that An Affair To Remember is, if anything, awfully clichéd. That doesn't necessarily make it a bad film. On the contrary, I thought it was two-thirds of a great movie and can obviously see why it has generated a genuine following over the years. The stars are mighty and magnetic, the music is truly romantic and the direction is tender and punctual. Plus, even as a guy, I refuse to label this film as a "chick flick," as other critics like to say, largely because I think the term is equal parts stereotypical and

sexist. Yes, I do think some guys would like An Affair To Remember, despite its age and familiar story. Still, I can't go so far as to call the film a classic, for reasons I will explain later.

One thing I wish I had done before sitting down to watch it for the first time was to watch Love Affair (the original 1939 version) to make comparisons. However, perhaps it's a good thing I didn't as I can be a staunch purist when it comes to remakes. That being said, I barely remember watching the 1994 version and couldn't get into it. Mind, I was still in high school then. While I was listening to the audio commentary on An Affair To Remember, I discovered more or less why director Leo McCarey (who had won Oscars for and The Awful Truth) had decided to do a remake of Love Affair: first because he felt the story deserved a treatment not only in colour but in Cinema- scope, which was quite a popular process throughout the 1950s, and second because he felt a remake could connect more with younger people.

In addition, the role of Nickie seemed tailor-made for a major star such as Grant, who you could say is playing a version of himself. Grant's trademark wit and charm is here in full force, and he is irresistible to watch, though I think the film belongs to the luminous Kerr. While she certainly made her mark in the 1950s, she is not really all that remembered today. True, she is probably recognised more in this film than any other, though we must note that she raised so many eyebrows (particularly in the decade of Marilyn Monroe) with a certain beach scene in From Here To Eternity. While I did empathise with both Nickie and Terry, I think that Kerr's character was much more interesting, considering that she was emotionally confused nearly every step of the way when it came to Nickie. Nominated for six Oscars, Kerr sadly passed away last October after a long battle with Parkinson's disease.

While the soundtrack may never catch up with Dirty Dancing (or even Breakfast At Tiffany's) in terms of sales, the songs and music can't be overlooked. However, what many audiences seem not to notice - which is mostly unintentional, of course - is the work contributed by Marni Nixon. Known by many as The Great Dubber, she dubbed much of Kerr's singing not only in An Affair To Remember but also in . She later went on to do some of the greatest musicals, stars such as and Audrey Hepburn - and yet was never given onscreen credit. Nixon's powerful soprano voice is present every time Kerr is singing, and on the commentary track, she remembers how bitter she was when she got shafted by the studio more often than not. Sure, Vic Damone may be singing the title tune over the opening credits, though Nixon is the one that stands out when it comes to this quasi- musical version. As with many Fox pictures of the era, the cinematography, costumes and art-set decoration are all world class.

So why is An Affair To Remember not a classic in my book? In a nutshell, while I do think the film delivers enough as a love story, where it stops short is being a tearjerker. Now before everyone starts raising the cynic flags, I do love romantic / love stories that are done well. Two of my absolute favourites are Gone With The Wind and An Officer And A Gentleman and others like Children Of A Lesser God and The Quiet Man never fail to move me. But the difference between An Affair To Remember and those other films is that never once while watching it did I shed a tear. Yes, Grant and Kerr had chemistry, and yes, I did empathise with them, but ultimately I felt the story became too clichéd and predictable such that I saw the ending a mile away. I've cried at many love stories, too, even if they are a little predictable. (Anyone who remembers Ice Castles will know exactly what I'm talking about.)

Ultimately, I think that An Affair To Remember is overrated. The stars are there, the romance is there, the music is there and the story, while simplistic, I still accept. However, some of the believability is skewed when Kerr is attempting to get to the Empire State Building and is stopped short for circumstances I will not reveal. I just cannot see how this film could have gotten in the top five AFI Passions, when other films like , An Officer And A Gentleman and The Apartment (all with far more powerfully romantic endings) are lower on that list. Finally, I think the film just goes on too long for such a simple, sweet story and some of the scenes (particularly in the second half) could have been cut down or dropped altogether. For example, were the two sequences with the children's choir really necessary? (Perhaps this is why some critics prefer the 1939 version, which is nearly a half hour shorter!)

Christopher Kulik, DVD Verdict, 15 January 2008

* * * * *

THE PRIDE AND THE PASSION (1957)

Spain, 1810: Iberian resistance to Napoleon's conquering hordes centres on an outsized cannon that "natives" and , assisted by British naval envoy Grant (all above), have pushed and pulled 1,000 kilometres across country to the French central Spanish stronghold at Avila. Based on C. S. Forester's novel The Gun and clearly made with pride (plus lots of extras, work and money), this part patriotic paean, part smouldering love triangle nonethe- less evokes too little passion and rather too much tedium. Sinatra's conviction and wig are equally grim, the French (militarily very successful at this time) are portrayed as incredibly stupid and a huge Spanish army suddenly appears from nowhere. Grant rises magisterially above the dust and brouhaha but not even he can save this big budget, small beer damp squib. 127 minutes. Dull.

IMDb: Truly amazingly bad. Everybody overacts, even the donkeys / A stupendously mounted action romance with just two problems: Stanley Kramer doesn't know how to direct action and Grant seems too bored to provide much romance / Some films belong to Hollywood rather than the stars in them, and this epic spectacular is one / Spare yourself this big bore and try instead Kramer follow-ups The Defiant Ones or On The Beach / Well-meaning historical pageantry, but Spartacus it ain't / A somehow likeable but overlong and totally ludicrous period piece / Thoroughly mediocre / The passionate affair between Grant (53) and Loren (23) off screen sparks no fireworks on / Giant cannon in historic misfire / Sinatra just didn't care and it shows / A dark spot on the career of three fine actors. Not worth your time / Viewed as an action drama rather than a character study, the film has its good points. The photography of the wild Spanish landscapes is magnificent and many of the individual scenes generate a sense of excitement, as when the cannon is manoeuvred up then down a steep hillside, nearly ending in disaster, or when it is hidden in a cathedral under the noses of the French / Somewhat dated and slightly corny, but good entertainment still / Grant seems carved out of wood / Visually arresting but too poorly cast and scripted to succeed.

KISS THEM FOR ME (1957)

Honolulu, 1944: three navy pilots snatch four days shore leave in , determined to have a good time. They cook up various schemes to extend the leave or quit service altogether, only to find, when it comes to it, that, though war may be hell, duty trumps liberty and they'd sooner return to Pearl after all. From a Frederic Wakeman novel and Luther Davis play called Shore Leave and Kiss Them For Me respectively, with Suzy Parker (above), pneumatic Monroe clone (and every bit as irritating) Jayne Mansfield and Leif (Big John) Erickson. Dated, frivolous, by the numbers pap. 102 minutes.

IMDb: I was very disappointed with this weak film. Grant's usual charm and effortless comedy are AWOL throughout. He seems strained, bored and not himself. Mansfield looks more like an obscene blow-up doll than a Hollywood sex kitten and confirms beyond doubt her lack of talent / Entertaining but ultimately unsatisfactory / Former model Parker "acts" with a woodenness, a deadness, a cluelessness beyond belief / Not a bad film, but an uneven one. Grant saves it from being a total waste of time, together with an Epstein script that has some wonderful gems scattered here and there / A cheap, weakly written film with little energy and some very broad performances / This movie is a diabolical waste of everyone's time with the exception of Suzy Parker who is the only thing in it as feeble as the material. Many people blame Mansfield and her grating performance for the film's poor returns at the box office and while she is a pain, she can only do her best with what she's given. After a handful of good dramatic and comedy turns her ambitions were set ten steps back by agreeing (simply for the sake of appearing with Grant) to portray this squealing, idiotic menace. Her character is a complete cartoon bimbo and although she looks good enough to eat in a boiler suit, her every appearance in the film jangles your nerves. A real shame. Steer clear of this so-called comedy. It's more depressing than funny / Thanks to its meandering, dreary and wholly pointless script, which drags itself lamely along and drags the viewer's interest and patience down with it, this leaden melodrama (it would be wrong to call it a comedy) sinks without trace / Up there with Grant's worst / I've long thought it a loss that Grant did not do more edgy roles and his harder, edgier characterisation here is a delight to watch / Overall a silly mess, but with some terrific little parts and a terrific Grant / A comedy with serious overtones that reminds us of our patriotic duty.

INDISCREET (1958)

Scripted by from his own play Kind Sir and directed by (Kiss Them For Me, Charade), Indiscreet reunites Grant at the top of his game with Ingrid Bergman (above - see also Notorious) to present a slight but entertaining tale of romantic intrigue. With Cecil Parker. 100 minutes. Good.

IMDb: Fun fluff from Bergman and Grant. The story leaves something to be desired and there is too much silence between them - but just watching these two together on screen is reason enough to enjoy the film / Delightful / These incomparable stars are always worth watching, with Grant suave, debonair and handsome as ever / Billed as a comedy but actually a dull-a-thon / An endearing film with elegant sets and costumes. If only the dewy romance had been played down and the comedic element up, in the style of My Favorite Wife or The Awful Truth. Grant is at his supreme best in this type of comedy. His highland fling here is hilarious / Star trifle wastes Grant and Bergman on stuffy, inferior material / A bit of a "Much Ado About Nothing" type of flick, but still a pleasant way to pass a quiet evening / Star power at its best / A perfect little gem, undeniably slight but with the elegant simplicity of a fine Swiss watch / A good old classic / A wonderful light comedy with no messages or meaning - just enjoy! / Indiscreet points up the multiple advantages of filmed over live performance. The film was taken from Kind Sir, a Broadway play with and Mary Martin that ran for almost a year, with all the action set in the apartment of the leading lady. But Stanley Donen didn't settle for that. Rather, he used the entire city of London as a set and photographed its day and night life in glittering Technicolor. Though the film has only seven speaking parts, all the glitz hides that beautifully / Charming / The superior dialogue sparkles and the sense of important lives being lived with some intelligence is a welcome change from the content of most films, then and especially since 1958. Moviegoers need to thank Donen for yet another cinematic delight / After a first half of pure poetry, the second falters before its crowd-pleasing end. Flawed, perhaps, but a gem nonetheless! / The genre of "drawing room comedy" has sadly passed but we are fortunate to have this fine example showing exactly why it succeeded for decades.

HOUSEBOAT (1958)

After mom dies, a dysfunctional family of absentee father (Grant) and three young children gradually relearn how to get along after fate sends them Sophie Loren (above - see also The Power And The Glory) for a maid and a derelict houseboat on which to live. Even more contrived and unexceptional than it sounds, or innocent fun from a more tolerant age? You choose. 110 minutes.

IMDB: A throwback to the kind of sweet, happy comedies Grant did in the late '40s and early '50s. A warm, family-friendly film / Excruciatingly cute slapstick mixed with some ham-handed satire, not to mention the sitcom idiocy of Grant's obliviousness to Loren's beauty. Then he notices. Pure formula junk / That rarity, a sitcom done right / The Sound Of Music in miniature / Recommended to anyone who needs to focus on the beautiful things of life. A pleasure to watch / Sweet, smarmy and predictable but in a nice, safe, comfortable way / Saccharin-averse viewers might bail early, but give it time. I was genuinely entertained by this jewel with surprising emotional resonance / A cosy romp / Not just a bad movie, but offensive: Loren is made to look ugly, the film is full of poorly drawn characters, there's a cheap Keaton rip-off (when the train destroys the house) and a vapid appeal to Saturday Post notions of religion and the script's romantic dynamics are completely valueless and nonsensical. Every element reflects the worst of the Hollywood formula system / Watching Grant in a role written for a B or C list actor is always painful. As a romantic male lead there's never been anybody better but comic dad parts are best left to the Paul Dooleys of this world. The three kids are charm-free, the novelty of the houseboat quickly gets tiresome and the plot is entirely predictable. If you like Sophia Loren, however, then feast your eyes / A nice family comedy and hasn't aged a bit / Cute but inconsequential / Hesto, presto, one of Cary's besto / A feeble, predictable film wasting two great talents / Has all the charm of a sugary half-hour sitcom stretched out to feature length. Only Grant's most loyal fans will want to see it more than once / Aside from his Hitchcock films and Charade, this is virtually the only watchable movie Grant made after 1944. It's really just one more of the bland family-friendly that blight his later career, but more interesting than

most for a couple of reasons. One is the passel of motherless kids who, for a change, are convincingly sullen, bitter and unreachable until a brief last-minute conversion. The other is the presence of Sophia Loren - raw-boned, gauche, gorgeous and in real life determined not to become the fourth Mrs. Grant. The movie is contrived and totally unconvincing, but the two stars' tortured feelings for each other keep seeping through, giving many scenes an edgy tension you can't shake off. Loren's artless singing of the fine ballad Almost In Your Arms is haunting and the couple's subsequent dance has an emotional fierceness that practically burns a hole in the screen.

This one-idea dud is of the "Please Don't Eat The Daisies" variety of wholesome family corn, irritating and crappy from the first frame. The story is a saccharine homily. Dad loses mom in an accident and hires a hot nanny. I'll give you nine seconds to figure out that mommy replacement is the agenda. Is there any other way that storyline can go? The script is quite rotten and the direction very horrible, with dollars visibly saved by getting ninety per cent of the movie in the can via rear-screen projection. We gave up the conceits of noir in the '40s for this? For 1950s commie-hating, child-obsessed, nuclear-familifying propaganda? Like most everything from the '50s, Houseboat tries to naturalise your patriotic duty to reproduce via the inclusion of major roles for children, despite the fact that very few children can act (see also The King And I, An Affair To Remember, South Pacific, The Man Who Knew Too Much etc) - and the unwelcome "Dad's a jackass around kids" routine rears its ugly head. The movie starts weird with twee hand-drawn credits over one of the film's moppets sulking and walking in circles on the floor, while the colour process switches inexplicably between tints. The film then starts running backwards and forwards. Loren looks bizarre - shaded down to Indian tones and made up like a voluptuous cat, she looks like she may eat the children at any moment. Just like everything else in this film, her part is written for maximum irritation. She sings a stupid song over and over and generally demonstrates why Italians will be absent from Hollywood for the next five decades / Don't let the critics discourage you. If you analyse production values, Houseboat may seem pretty weak but if you look for its more enduring qualities there's a lot of pleasure to be had / Enjoyable as a time capsule - otherwise uncreative, naive and unfunny / I never tire of watching this gem / An oldie and goodie. Its story and issues are timeless.

NORTH BY NORTHWEST (1959)

Top-notch Hitchcock, all the way through to its cheeky last shot. A fit and feisty Grant plays well under his 55 years. With and a slightly bloodless though still effective Eva Maria Saint. 131 minutes. Fine.

* * * * *

"Now you listen to me. I'm an advertising man, not a red herring. I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself slightly killed!"

Pretty much any list of "great Hitchcock films" is going to include North By Northwest, but one doesn't usually find it at the top. People tend to veer towards Psycho, Vertigo, Rear Window, The Birds and Notorious when it comes to selecting a single masterpiece among masterpieces. However, I have a friend who once told me that he felt North By Northwest was not only Hitch- cock's greatest film, but one of the greatest films of all time by any director. When I asked him why, he answered without hesitation: "It has absolutely everything an audience could want in a mainstream movie. It has comedy, it has action, it has romance, it has suspense, it has mystery, it has colourful locations, it has a great score, it has terrific cinematography, it has great dialogue, it has great acting, and absolutely everything works." He is correct. While I may not be quite so confident in declaring the movie Hitch's unquest- ionable best (the man made so many brilliant films), I can certainly say that it does the best job of showing off the director's skills as an entertainer. North By Northwest is indeed a movie that has everything.

Like many of Hitchcock's films, North By Northwest is primarily remembered today for its big set pieces, most notably the tremendously intense sequence in which Cary Grant attempts to escape the deadly crop duster and the thrilling climax at Mount Rushmore. To be sure, these are great moments, deserving of their iconic status in cinematic history. But what some viewers might have forgotten is just what a rich piece of entertainment this film is from start to finish. There isn't a single moment that bores or fails to be engaging. Hitchcock juggles a lot of elements in the film, and a lesser director surely might have dropped the ball or pushed too hard in one particular direction. By some miracle, North By Northwest is more or less pitch perfect, being light on its feet when it needs to be and dramatically gripping during other moments.

Cary Grant is a huge key to the film's success, as there was perhaps no other actor of the era who could have made the role work so well (Jimmy Stewart lobbied for the role, but was turned down). Despite the fact that his age was starting to show, Grant was still the ultimate movie star in 1959. When we're first introduced to Roger Thornhill, we recognise the character as being the usual sort of man that Cary Grant plays: witty, charming, intelligent and friendly. His dialogue is the sort of playfully hilarious material that Grant mastered over the years. However, Thornhill is quickly thrown into a rather desperate situation and Grant excels at conveying a sense of genuine fear and tension during these moments. Though he never loses his silver tongue ("Not that I mind a slight case of abduction now and then, but I have tickets for the theatre this evening, to a show I was looking forward to, and I get, well, kind of unreasonable about things like that"), there's clearly an element of vulnerab- ility in Grant's character. He is bold and charming in spite of his fears, not because he doesn't have them.

It's particularly impressive to note just how quickly many of the scenes in North By Northwest can slip between comedy and drama with ease. Consider the moment in which Grant desperately attempts to convince the police officers that he has been abducted and drugged by evil men. The humour generated by the fact that Grant's story sounds very much like the typical ravings of a drunken bum plays devilishly against the fact that Thornhill is indeed a man stuck in a very troubling situation. Likewise, the confrontational scenes between Grant and James Mason (marvellously cool and sinister) crackle with that intoxicating blend of wit and danger. Hitchcock loved the "Innocent Man Wrongly Accused" plot element, but never was it as playfully entertaining as it is in North By Northwest. Even Thornhill's own mother (a very amusing Jessie Royce Landis) clucks disapprovingly when she hears Roger's ludicrous story.

Though North By Northwest may seem strikingly different than much of Hitchcock's work, many of the director's trademark elements are still in place. In addition to the Innocent Man Wrongly Accused protagonist attempting to

convince everyone around him of the truth (not to mention the fact that he is yet another one of Hitchcock's everyman detectives), we have the icy yet immensely alluring blonde female lead (Eva Marie Saint, quite good if not a match for ), a vivid Bernard Herrmann score that not only comments on the action but adds its own subtext and a perilous climax in which at least one character will fall to their death. Oh, and let's not forget the director's trademark cameo.

It's a small problem, but there are a couple of casting issues that made me raise my eyebrows. First of all, Landis was actually a year younger than Grant when the film was made, so the idea that she could be his mother was nothing short of absurd. Additionally, I couldn't help but laugh out loud when the 35 year old Eva Marie Saint tells Grant that she is 26. She may be attractive but there's no way she can pass for a day under 30.

A great film that belongs in any movie lover's collection

Clark Douglas, DVD Verdict, 3 November 2009

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OPERATION PETTICOAT (1959)

Directed by (Breakfast At Tiffany's, the Pink Panther films etc) this is typical fifties "light comedy" - i.e. a couple of mildly amusing and a couple of quasi-dramatic moments all but lost in an excess of stultifyingly wit- less and pointless tedium. The story, such as it is, concerns a patched up WWII sub, commanded by Grant, that picks up five female service personnel followed by two pregnant native women plus children and a goat - oh, and gets painted pink. Grant still just about defies the years and Tony Curtis (above) and a pig provide some knockabout fun, but it's all hard going. Surprisingly, both Maltin (three and a half stars) and IMDb (7.3/10) rate this highly! 120 minutes.

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As WWII comedies go, Blake Edwards' Operation Petticoat is among the silliest and most lightweight. The plot is exceptionally thin and contrived and the comic scenarios the film concocts require a considerable suspension of disbelief. None of that really matters, however, because Operation Petticoat never once asks to be taken seriously. It's a fun, playful movie anchored by a pair of fun, playful performances and expecting anything more than that is a recipe for disappointment. If simply watching Cary Grant and Tony Curtis effectively employ their charisma and comic timing sounds like a decent way to spend a couple of hours, then you're in luck.

As the title suggests, Operation Petticoat might as well be called Wacky Hijinks: The Movie. Nearly all of the film's running time is occupied by a series of silly confrontations, silly wartime strategy and silly pranks. For instance, consider

the sequence in which Holden is caught stealing a pig from a Filipino farmer. Sherman recognises that the situation needs to be resolved quickly and quietly but also sees this as an opportunity to really irritate his chief rival. So he brings the poor farmer to Holden's quarters and begins handing him all of Holden's most prized possessions as payment. Holden is in no position to argue, of course, so he's left to despair as his precious trinkets are cheerfully given away. The scene goes on for an eternity, which would be a detriment if we were actually invested in the ongoing narrative. However, the film realises that what we're really interested in is watching the two leads spar with each other, so that's what we get.

Cary Grant is clearly too old for the part he's playing, but the film makes a half- hearted effort at excusing that fact by having the whole film play as a flash- back (a pair of bookend sequences are set nearly twenty years after the events of the film). They needn't have bothered, really. In a film filled to the brim with so many silly elements, Grant's age is hardly a problem. He's absolutely as charming and funny as he needs to be (despite the fact that he's in the "straight man" role), even if he's never too convincing as a military leader. Tony Curtis has always been a bit more hit and miss for me, but he's on his game this time around, preening for the camera and veering satisfactorily between nervous fretfulness and amusing smugness. A handful of talented supporting players - Joan O'Brien, Dick Sargent, Virginia Gregg and more - turn up, but Grant and Curtis own the film.

Clark Douglas, DVD Verdict, 5 August 2014

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THE GRASS IS GREENER (1960)

Stanley Donen directs Grant for the third time (of four) alongside Deborah Kerr (above, right - see also Dream Wife, An Affair To Remember), (second right above), and in this splendid five- handed play adapted for the screen by authors Hugh and Margaret Williams. Grant and Kerr are happily married members of the impoverished British aristocracy until she falls for American oil tycoon Mitchum. All is resolved in civilised and pleasingly literate style. Grant shines. 104 minutes. Excellent.

IMDb: Fine, funny and recommended / A strong script wasted with only Jean Simmons seeming to fit her part. Still, anything with Grant in is worth watching / A top notch script and fantastic cast combine to create a funny, moving, cracking film that seems to have been overlooked by most / This delightful film's script is a descendant of the sort of archly witty portrayals of British upper-class life that came from the pens of Somerset Maugham and Noel Coward. The atmosphere of this sort of comedy may be a bit foreign to American tastes but as a devotee of British drama I enjoyed the movie hugely. All the cast shine, right down to Moray Watson in the small but delicious part of the befuddled butler Sellers. Jean Simmons is especially enjoyable in her out-of- character portrayal of the vampish Hattie. Despite what others have said, Grant fills the part of this down-at-the-heels English Lord like old brandy fills a crystal decanter. The sumptuous setting of the baronial manor and the high production values make the film beautiful to look at, to boot. It does stretch the imagination a tad that Victor could treat the whole issue of his wife's infidelity, going on right in front of his nose, in such a dispassionate manner, but that is a characteristic of this genre. Further, Grant manages to convince us that, beneath his outer imperturbability, his wife's disloyalty has pained him deeply and he could not stand to lose her. Though the appeal of this little known film may be somewhat niche, it's a minor gem / An enjoyable cast and often deliciously witty dialogue succeed in enlivening this otherwise rather static comedy. It can't shake off its staginess, resulting in occasional moments of slight weariness, but for the most part, The Grass Is Greener is quality entertainment / A movie that glows brighter with the passage of time / Elegant Grant shows once more what a master he was / Erudite and delightful. Radiant Kerr dazzles, bovine Mitchum doesn't / A very intelligent script provides plenty of innuendo and moments for each of the stars to shine / Great fun.

Pandora's Box

Bookmarked by a cheery chorus extolling the joys of "the stately homes of England", Stanley Donen's The Grass Is Greener at first promises to be a pleasantly rich, thoroughly British comedy of manners, repartee and archly subtle barbs ready to go. The film elicits so comfortable a viewing state, in fact, that it takes some time to clue into the slow, inextricable escalation evolving on screen. The final result is an impressive transformation indeed: a sly, witty affair (pun intended) that, while unpacking the virtue of old-fashioned sensibilities, demonstrates a markedly modern undercurrent of risqué subtext and the place of tradition and posterity in the twentieth century. Donen's film is a charming and sophisticated satire that never becomes stuffy or unengaging. Most importantly, it is highly enjoyable through and through.

The film's clever script by Hugh and Margaret Williams, nimbly repurposing their own play, keeps the plot plugging along at a slow but subtly rising pace, with an opening poking fun at vacant tourists and the upper class elite stubborn enough to cling to the antiquated decadence of their heritage while begrudgingly opening their historic homes to the riff raff for sustainable income. However, as the conflict settles in, enough genuinely surprisingly twists and turns and pockets of action pop up for the film to never feel excessively talky. It's also impressive how cavalier the film is about its central infidelity conflict and (arguably more controversial) the motivations behind sustaining a strained marriage. Mercifully absent is the implicit judgement in many comparable narratives released in the thick of the Hays Code, making the film feel much more like a story than an ideologically spring-loaded cautionary tale.

Unsurprisingly, the film's main draw is its trifecta of Hollywood megastars comprising the central love triangle, the allure of whom Donen cheekily demystifies by introducing them as squabbling babies over the opening credits. However, rather than awards-baiting scene-chomping, Cary Grant, Deborah Kerr and Robert Mitchum all turn in restrained, deadpan performances - this is a British comedy of manners, after all, and overacting would be intolerably uncouth. Nonetheless, all three possess such natural star magnetism that, armed with the script's arsenal of clever zingers and double entendres, they remain eminently watchable throughout.

An uncomfortable situation unwound to its full satirical potential, The Grass Is Greener unpacks social performativity with deft ease. Fans of the stars, or those seeking an old-fashioned jaunt with a slyly contemporary edge are cordially invited to experience the distinct pleasure of visiting this stately home of England.

Pyrocitor, 31 July 2015

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THAT TOUCH OF MINK (1962)

Grant stars with Doris Day (above - thankfully no songs) in this visually fine (indeed Art Direction Oscar nominated) and otherwise pleasant rom-com that, but for a weak central premise and a couple of silly plot developments could have been something special. With Gig Young (last seen in 1942 Stanwyck vehicle The Gay Sisters) plus cameos from Yankees aces Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris and Yogi Berra. 99 minutes. Amiable, anodyne fun.

IMDb: Grant is the greatest actor who ever lived, whose mask-like suavity concealed astonishing depths and darkness and who starred in more genuine masterpieces than any other performer. He retired early because the quality of material put his way was severely diminishing. With this film you can see why / A few special moments in this movie almost mask the rest of its mediocrity / Surprisingly refreshing / It could have worked had the film not been based entirely on a single joke / You'll like yourself and the human race better after enjoying this one / These actors are too mature for this embalmed version of burlesque, glossy and colourful though it may be / Flimsy but fun / Grant is good but laconic and Day is kind of annoying. Some funny moments and pleasing atmosphere but with a phoney sentiment / One of the best of the "perpetual virgin" genre, of which Day was the leading star. The script sparkles and the supporting players really add to the total package. Enjoy this fantastically silly film! / An easy to take Day sex romp, I recommend it for the amusement it generates / This "adult and sophisticated" sleaze just made Grant look like a dirty old man with little class. Give me the old, real Cary Grant instead / A beautifully filmed fantasy that titillates in a genuinely charming way / Support players Gig Young, Audrey Meadows (Day's room mate) and ("Muscatel for my lady's pleasure") all do fine work / Probably the unfunniest comedy ever made / Not the best of Grant or Day, but as a pairing piece it's most entertaining - a brisk, dialogue-driven, humour-laden film that revels in a sort of smug awareness / Light-hearted and constantly funny with an exceptional main cast / Chemistry-lite, with both leads around twenty years too old / Cheesy but nice / Grant, the absolute epitome of genuine American bachelorhood and Day, the famously sweet innocent girl-next-door combine to make an early sixties classic / Wonderful.

CHARADE (1963)

Stanley Donen (Indiscreet etc) directs Grant for the fourth and last time in this tight little romantic mystery thriller that would have done Hitchcock proud. Set in Paris, it concerns the whereabouts of a missing $250,000 stolen during the war by one of five friends. After he dies before the opening credits, his mates turn their attention to his unknowing wife, played by Audrey Hepburn (above). The CIA also take an interest. Regina's problem is, whom can she trust? Grant, still performing at 59 with immaculate conviction, must have known, like his audience, that his screen days were numbered, but he's not finished yet. With , James Coburn and George Kennedy. 113 minutes. Good.

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It's hard to imagine how you can go wrong when a film's cast is led by Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Indeed, the funny and suspenseful romp that is Stanley Donen's Charade doesn't make imagining any easier. Donen began his career in musicals, directing the famous / Jerry the Mouse song and dance number from George Sidney's Anchors Aweigh (1945) before sharing lead direction with Kelly in movies like 1949's On The Town and the big daddy of all Hollywood musicals, 1952's Singin' In The Rain. With Charade, he decided to meld screwball comedy's rapid-fire wit with a Hitchcockian tale of suspense and danger. The resulting film is a warm cinematic ride, an adventure in Paris whose favouring of posh style over lurid detail must have seemed slightly nostalgic even in 1963, considering that the James Bond franchise with its racier brand of intrigue was hitting its stride and Hitchcock himself had moved on to more explicit terrors in Psycho and The Birds. The movie so overflows with charm, though, it's difficult to care that it feels more like a product of the 1950s than the '60s.

With its focus on shifting identities, shadowy government agencies and a woman in distress, Charade is often viewed as a gender-reversed version of North By Northwest. It suffers by such comparison because its breezier tone and emphasis on romance over action make it more akin to the lesser Hitch- cock thriller and Grant vehicle To Catch A Thief. As scripted by Peter Stone, Charade's intrigue is merely the skeleton on which the romance - the true meat of the picture - just as in To Catch A Thief we're far more interested in a Grant- Kelly hook-up than the cat burglary plot. Even so, Stone, who would go on to write Grant's penultimate picture, Father Goose and Donen films Arabesque and The Taking Of Pelham One Two Three, crafted a series of twists and turns sufficiently coherent that the thrills don't feel either throwaway or a poorly conceived staging ground for high style romance. Charade sports none of the gaping plot holes or gross slips in logic one finds in, say, the Bond or Pink Panther series, the sorts of gaffes that force a viewer to consciously flip the Suspend Disbelief switch in his brain. Charade's glitzy artifice is eminently and effortlessly digestible.

Donen could have found no better leading man than Cary Grant, considering Grant starred in some of the finest and funniest screwball comedies ever made, as well as topping the bill in four Hitchcock white-knucklers. The actor's looks (which basically defined the concept of movie-star handsome) along with his casual grace and impeccable timing make it easy to underestimate his enormous talent as an actor. Grant's turn in Charade appears so effortless, without coming off as rote or phoned-in, one could almost believe assuming top bill in a romance/thriller/comedy is such a simple thing that Donen could have plucked any Joe Schmo off the street to do it. All the more impressive is that Grant was on the cusp of 60 when he played Peter Joshua, yet doesn't come off the slightest bit like an old goat trying to hang onto his former glory. He's as vital and believable a romantic lead here as he was in the '40s and '50s. For all Grant's debonair charm, though, the show really belongs to Hepburn. Her classic beauty, augmented by the luxurious costume design of Hubert de Givenchy, melds with her innate intelligence and ability to play convincing vulnerability to make Regina Lampert a feisty yet deeply sympathetic heroine. The only incongruity in the character is her increasingly aggressive romantic pursuit of Mr. Joshua despite her growing distrust of his motives, a weird flaw attributable to Grant's discomfort with the 25 year age difference between himself and Hepburn. Before accepting the role, Grant, who found the notion of a man his age pursuing a woman Hepburn's age unseemly, insisted Stone alter the script to make the actress the pursuer. Rest assured, though, that Hepburn has little problem charming her way past this little inconsistency. In her hands, Lampert's fears become our own, and it's this character identifi- cation that lend the thriller portions of the film their substance.

Dan Mancini, DVD Verdict, 26 April 2004

FATHER GOOSE (1964)

Grant sets aside his boulevardier image to play a hard-drinking, island-hopping drop out in this WWII comedy set in the Malay archipelago. As the Japanese advance and the Allies fall back, spotters are left behind to report on enemy movements and Grant reluctantly becomes one such. His radio call sign (whence the film's title) is Mother Goose. Initially alone, he's soon encumbered with a diplomat's daughter (Leslie Caron, above) and seven young schoolgirls in her care. He's a bum, she's a self-confessed "picture-straightener". Will shared adversity bring them together? Have a guess. The screenplay won an Oscar. Pleasing, playful sport. With Trevor Howard. 116 minutes.

IMDb: If you haven't seen a Grant movie before, this is a perfect place to start. One of his very best / Vintage Grant, reminiscent of his earlier romantic comedies / They don't make stars like Grant anymore. His combination of maturity, good looks and comedic timing makes this a triple treat / Touches all the right buttons / A simple film, not very deep, but endearing, with just the right amount of silliness and predictable heroism / Lots of fun and goes down smooth / My favourite Grant comedy is 1937's The Awful Truth and it is an amazing tribute to his talent that in Father Goose, made 27 years later, he seems to have aged very little and has not lost one iota of the spark or zest that graced his performances throughout the decades. The rest of the cast are excellent too, most notably Trevor Howard who relishes this rare chance to take on a comedic role - but what makes this film really stand out is the clever writing / Grant, at the very top of his game, gives his best comedic performance. Every movement, every gesture is well nigh perfect. It looks effortless but is all well thought out. Film historian David Thomson called him the finest actor in Hollywood history and Time critic Richard Schickel once called him "a technician of genius". Watch Grant closely in this fine film and see why / By his only admission, one of Grant's own favourite projects.

WALK DON'T RUN (1966)

Grant brings his magnificent career to a close with this innocuous rom-com set in Tokyo during the 1964 Olympics. With accommodation throughout the city in very short supply, he's forced to flat-share with a British Embassy attaché (Samantha Eggar, above). He then sub-lets half of his half share to an athlete on the American team (, above) and, when the young couple show signs of mutual attraction (despite her engagement to someone else), decides to play Cupid. Inoffensive though forgettable fun. 114 minutes.

IMDb: He was old and greying and saddled with a weak script, but in many ways this film displays the magic of the great Cary Grant. Rising once more above lame material, he single-handedly makes the unwatchable watchable / Grant's swansong is done in his inimitable style, subtle and understated / Grant plays a graceful supporting role and the final scene with him giving Eggar to Hutton in marriage is symbolic of him handing over the baton to the next generation of stars / For Grant's swansong, stick with the terrific Father Goose rather than this half-baked fluff / The droll, dry, witty and acerbic humour of this light-hearted, feel-good comedy gem has a sense of we're-all-in-this- together that keeps the film on the fun side of the line between confusion and conflict / An infuriating experience, so dated and pedestrian, with morals already out of fashion when the film was released / A breezy, slick, amusing and frequently involving story filled with characters that seem unusually real. Grant in the walking race is a hoot! / A dull remake of the far funnier from 1943 / Eggar and Hutton are unattractive and irritating. Grant still commands the screen but is fighting a losing battle with inferior material / Tired work. No wonder Grant called it a day immediately afterwards / Lightweight but likable / Grant retired from screen acting at just the right time, not going on like so many of his contemporaries into decrepit old age, doing humiliating cameos and character roles. He alludes to his age here by not getting the girl at the film's end for the only time in his leading man career. The last scene, in which he waves goodbye to the two children before climbing into the car to be driven away, is touchingly done. Though it would have been nicer to see one of cinema's greatest stars sign off on a higher note, Walk Don't Run is still a pleasant and reason- ably dignified swansong to Grant's memorable contribution to film history.

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Cary Grant once described his screen persona as "a combination of Jack Buchanan, Noel Coward and . I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be and finally I became that person. Or he became me." In fact, in the process of constructing his cool, sophisticated movie star persona, Grant became not only the illusory presence he would have liked to be but the perfect, debonair Hollywood star. In Charade, Audrey Hepburn poses a question to her co-star and then answers it herself: "Do you know what's wrong with you? Nothing." Cary Grant was the true iconic movie star, his suave outward style and external sheen masking an inner reserve and aloofness, and in that reserve and seeming unconcern lies the Grant mystique. The plots of most Grant films revolve around this mystique and the efforts of a female (a short list includes such disparate types as Irene Dunne, Jean Arthur, Ingrid Bergman, Katharine Hepburn, Eva Marie Saint, Leslie Caron and Grace Kelly) to break it. And the audience can only guess at Grant's seeming abandonment and surrender to these women, whether it's symbolised by the door slamming shut at the end of The Awful Truth or the train racing into a tunnel at the end of North By Northwest. Whatever the final outcome, Grant did not show passion. That was left to other, more demonstrative actors. His acting was subtle and seamless, transcending performance altogether. It could be said that Cary Grant became a state of mind.

James Monaco, The Encyclopedia Of Film (Perigee Books, 1991)

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In the last four years of his life, Grant made 36 public appearances at theatres across the US performing an intimate film clip + Q&A show called An Evening With Cary Grant. In 1991, Nancy Nelson, the agent who booked these events and managed Grant's participation, published a memoir (Evenings With Cary Grant) not just of them but of his life, based on things she heard him say, his personal papers and the testimony of many associates and friends. Though not quite hagiography, it is remorselessly upbeat, but imparts nonetheless a compelling portrait that tells, if not the whole truth, still a warm, winning and (because first hand) ultimately persuasive approximation. We learn that he was "religious but not pious", a giggler and a baseball lover; also that, from the age of thirteen, he had only three upper incisors (having knocked out a fourth after falling on ice). Below are selected excerpts from the book:

CG, on his choice of career: [My science teacher's part-time lab assistant, an electrician] was a jovial, friendly man with children of his own and, one day, in kindly response to my eagerness to learn about anything electrical, he invited me to visit the newly-built Bristol Hippodrome, in which he'd installed the

switchboard and lighting system. The Saturday matinee was in full swing when I arrived backstage and there I suddenly found my inarticulate self in a dazzling land of smiling, jostling people wearing and not wearing all sorts of costumes and doing all sorts of clever things. And that's when I knew! What other life could there be but that of an actor? They happily travelled and toured. They were classless, cheerful and carefree. They gaily laughed, lived and loved.

Gunga Din (1939)

Jack Haley Jr.: He was constantly a maverick, rebelling against what everyone expected him to do. He had the confidence to say goodbye to Pender [when his troupe returned home after their American tour] and look for work in the theatre. Later he'd walk out on [touring theatre company impresarios] the Shuberts. Then [so becoming the first freelancing major screen star] he walked out on Paramount, which offered him a great deal of money to stay. And that was right toward the end of the Depression. It took cojones to do that.

Journalist Roderick Mann (on assuming the name "Cary Grant"): Cary told me he used to telephone Clark Gable each Christmas and say: 'Did you get any monogrammed stuff you don't want?' If he said yes, I'd hurry round and we'd exchange initialled presents.

Five of his films CG disavowed: Singapore Sue (1931), The Devil And The Deep (1932), Born To Be Bad (1934), When You're In Love (1937) and People Will Talk (1951). Nor (see below) did he care for Arsenic And Old Lace.

CG: Sylvia Scarlett was my breakthrough. It permitted me to play a character I knew. Thanks to [director] George Cukor. He let me play it the way I thought it should be played because he didn’t know who the character was.

My Favorite Wife director : Cary was not one of those movie stars who gets out there just because he's handsome and has a flair for playing one key or another. He worked very hard. I remember that indelibly. Almost more than any other quality was his seriousness about his work. He was always prepared; he always knew his part, his lines and the scene. And he related very well to the other players. He took not only his own part seriously; he took the whole picture seriously. He'd come and look at the rushes every evening. No matter how carefree and easygoing he seemed in the performance, in reality he was a serious man, an exceptionally concentrated man. And extremely intelligent, too. Still, he played far more on instinct than he did on intellect. I don't recall him ever intellectually discussing a role or a scene or a picture or a part. He trusted his own instincts, which had worked for him so well. He just polished that up and used it.

Destination Tokyo (1943)

Stanley Donen (director of Kiss Them For Me, Indiscreet, The Grass Is Greener and Charade): Cary was unique. You see it and feel it in the reactions and the characterisation. There's not a false moment. And it seems like it's just happening, that he's experiencing it at that moment. He projected ease and comfort, and he was always concentrated. You never saw any fear in him when he was acting. His scripts were full of little notes to himself. The minute detail of it all: that's really what all art is about. The tiniest details: that's what he

was great at. He always seemed real. It wasn't a gift from God, it was the magic that came from enormous amounts of work.

CG on Arsenic And Old Lace: I did not enjoy the role. It's my least favourite film. It wasn't my kind of comedy. Frank Capra, who was a great director, thought I could do it. I tried to explain to him that I couldn't do that kind of comedy - all those double takes. I'd have been better as one of the old aunts!

The Pride And The Passion (1957)

CG: If you want to be an actor, my advice is to learn your lines and don't bump into the other actors. Just get out there and act. You have to have the courage to make mistakes. It takes courage to be bad. You can only be good with experience. If you are really interested in a film career, you should get all the training and experience you can. You won't be wasting your time. Practically all films have someone young and someone old in them. You can work until you're one hundred years old.

Burt Reynolds, when he was number one at the box office: Cary told me: 'Enjoy the moment, but understand this is not the summit. You haven't gotten where you're going.' I thought he was talking about my career, but he was talking about my life - children and happiness. I wish I could tell him now that he was absolutely right.

CG: I liked being where I was, in front of the camera, especially when there was a man I respected on the other side. Directing is a long, long haul. You start with the script and have to be able to work with everyone connected with the film: actors, the scenic designer, the cameraman ... And when the picture's finished, you still have to edit it. That step can take months and months. As a

director you have to spend a great deal of time on one film. An actor, on the other hand, is in and out. A director gives a great deal of his life to his craft. I was never attracted to that aspect of filmmaking. I was much more interested in the economics of the business.

In the period 1960-63, Grant took LSD, under medical supervision, before its use was banned, more than one hundred times. He said: LSD permits you to fly apart. I got clearer and clearer. Your subconscious takes over when you take it, and you become free of the usual discipline you impose upon yourself. I forced myself through the realisation that I loved my parents and forgave them for what they didn't know. I became happier for it, and the insights I gained dispelled many of the fears I had prior to that time. I began to realise that I was my own worst enemy. You can't blame anyone else for what you've done in your life. You must keep in mind that you are always part of the action. Once you realise that, you're home a little freer.

With Ingrid Bergman in Notorious (1946)

Roderick Mann: Most actors are empty. [CG] was a very sage person - almost like a prophet. A thinking man. What I liked most about Cary was that I could talk to him seriously, about anything. You could tell your troubles to Cary.

HSH Prince Rainier III: Cary had not been a happy man ... It was only when he met [his fifth wife] Barbara [Harris] that he found what he had been searching for - the everyday happiness that lasted all day, all night, day after day, month after month, year after year.

Gregory Peck: [Cary told me] 'I just want to see [my daughter] Jennifer have a child. I want to see my grandchild. Then I'll be ready to shuffle off.' I think that nicely expresses his state of mind at the end. He had no fear. I hope he had a

feeling that he had accomplished a lot with his talent, determination and hard work. I hope he had an inner feeling of having done a good job and having made something of himself. I think he did.

CG: There's no point in being unhappy about growing older. Just think of the millions who have been denied the privilege.

Burt Reynolds: Cary was magical. He was touched by the gods in the sense that he was different from everyone else. When he walked into a room, you had to look at him. Men liked him as well as women, and that is incredibly rare. Men found him non-threatening. If a woman said: 'I'm in love with Cary Grant,' most men couldn't blame her.

Journalist Abigail Van Buren: Most celebrities are concerned with how they look and how people react to them. Cary reacted to other people. His success never went to his head. There are people who walk into a room and say: 'Here I am.' Cary walked in and said: 'There you are.'

Gregory Peck: He was comfortable in all aspects of show business: acrobatics, singing, music, comedy, drama, the circus. Underneath that suave manner and sophisticated style he was dyed-in-the-wool, grass-roots, down-to-earth show business. A performer. He might have been a vaudevillian or he might have been a band singer. In one way or another he was going to entertain people. But he finally weaved his way through and found he could be Cary Grant, the film star. He discovered that for himself.

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