Cary Out Grant By Threes

Watching His Lessers Make Me Like More His Betters

Three with Cary Grant, two watched together, the other further back. Grant was freelance early enough to choose for himself over most of a career. I’m not sure he was his own best guide. Once-upon-time wife Betsy Drake told an interview how she warned Cary against so many empty pictures (including ones with her), to which she did not add how he replied, but the conversation having been in the early 50’s, you know she made valid points. Given pick Grant had of virtually any movie being made, why Room For One More, Dream Wife, or too-oddity People Will Talk? Grant is one whose legend rests on fewer good pictures than most, among legends, that is. I wonder if Drake, a brainy sort, was too perceptive to set well with Grant. Every Girl Should Be Married was an RKO I had seen years before and forgot. Having had lobby cards, the set-up was familiar, but still came surprises when it unspooled.

Here was Grant called upon to elevate weak material, and knowing it (did that happen often enough to unstring, and make more moody, a famously fussy CG?). Money was a best reason for being there from what we know of him, Grant another who came up poor and forever felt wolf-sniff at his door. Wasn’t there a story about him darning socks until there was barely thread left? Keeping in eats made him do things unworthy, or did Grant believe ones of Every Girl sort would by miracles emerge good? Howard Hughes was evidently a friend, and maybe he asked Grant as a friend to be in Every Girl Should Be Married. The movie pleases for peculiarity and remove from how people are obliged to think today. I’d like  seeing a university book it for resultant fireworks. Just that title! Is it less legitimate to ask in 2020 if every girl should be married --- or more dangerous? Maybe the better title would be, Should Cary Have Made This Movie?, because Every Girl all but endorses track, stalk, and mislead toward wedding a man, trouble Grant had in other of late 40’s comedies where women, even teen girls (Shirley Temple) painted targets on his back. Was this because Cary Grant by postwar was anointed Most Eligible of Any/All Men, besides a dreamiest?

An aunt told me when I was ten that Grant was the most handsome movie star that ever was, and I went years ascribing truth to that. Seemed he was always overrun, however, by brat kids, per early view for me of Father Goose (at the Liberty, where a ten-cent Baby Ruth was regarded higher than many movies), Room For One More, in which he marries and winds up with a passel, to which I asked, Why do that?, and Houseboat (same, w/ Sophia Loren but small compensation). Finally got to see Notorious at age fourteen, and said, Ah yes, this is my Cary Grant. Every Girl has shock value that I enjoy more than if it were funny. Drake spots Grant at a magazine shelf in a drug store where his looking at a gurgle-baby cover makes her think he’s married, signals endlessly crossed from there. She gets him at an end by trickery, but to avoid his being made an utter fool, Grant is shown as being hep all along, but … why agree to marry in the face of such red flags? Also Drake is more neurotic than comical, persistent like Maggie McNamara before there was a Maggie McNamara. We worry that fade-out Cary has gone, or been dragged, in over his head.

I Was A Male War Bride explains at least where Herman Cohen got his clever werewolf idea some years later, though there had been a first person Shoplifter, and far back as 1933, a Prisoner on Chain Gangs. To me, I Was A … anything implies humor, and so Male War Bride is funny, the best I think, of Howard Hawks comedies. Devastated Germany is again backdrop for frolic, as with A Foreign Affair out a year before. US crews went Euro after the war for greater authenticity and to loosen funds frozen by governments tired of us carrying off loot earned on site. I Was A Male War Bride opens with Cary Grant on leisurely ride through what's left of Deutsch landscape, Hawks and cameras giving us glimpse of mess a fighting force left behind. This isn't emphasized or even commented upon, as Male War Bride treads at all times lighter, though men may laugh less at continual embarrassment sustained by Grant, plus near two hour length of his ordeal. Hawks enjoyed juggle of man/woman power, even if his humor worked better as garnish to action subjects. When baked from full comic recipe, the cake could and sometimes did fall, not the case for me here, though I admit Hawks at full levity can register two dozen differing ways for as many onlookers. You may expect your guests to dig his humor, but don't be overly confidant of it.

A first half is conflicted courtship of Grant with Ann Sheridan, the second given to delayed consummation of their marriage. We get slapstick plus business with a motorcycle and sidecar, which Sheridan herself drives with Grant accompany, even in long shots, willingness I admire as it's rare for big stars to exert themselves where distant stand-ins could do as much. Hawks and writers have great sport with army protocol and senseless regulation. Now that serious mission of war was over, we could laugh at military cock-ups and personnel wanting to get hell out of it (but what of the Cold one --- did Soviets watch this and figure we could be beat?). Hawks stars were permitted ... encouraged ... to ad-lib and submit ideas, Grant an actor as auteur who could and did shape vehicles to suit instinct of what worked for him. Fact is, maybe we should call it Cary Grant’s I Was A Male War Bride. Hawks liked women to laugh at absurdity of their men, War Bride with innumerable scenes where Sheridan breaks up over Grant's discomfort. Query: Did Howard enjoy wives doing this to him at home? I bet not. Sheridan would remember War Bride as a favorite assignment, her Warner output largely scrap iron since a wartime peak (grimly photographed and made up in Silver River). She should have done a dozen for Hawks before War Bride. Think of her opposite Grant in Only Angels Have Wings instead of Jean Arthur. I Was A Male War Bride streams here and there in High-Def, a best bet since visually, it could use a boost.

Most intriguing of the Grant group was Crisis. Decidedly not a comedy, but sold like one in 1950, MGM’s campaign reflected what they wish they had over reality of a thing no one was figured to want. False labeling usually betrayed a dud picture, which Crisis isn't, but Cary Grant not doing comedy was an unnatural state, thus a trailer with whatever moments might be read as frothy, posters reading “Carefree Cary Grant On a Gay Holiday With His Lovely Bride Walks Right Into Danger.” That much was technically true where one split hairs, but exit from Crisis had to feel like leaving a dentist who promised only to polish your teeth, but drilled them instead. I will state without deeper research, and little fear of being wrong, that here is the only time Cary Grant played a brain surgeon. Crisis was directed and co-written by Richard Brooks, his first in that dual capacity. Brooks later said it was Grant who made that possible. The star is so good being serious that you wish he had done it more often. There really should have been two or three Cary Grants to satisfy varying audience appetites.

Always good, and happening too seldom, was Grant going opposite, or in opposition to, a strong male co-lead. Crisis has Jose Ferrer, nearing a peak of Broadway and elsewhere success, as a South American despot who kidnaps Dr. Grant for purpose of cutting out a tumor, procedure for which Grant is most-in-the-world qualified. They verbal spar and not in jest. Grant must have been refreshed doing work like this, to show himself, if not a wide audience, that straight performing was still an option. I enjoyed him as much here as in any six of comedies. That Crisis lost money, a rather lot of it ($680K) was less reflection on Grant than further proof of MGM feeling pinch that was sunk revenue across industry boards. I’ll note he ducked drama for a next seven years, till The Pride and The Passion, which tanked also. Everything from there to finish was comedy, or thrilling served Hitchcock light, or someone trying to be Hitchcock. Crisis plays TCM and is available from Warner Archive. I don’t see them rushing to put it on High-Def, tip-off that 2020 can’t use Cary Grant in drama any more than 1950 could. By all means order Scott Eyman’s Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise, a best-ever bio of the star and a same joy to read as every other Eyman book. 

6/14/2020: Up this morning to a wonderful comic by Jules Feiffer sent Greenbriar's way by Donald Benson. So yes, we do, all of us, want to be Cary Grant, but has even one among us ever achieved it?