The Cary Grant List

[Rayon Vert]

My Favorite Wife (Kanin 1940). (revisit) The plot here is like the moving one of the Tom Hanks character coming back to his now remarried wife at the end of Cast Away, but of course here it's executed in the screwball comedy style (shrewd bit about the dog recognizing her and not the young kids after seven years). A McCarey project, this is very much a reiteration of The Awful Truth, complete with similar cute bedroom finale. It can’t compete with the original, but I enjoyed this again quite a bit. Not everything is consistently a laugh fest, but the actors’ performances raise the material to another level, Dunne especially being the equal in her comedienne skills as she was in the earlier film.


Wings in the Dark (Flood 1935). Generic melodrama is right. I couldn’t muster the same enthusiasm for this as knives, even though it’s watchable. I have to agree CG is close to being CG though.


Big Brown Eyes (Walsh 1936). Twbb was right in describing this like a His Girl Friday test run. The switching back and forth from romantic comedy to gritty crime film was pretty smooth, and both modes worked for me. A fun, lively and energetic movie. Cary was fine but Joan was the scene-stealer. Can’t say I’m crazy about the blonde hair though (and not quite sure what the title refers to).

[Shrew]

[b}Wings in the Dark[/b] is more frustrating than generic, as it's full of narrative forks at which the plot also makes the worst possible turn. Loy and Grant work well together the opening with Loy's independent aviatrix promises something like Anne Marie or Le ciel est a vous, but then she's mostly grounded in favor of Grant. And once the plot becomes Loy hiding the direness of the situation from Grant all hope is lost. Still, there's enough good here that you can't just turn it off, but alas even the weird process scenes of Grant testing tech by controlling a model plane against a fan just make you angrier that this wasn't something better.

Big Brown Eyes strikes me as half Thin Man copy and half His Girl Friday precursor. Grant's chemistry with Bennett is the prime propellent, helped along by some fun Walsh touches like the editing of the barbershop gossip, but hasn't quite been refined yet. There's an odd scene midway where Grant is packing and Bennett can't pull open a jammed dresser drawer. It's the sort of random digression that Hawks or McCarey might have built into a big comic moment, but here its just an incongruous aside. I'm also not big on the gangster stuff, which gets more boring the more they return to it (and the more forgettable hoodlums they introduce).

[domino harvey]

Ladies Should Listen is just dreadful. Apart from one decent contemporary dig at Anthony Adverse this film is completely laff free and the actors just flounder about in a terrible idiot plot where you hate everyone and an hour feels like an eternity

[Rayon Vert]

Ladies Should Listen (Tuttle 1934). Another trifle, but just a dreadful film by comparison, with the actors’ efforts powerless against the thin, humorless script.

Ladies Should Listen is just dreadful. Apart from one decent contemporary dig at Anthony Adverse this film is completely laff free and the actors just flounder about in a terrible idiot plot where you hate everyone and an hour feels like an eternity

Feeling vindicated right now.

[bottlesofsmoke]

I gave Penny Serenadeanother try because the melodrama / weepie is a genre that I usually eat up. The song-flashback structure is clever, but I wish the songs themselves had more significance, rather than just triggering flashbacks. Grant is the best part of the movie, the scene where he pleads for custody of his child is a high point. It felt different than when he cries in Only Angels Have Wings, though, where I was absorbed in the characters and what was happening, and therefore carried away with the emotions. Here, I mainly felt the emotion of the scene because of Grant, not his character. I think that is a fault of a script that doesn’t do much in the way of establishing depth to the characters. Instead, it just keeps laying on scenes of feeling and heartrending yearning that feel quite manipulative. Outside of the aforementioned Grant scene, these moments didn’t really work for me. By the time I reached the scenes that might actually be moving, I was too worn out to care very much. I had hoped that now, expecting my first child, I might connect more with it, but alas it’s attempts at pulling the heartstrings are so frequent, unearned, and obvious that I felt no different.

Most of George Stevens’ pre-war movies always seem to have something off about them to me, even The More the Merrier, which I know a lot of people really like. Like the pieces don’t quite fit together, despite some good ideas and the tone is slightly off. Gunga Din is, ironically, one of the only ones that works best for me, if only because it knows exactly what it is - a pulpy boys adventure story mixed screwball comedy - and as such has all the inherent strengths and flaws. The adult me recognizes the many problematic parts of the film and can see some of the filmmaking deficiencies, but the little bit left of the 10 year old me who loved Kipling and Edgar Rice Burroughs, still gets a little thrill out of parts of it. It’s a movie for kids like that, but has enough issues that it’s hard to recommend to that audience without someone to provide context, leaving it in a weird sort no-man’s land.

Penny Serenade reminds me of Arsenic and Old Lace, another movie that I feel like I should love based on the pieces but boy do I dislike it. The comedy feels so forced, with a few jokes repeated over and over. The wackiness is turned up all the way up from the get-go, the actors are trying so hard to be zany, and so it wears itself out after thirty minutes - and the movie is two hours long! This is apparently a beloved movie but I’ve never been able to stand it, I know comedy is subjective but man… I’d love to know what so many people see in it, I can usually at least understand why some movies are popular, even if I disagree, but this one misses me completely.

[Rayon Vert]

I know not everyone here is crazy about Arsenic - it's unbearable to me, and dead last.

[senseabove]

Bringing Up Baby is that one for me. After throwing in the towel fifteen minutes in during the Hawks list, I mustered the diligence to rewatch it for this one by inveigling my roommate to choose it one night. The jail scene is absolutely hilarious, but nearly everything before and after it is nails and chalkboards. I just need at least one character who isn't talking obliviously past everyone—a Michael in Arrested Development character. Grant becomes that briefly, here, in the famous nightgown scene and Hepburn does it during the jail scene, and those are the only two scenes I find genuinely amusing. The rest is torturous.

[domino harvey]

Madness, but my mentor in college told me he took Bringing Up Baby out of his intro film courses because he got tired of students bitching about it, so you're not alone. Still, madness! Sylvia Scarlett is prob the worst for me because it's made by people who could all do better and should have done so-- picking on a movie like Ladies Should Listen, which is an objectively worse film, seems like a waste of time. Who cares what Frank Tuttle could have done?

[therewillbeblus]

I theoretically understand these rationales, but anyone ranking a film behind The Pride and the Passion is just wrong

[dustybooks]

My first encounter with Bringing Up Baby when I was about 21 was one of those bracing, unforgettably perfect experiences of absolute joy with a film; I was alone and spent the entire time in a state of something like bliss, I was so endlessly amused and delighted by it, not least because the extremity of the characterizations went so far beyond what I expected. (I'd seen Albert Brooks' Modern Romance around the same time and had a similar experience with it; comedies generally do not make me laugh when I'm alone, even if I find them genuinely funny, and these were both exceptions.) I had taped it from TCM that night and a couple of weeks later I started showing it to my then-girlfriend after talking it up in terms similar to those I just used, which may sound lofty but were truly sincere. And she didn't even have to say anything; after about ten minutes I knew it was utterly bombing, and nothing that seemed endearing about it to me in private was working with the two of us in the room.

I still think it's a truly great film, one I find more to appreciate in as years go by (for example it flew past me the first time how much sexual innuendo it contained), and it played gangbusters when I watched it with my wife many years down the line. But I will admit that I've never had another experience with it like that first time, and I'm still shocked by how different it felt in the room when it just wasn't landing.

[therewillbeblus]

I love Bringing Up Baby and Grant is great in it, but I found myself ranking films for this project by the strength of Grant's performances within those great films. Of course this is often arbitrary between comedies and dramas, but I believe I placed His Girl Friday above Bringing Up Baby, while I like the earlier Hawks film more, because Grant's adrenaline rush of a performance is so insanely impressive in the later film.

[Rayon Vert]

Destination Tokyo (Daves 1943). It’s interesting watching a film like this, only two years into the ongoing war (for the U.S.), which unveils fascinating military strategies you figure at first glance should stay secrets. I was looking forward to this and it didn’t disappoint. At first there’s a lot of focus on the social interplay between the crew members that makes you wonder if it’s going to be more light on action, but boy does it end up delivering, with tons of successive, very suspenseful scenes, not the least the operation on the sick Tommy. (And those depth charge attacks are brutal.) And though it isn’t initially promising in that way, you do end up getting involved and engaged in all of these characters. Grant is more low-key in something like this than in his usual comedy roles, but he’s extremely fine, and intense in just the right way when he needs to be, especially at the end. It’s jingoistic as hell and borderline racist like most of these wartime films are, but at least there’s a(n ideologically-motivated) recognition that Japanese society is evil because of its current regime. It breaks into my top ten (and likely to stay there), which I thought would have been hard to do, and is easily my second favorite Delmer Daves so far.


The Grass Is Greener (Donen 1960). In contrast to others here, I thought the beginning was the film’s best moment - irrespective of whether Mitchum was the right actor, there was some spirit because of the morally shocking nature of the storyline for this period (which as sensabove quite rightly explains is eventually undone by the conservative dénouement) and Kerr was very good in this part. However that initial promising tension gets dissipated in the incessantly verbose light comedy stage play fare that this becomes, very much like Indiscreet, though I enjoyed it substantially more than the preceding two Donens. I’m not familiar enough with the director but I noticed this and Indiscreet are very eye-catching in terms of the extremely colorful (and busy) rooms/sets - too bad in these two cases that the content doesn’t quite match the style.


Penny Serenade (Stevens 1941). (revisit) I knew going in this time that it was a shameless tearjerker so I was ready to just accept the sentimentality and see if the film had anything else to offer. (It’s the kind of film that by its very melodramatic nature feels very dated - things just go from good to bad to worse for no particular reason -, which I tend to assume is purely a staple of this bygone era, but then I think of a later film like Terms of Endearment that does something similar, so things aren’t probably that simple.) I was surprised by how much I enjoyed a lot of it despite the flaws pointed out by others already. That first 20 minutes allows us to indulge in pure romance between the heaven-matched Dunne and Grant that the two previous screwballs they did together, consumed by wit and the battle of the sexes, didn’t offer, and makes for a really enjoyable mini-movie in itself. The rest is at least regularly dotted with great scenes and moments, especially in terms of the acting. I tend to agree with bottlesofsmoke’s assessment of Stevens’ pre-war movies (with some exceptions, like Swing Time). My main problem here, in the same way some of the gag sequences in his comedies lose steam because of how they’re so belabored, is some of those scenes just go on for so long. Some of the scenes with the baby (although I love Applejack showing the parents how to give the baby a bath), Grant’s plea to the judge, the Christmas play, for instance, just go on for a few or several beats too long. It’s like the director is falling in love with those scenes and not caring so much how they’ll affect the film’s rhythm. Still a lot to enjoy though, and glad I gave this one another shot. (Funny how Olive seems to have a quasi-monopoly on the Cary Grant blu rays - which wouldn’t be such a bad thing if it didn’t take a Signature Edition just get subtitles!)

[knives]

Ladies Should Listen (Tuttle 1934). Another trifle, but just a dreadful film by comparison, with the actors’ efforts powerless against the thin, humorless script.

Ladies Should Listen is just dreadful. Apart from one decent contemporary dig at Anthony Adverse this film is completely laff free and the actors just flounder about in a terrible idiot plot where you hate everyone and an hour feels like an eternity

Feeling vindicated right now.

Ah, I thought it was cute and enjoyably stupid.

[Rayon Vert]

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (Potter 1948). Knives did a good write-up of this one. But if it worked as satire the jokes didn’t really land for me, even though the situations were promisingly amusing. Grant excels though.


The Last Outpost (Gasnier & Barton 1935). Grant and Claude Rains set up as rivals a decade before Notorious. As knives has outlined the racism is pretty marked. You’d think animals were harmed as well, but that footage comes from a Merian Cooper documentary. There were things to like, for me especially in the adulterous near-affair with another Paramount actress I hadn’t really seen before. But it’s a war romance epic that’s played at double-speed to fit into 1h16, which makes the whole thing come off as a little ridiculous.


Wedding Present (Wallace 1936). This is pure screwball and Grant is almost there (although his drunk scene is awful) - plus he and Bennett are newspaper reporters, so it’s got a slight His Girl Friday feel. The film has plenty of spirit, willing and able actors (including Demarest), but the storyline is barely existing and it’s just a series of one not very funny set-up after another. Just bad writing really, resulting in not a single laugh or even smile for me.

[Rayon Vert]

Topper (McLeod 1937). I kept waiting for a decent release to finally see this screwball classic and didn’t even know it involved ghosts. It delivered and the film is a lot of fun on account of the anarchic spirit of Grant & Bennett’s characters even before the accident happens. What a difference a proper script (and probably a better director) makes when contrasted with the previous year’s Wedding Present. It’s amusing for the whole run and I don’t know if Grant is visible enough for it to count as one of his best performances, but he’s flawless whenever he’s on screen.


Gunga Din (Stevens 1939). (revisit) I too felt the Indiana Jones films took not only several pages from this film but the general spirit and humor. I was a little underwhelmed the first time, expecting something maybe more awesome from one of the monuments of The Greatest Film Year Ever, but it ticked all the boxes for me this time. The drawing of the characters and how they’re played, Steven’s direction overall (I don’t think Ford could have done it better), it’s all excellently executed, and I didn’t remember Grant being this good in it either.


Charade (Donen 1963). I’d never seen this obvious classic before because I was waiting to “do” Donen at a later point but this project has forced me to jump ahead. It’s a welcome change of pace from the talky play adaptations with all of those appealing location shoots (that obvious process shot on the Seine tour boat being an unfortunate exception). The dizzying changes of tones match the unending plot twists (at some point I even started entertaining the notion that Hepburn was the killer/thief). I have to admit that a bit after the first hour the amount of comedy started feeling like it was undercutting the seriousness of the suspense, and at that point looking ahead to another hour felt like a miscalculation in terms of length. But to my surprise I ended up getting absorbed again and the film achieved its greatest heights in the last reel or so. Hepburn is clearly the film’s center but it’s nice seeing Grant pull out all the stops again. And the choreography of that fight scene on angled roof was pretty terrific.


Crisis (Brooks 1950). Grant’s a doctor who gets kidnapped while vacationing with his wife in a Latin American country and forced to perform a brain operation to save a dictator’s life. This is definitely watchable, though a little bloodless. José Ferrer was more fun to watch than Grant, whose character is a bit too committed to his ideals and imperturbable to make him very relatable.

[therewillbeblus]

Welcome to team Gunga Din (which has sadly had the opposite effect on me, losing esteem each rewatch, though I still like it)!

[Rayon Vert]

Glad to be on it!

[Shrew]

I quite liked Crisis. It probably helped to come in with no expectations, given the generic title and the fact that the film is never discussed. There's a fun style and spookiness in the early scenes as Grant and wife navigate cities and towns falling into civil war and emptying out. But the "generic" nature of the film is what keeps it from greatness. The film takes one step forward--the milieu feels more authentic than many of the era's south-of-the-border tales--but doesn't commit to any specifics of culture or politics. Ferrer's despot scans as Fascist and the resistance vaguely Leftist, but you could tell me it was meant to be vice versa and I'd buy it. An agent of US Oil is hanging around as the de facto ambassador, but the implications of that aren't explored. Still, the film is worth a look particularly in this project because it has a rather singular Cary Grant performance. I suppose it's closest to his roles in the Hitchcock films, but without the barbed wit of NbNW or the veiled threat of Suspicion/Notorious. You don't have the frustrated masculinity of the Hawks or Daddy Grant films, or the suave but placid object of desire seen in the late films (it's interesting how often the film deploys close-ups of Grant's left side, highlighting the unflattering bump on his cheek). Instead, Grant is merely a highly competent man trying to manage a complex situation--a late Tom Hanks role if you will.

I also watched Charade for the first time in this project and Rayon Vert's writeup nicely encapsulates my thoughts. I think it was twbb or senseabove that noted upthread how Grant does surprisingly little in the film despite all the twists at which he's the center. It's a fun spin on the suave but staid, almost robotic, persona of late Cary Grant. He, as in That Touch of Mink, he's mostly there to be an object of desire, but Charade expands that into a fun Kuleshov experiment, where Grant changes very little about his demeanor but the film's advancing plot twists change how we (and Hepburn) perceive him. Of course, the real gift of the film is that Grant also gets a few chances to get zanily loose again--the apple passing gag, the shower scene, and the goofy face at the final reveal.

In Name Only (Cromwell, 1939) is a heightened melodrama and the odd duck out in Grant's golden year. This is also sort of a singular Grant role (though not far removed from his other 30s melodramas), as a depressed romantic trying to escape his cruel wife, but it's really Lombard's movie. Grant even spends the last act in bed. The opening also apes the opening of Blonde Venus in the willow glade, down to a shot of a road sign with Fraktur on it. But post-code we just get Lombard trying to fish and grant riding on a horse through shimmering willow leaves like in a fairy tale. It, and the subsequent interplay between Lombard and Grant, is the best part of the film, and makes you sad the actors never worked together again.

[domino harvey]

Lists are due Thursday which means Friday morning when I wake up. Lotsa discussion but very few lists submitted so far...

[knives]

Dang, this came up too quickly. Had no time to rewatch the Hitchcocks.

[therewillbeblus]

I definitely expected Suspicion to be one of the most analyzed films in the thread due to it being arguably the most complex manipulation of Grant's image and exploitation of his enigmatic presence as horror, but I don't believe it was discussed at all!

[soundchaser]

It would have been number one or two on my list had I watched enough to submit, for basically those reasons! Hitchcock was very good about taking the image of stars and twisting them, generally speaking. I assume he’ll play an important role in the Stewart list as well.

[therewillbeblus]

Personally I don't like the film as much as most, so even with that intriguing factor I couldn't bring myself to include it in my top ten. Still would have made for an interesting discussion tho

[dustybooks]

As someone whose dad was a chronic financial abuser (several incidents depicted in the film being eerily similar to things that really happened to my family), I've always found it a powerful and all too believable performance. (My dad did not look like Cary Grant, though, more like Yosemite Sam.) Three different women I've seen the film with have also commented on it as a very persuasive depiction of the early cycles of a relationship with a controlling partner. But while I admire the film a great deal both for its story and its offhand eccentricities (the cop with the painting; the mystery author's lesbian relationship), I have never been able to even remotely get past the idiocy of its ending, even after reading the various explanations (by Bill Krohn in particular) of why it happened. Even more than the disappointing compromises in the final moments of movies like The Wind, it completely takes me out of the narrative.

[TMDaines]

Is the deadline for this one Domino's wake-up time tomorrow? I completely lost track of time and still have one title to watch tonight!