G
Guest
Guest
For the youngsters on Lit. There's no man like him around today. My must sees in Bold. - Perdita
----------
Monumental Man - Mick LaSalle, SF Chronicle
If he were alive, Cary Grant would be 100 years old today, and you know he'd still be looking good. He looked good until the day he died -- in Iowa, while on a speaking tour in 1986: snow white hair, handsome face, 82 years old. He was the picture of health, and then a one-day illness. It was a smooth exit that has since been followed by many, many smooth entrances. Cary Grant refuses to go away.
Just turn the TV to Turner Classic Movies and you might see him, breezing into the lobby of his apartment building in "North by Northwest'' -- breezing in in a way that has made every man ever since feel like a galumphing clod in comparison. It took me until I was 30 to face the reality that even if I practiced I could never quite breeze into a lobby like that. In the past 100 years, only one guy got to be Cary Grant, and we should all be glad the camera was on him as often as it was.
Cary Grant. It's hard not to write both names. "Grant'' is a civil war general, and Cary is -- well, it's not like "Clint''; it doesn't stand alone. That walk, that unmistakable way of speaking: If we wanted to be fanciful, it would be easy to think of him as more a phenomenon than a man. But this was an actor, an exceptionally good actor, whose greatest creation was this malleable screen entity - this "Cary Grant'' -- that he more or less invented, or rather crafted, out of himself and the roles offered him.
Like Humphrey Bogart, he did not spring full-blown. With Bogart it's possible to say that he might have been the Bogart of "The Maltese Falcon'' earlier had the right roles come along, but with Grant we know that's not the case. Cary Grant had to evolve. Anyone wanting to see something truly hideous need only rent the "Hollywood Rhythm Volume 2'' DVD, which contains Grant's first screen performance, in a 1931 short called "Singapore Sue.'' He plays a rowdy sailor, and he is simply awful in it -- not merely miscast, but uncomfortable, physically stiff and smiling wildly.
He began life as Archibald Leach in a working-class family in Bristol, England. Some have described his distinct accent as Cockney, but others insist it was not. I prefer to think it was from a planet all his own. As a youngster, he worked as an acrobat, and came to the United States at 16 with a vaudeville troupe. By the end of the 1920s, he'd made a name for himself on Broadway, scoring a particular success in "Nikki'' (1931), a musical adaptation of John Monk Saunders' novel "Single Lady.''
He took a screen test for Paramount, and the studio decided to sign him to a contract, but first they insisted on a name change. He suggested "Cary Lockwood,'' the name of the role he played in "Nikki,'' but there was another Lockwood in pictures. Thus, after more than a decade in show business, Archibald Leach disappeared, and Cary Grant was born.
He was not a star at first. He played supporting roles and leading man parts, playing opposite star actresses. This phase of his career lasted five years and 25 films -- almost a third of Grant's 78-item filmography. In the 1932 films "Sinners in the Sun,'' "This Is the Night'' and "Merrily We Go to Hell,'' he's not much more than decorative. He made his first real impression in "Blonde Venus'' (1932), as a rich gangster in love with Marlene Dietrich. The following year, his two films opposite Mae West -- "She Done Him Wrong'' and "I'm No Angel'' -- didn't show him off to great advantage, but they did expose him to a mass audience. They were two of the most popular films of the year.
It's fun watching these early Grant films for the hints of the actor to come. One wonders, for example, how the writers of the Nancy Carroll vehicle "A Woman Accused'' (1933) knew Grant would be ideal for dialogue like this: "I'd go miles and miles on my hands and knees over broken bottles just for a little kiss." You've probably never seen the movie, but can't you just hear him saying that?
And in "Born to Be Bad'' (1934), opposite star Loretta Young, we see, perhaps for the first time, one of Grant's patented moves: Unlike most tall men, who look down when talking to a woman, Grant -- whenever he was in his imploring mode -- would dip his knees and put his hands on the woman's shoulders, so he could look her in the eye. In his later career, he'd use this move to comic effect.
In 1998, Young described Grant as one of the few leading men she didn't fall in love with -- they were friends -- and said that he was "always searching for answers, in a religious way. He tried everything.'' If this is not the picture we get from his films, it is consistent with Grant's own statements. He was a complicated man, reserved, sometimes dark and brooding, and he was always candid about not being quite the fellow he played onscreen. "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be,'' he once said, "and, finally, I became that person. Or he became me."
He came into his own with "Topper'' and Leo McCarey's "The Awful Truth'' (1937), and for a while his filmography reads like a series of classics. In 1938, there was "Bringing Up Baby'' and "Holiday,'' both with Katharine Hepburn. In 1939, "In Name Only'' (with Carole Lombard) and "Gunga Din.'' In 1940, "His Girl Friday'' and "The Philadelphia Story.''
"Suspicion'' (1941) contains one of the great Grant performances -- he plays a lovable scoundrel whose wife (Joan Fontaine) suspects him of being a murderer. Grant invites the audience to look deep into his glib, smiling character and see the wheels of calculation spinning. Here, but not only here, there's a coldness about Grant's warmth, an awareness of who he is, what he's doing and how he's coming off that is often just a little too alert and intelligent to be completely benevolent.
There's a tendency to think of Grant as someone, like Bogart, who was always essentially the same. But think how elastic that "Cary Grant'' persona could be. Look at his completely abandoned silliness in "Arsenic and Old Lace'' (1944), then at the cold spite of his performance in Hitchcock's "Notorious'' (1946), another career highlight.
His 1950s films were more hit and miss, but the social comedy "People Will Talk'' and his films for Hitchcock, "To Catch a Thief'' and "North by Northwest," were standouts. "North by Northwest'' was the ideal Grant film of his late career: It showcased his flair for subtle comedy, his irascibility and his sex appeal, while providing audiences with the kick of seeing a seemingly unflappable icon get tortured for two hours.
He let his hair go gray in the 1950s, and he looked great that way, too. The leading ladies got younger -- Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Eva Marie Saint -- and no one seemed to mind. But he was self-conscious about it, and he retired in 1966. A year later began the era of "The Graduate'' and "Bonnie and Clyde.'' Grant got out at the right time. Four years later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him one of those special we-blew-it Oscars, for his career achievement.
There are people yet to discover Cary Grant, and they're lucky to have such fun ahead. What they'll discover is a mere mortal who somehow made himself into a kind of masterpiece. In the 100 years since he was born, few people have made the spectacle of their own being quite so delightful, fascinating and elaborate.
article w/pics
----------
Monumental Man - Mick LaSalle, SF Chronicle
If he were alive, Cary Grant would be 100 years old today, and you know he'd still be looking good. He looked good until the day he died -- in Iowa, while on a speaking tour in 1986: snow white hair, handsome face, 82 years old. He was the picture of health, and then a one-day illness. It was a smooth exit that has since been followed by many, many smooth entrances. Cary Grant refuses to go away.
Just turn the TV to Turner Classic Movies and you might see him, breezing into the lobby of his apartment building in "North by Northwest'' -- breezing in in a way that has made every man ever since feel like a galumphing clod in comparison. It took me until I was 30 to face the reality that even if I practiced I could never quite breeze into a lobby like that. In the past 100 years, only one guy got to be Cary Grant, and we should all be glad the camera was on him as often as it was.
Cary Grant. It's hard not to write both names. "Grant'' is a civil war general, and Cary is -- well, it's not like "Clint''; it doesn't stand alone. That walk, that unmistakable way of speaking: If we wanted to be fanciful, it would be easy to think of him as more a phenomenon than a man. But this was an actor, an exceptionally good actor, whose greatest creation was this malleable screen entity - this "Cary Grant'' -- that he more or less invented, or rather crafted, out of himself and the roles offered him.
Like Humphrey Bogart, he did not spring full-blown. With Bogart it's possible to say that he might have been the Bogart of "The Maltese Falcon'' earlier had the right roles come along, but with Grant we know that's not the case. Cary Grant had to evolve. Anyone wanting to see something truly hideous need only rent the "Hollywood Rhythm Volume 2'' DVD, which contains Grant's first screen performance, in a 1931 short called "Singapore Sue.'' He plays a rowdy sailor, and he is simply awful in it -- not merely miscast, but uncomfortable, physically stiff and smiling wildly.
He began life as Archibald Leach in a working-class family in Bristol, England. Some have described his distinct accent as Cockney, but others insist it was not. I prefer to think it was from a planet all his own. As a youngster, he worked as an acrobat, and came to the United States at 16 with a vaudeville troupe. By the end of the 1920s, he'd made a name for himself on Broadway, scoring a particular success in "Nikki'' (1931), a musical adaptation of John Monk Saunders' novel "Single Lady.''
He took a screen test for Paramount, and the studio decided to sign him to a contract, but first they insisted on a name change. He suggested "Cary Lockwood,'' the name of the role he played in "Nikki,'' but there was another Lockwood in pictures. Thus, after more than a decade in show business, Archibald Leach disappeared, and Cary Grant was born.
He was not a star at first. He played supporting roles and leading man parts, playing opposite star actresses. This phase of his career lasted five years and 25 films -- almost a third of Grant's 78-item filmography. In the 1932 films "Sinners in the Sun,'' "This Is the Night'' and "Merrily We Go to Hell,'' he's not much more than decorative. He made his first real impression in "Blonde Venus'' (1932), as a rich gangster in love with Marlene Dietrich. The following year, his two films opposite Mae West -- "She Done Him Wrong'' and "I'm No Angel'' -- didn't show him off to great advantage, but they did expose him to a mass audience. They were two of the most popular films of the year.
It's fun watching these early Grant films for the hints of the actor to come. One wonders, for example, how the writers of the Nancy Carroll vehicle "A Woman Accused'' (1933) knew Grant would be ideal for dialogue like this: "I'd go miles and miles on my hands and knees over broken bottles just for a little kiss." You've probably never seen the movie, but can't you just hear him saying that?
And in "Born to Be Bad'' (1934), opposite star Loretta Young, we see, perhaps for the first time, one of Grant's patented moves: Unlike most tall men, who look down when talking to a woman, Grant -- whenever he was in his imploring mode -- would dip his knees and put his hands on the woman's shoulders, so he could look her in the eye. In his later career, he'd use this move to comic effect.
In 1998, Young described Grant as one of the few leading men she didn't fall in love with -- they were friends -- and said that he was "always searching for answers, in a religious way. He tried everything.'' If this is not the picture we get from his films, it is consistent with Grant's own statements. He was a complicated man, reserved, sometimes dark and brooding, and he was always candid about not being quite the fellow he played onscreen. "I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be,'' he once said, "and, finally, I became that person. Or he became me."
He came into his own with "Topper'' and Leo McCarey's "The Awful Truth'' (1937), and for a while his filmography reads like a series of classics. In 1938, there was "Bringing Up Baby'' and "Holiday,'' both with Katharine Hepburn. In 1939, "In Name Only'' (with Carole Lombard) and "Gunga Din.'' In 1940, "His Girl Friday'' and "The Philadelphia Story.''
"Suspicion'' (1941) contains one of the great Grant performances -- he plays a lovable scoundrel whose wife (Joan Fontaine) suspects him of being a murderer. Grant invites the audience to look deep into his glib, smiling character and see the wheels of calculation spinning. Here, but not only here, there's a coldness about Grant's warmth, an awareness of who he is, what he's doing and how he's coming off that is often just a little too alert and intelligent to be completely benevolent.
There's a tendency to think of Grant as someone, like Bogart, who was always essentially the same. But think how elastic that "Cary Grant'' persona could be. Look at his completely abandoned silliness in "Arsenic and Old Lace'' (1944), then at the cold spite of his performance in Hitchcock's "Notorious'' (1946), another career highlight.
His 1950s films were more hit and miss, but the social comedy "People Will Talk'' and his films for Hitchcock, "To Catch a Thief'' and "North by Northwest," were standouts. "North by Northwest'' was the ideal Grant film of his late career: It showcased his flair for subtle comedy, his irascibility and his sex appeal, while providing audiences with the kick of seeing a seemingly unflappable icon get tortured for two hours.
He let his hair go gray in the 1950s, and he looked great that way, too. The leading ladies got younger -- Grace Kelly, Audrey Hepburn, Eva Marie Saint -- and no one seemed to mind. But he was self-conscious about it, and he retired in 1966. A year later began the era of "The Graduate'' and "Bonnie and Clyde.'' Grant got out at the right time. Four years later, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gave him one of those special we-blew-it Oscars, for his career achievement.
There are people yet to discover Cary Grant, and they're lucky to have such fun ahead. What they'll discover is a mere mortal who somehow made himself into a kind of masterpiece. In the 100 years since he was born, few people have made the spectacle of their own being quite so delightful, fascinating and elaborate.
article w/pics
