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FREE FROM REEL TO DEAL: HOLLYWOODS #1 FILM INSTRUCTOR TELLS YOU HOW TO BEAT THE SYSTEM! PDF Dov Simens | 604 pages | 15 Jul 2016 | Little, Brown & Company | 9780446674621 | English | New York, United States 20 Famous Movie Lines That You Have Been Saying Wrong American Masters Online thanks the New Yorker for their kind permission to reprint this classic essay. It makes him glamorous—and, since he is not as available as other From Reel to Deal: Hollywoods #1 Film Instructor Tells You How to Beat the System!, far more desirable. Cary Grant is the male love object. Men want to be as lucky and enviable as he is—they want to be like him. And women imagine landing him. If he had looked at her with desire, everything else about the movie might have been forgiven. Cary Grant would not have failed; yearning for an idealized love was not beyond his resources. He expressed the very sort of desperate constancy that Redford failed to express. The heroine who chases him knows that deep down he wants to be caught only by her. With Gable, sex is inevitable: What is there but sex? Basically, he thinks women are good for only one thing. Grant is interested in the qualities of a particular woman—her sappy expression, her non sequiturs, the way her voice bobbles. With Grant, the social, urban man, there are infinite possibilities for mutual entertainment. They might dance the night away or stroll or go to a carnival—and nothing sexual would happen unless she wanted it to. The game, however, is an artful dodge. He gets the blithe, funny girl by maneuvering her into going after him. Many men must have wanted to be Clark Gable and look straight at a woman with a faint smirk and lifted, questioning eyebrows. And at that deluxe level men want to be Cary Grant. Men as far apart as John F. Kennedy and Lucky Luciano thought that he should star in their life story. Who but Cary Grant could From Reel to Deal: Hollywoods #1 Film Instructor Tells You How to Beat the System! a fantasy self-image for a President and a gangster chief? Cary Grant has said that even he wanted to be Cary Grant. Sitting out there in Los Angeles, the expatriate New York writers projected onto him their fantasies of Eastern connoisseurship and suavity. How could the heroine ever consider marrying a rich rube from Oklahoma and leaving Cary Grant and the night spots? Los Angeles itself has never recovered from the inferiority complex that its movies nourished, and every moviegoing kid in America felt that the people in New York were smarter, livelier, and better-looking than anyone in his home town. There were no Cary Grants in the sticks. He and his counterparts were to be found only in the imaginary cities of the movies. When you look at him, you take for granted expensive tailors, international travel, and the best that life has to offer. Women see a man they could have fun with. When he and a woman are together, they can laugh at each other and at themselves. Come on up. Henry Fonda and James Stewart turned into folksy elder statesmen, sagacious but desexed. Cary Grant has had the longest romantic reign in the short history of movies. He might be cast as an arrogant rich boy, an unscrupulous cynic, or a selfish diplomat but there was nothing sullen or self-centered in his acting. Grant never got star-stuck, on himself; he never seemed to be saying, Look at me. The most obvious characteristic of his acting is the absence of narcissism—the outgoingness to the audience. He appeared with this batch in ; Paramount threw him into seven pictures in his first year. He was resplendent before but characterless, even a trace languid—a slightly wilted sheik. She brought out his passivity, and a quality of refinement in him which made her physical aggression seem a playful gambit. With tough men opposite her, she was less charming, more crude. Yet Grant still had that pretty-boy killer look; he was too good-looking to be on the level. And although he was outrageously attractive with Mae West, he was vaguely ill at ease; his face muscles betrayed him, and he looked a little fleshy. No doubt he felt absurd in his soulful, cow-eyed leading-man roles, and tried to conceal it; when he had nothing to do in a scene, he stood lunged forward as if hoping to catch a ball. He became Cary Grant when he learned to project his feelings of absurdity through his characters and to make a style out of their feeling silly. Once he realized that each movement could be stylized for humor, the eye popping, the cocked head, the forward lunge, and the slightly ungainly stride became as certain as the pen strokes of a master cartoonist. The new element of romantic slapstick in the mid-thirties comedies—the teasing role reversals and shifts of mood—loosened him up and brought him to life. At last, he could do on the screen what he had been trained to do, and a rambunctious, springy side of his nature came out. He was no longer effete; the booming voice had vitality. He was so brashly likable that viewers felt vaguely discomfited at the end when Brian Aherne who had given an insufferably egotistic performance wound up with Hepburn. Grant seemed to be enjoying himself on the screen in a way he never had before. The conventional bedroom-farce plot filmed twice before is about a couple who still love each other but have a tiff and file for divorce; during the period of the interlocutory decree, the husband has visiting rights to see their dog, and this cunning device enables Grant to hang around, romping affectionately with the dog while showing his unstated longing for his wife. Grant is a comic master at throwaway lines, and he turns them into a dialogue, as if he were talking to himself. And though she is often funny, she overdoes the coy gurgles, and that bright, toothy smile of hers—she shows both rows of teeth, prettily held together—can make one want to slug her. But Grant stabilizes her and provides the believability. Grant uses his intense physical awareness to make the scenes play, and never to make himself look good at the expense of someone else—not even when he could waltz away with the show. There were other gifted urbane farceurs. The best of them, William Powell, with his skeptical, tolerant equanimity, was supremely likable; he got the most out of each blink and each twitch of his lips, and he had amazing dimples, which he could invoke without even smiling. When we in the audience began to sense the pleasure he took in low comedy, we accepted him as one of us. Afterward, even when he played straight romantic parts the freedom and strength stayed with him. And never left him: he gave some embarrassed, awful performances when he was miscast, but he was never less than a star. He might still parade in the tuxedos and the tails of his dashing-young-idiot days, but he was a buoyant, lusty performer. The assurance he gained in slapstick turned him into the smoothie he had aspired to be. He brought elegance to low comedy, and low comedy From Reel to Deal: Hollywoods #1 Film Instructor Tells You How to Beat the System! him the corky common-man touch that made him a great star. So do moviegoers the world over. He is said to have been convivial and fond of singing—a temperament From Reel to Deal: Hollywoods #1 Film Instructor Tells You How to Beat the System! wife definitely did not share. Leach pampered their protesting child, keeping him in baby dresses, and then in short pants and long curls. A domineering woman with an early history of mental instability, she was married to a pantspresser but she wanted her son to be a cultured, piano- playing little gentleman. The parents were miserable together, and the boy was caught in the middle. When Archie was nine, he returned home from school one day to find that his mother was missing; he was led to think she had gone to a local seaside resort, and it was a long time before he learned that she had broken down and been taken to an institution. I was known, to most people of the world by sight and by name, yet not to my mother. After Mrs. He went to Boy Scout meetings, studied hard, and From Reel to Deal: Hollywoods #1 Film Instructor Tells You How to Beat the System! a school scholarship; he planned to try for a further scholarship, which would take him to college, but found out that even with a scholarship college would be too expensive. His first contact with music hall came quite by chance. At school, he liked chemistry, and he sometimes hung around the lab on rainy days; the assistant science teacher was an electrician, who had installed the lighting system at the Bristol Hippodrome, and one Saturday matinee he took Archie, just turned thirteen, backstage. It was probably the only free atmosphere the boy had ever experienced. When he learned that Bob Pender, a former Drury Lane clown, had a troupe of young knockabout comedians that suffered attrition each time a boy came of military age, he wrote, in the guise of his father, asking that Archibald be taken for training.

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