lol

I rather like I Was A Male War Bride but not one of Hawks' best.

Hawks didn't like Ann Sheridan very much. Bogdanovich liked her in the film to which Hawks said, "she was one of the few actresses who became a star by never appearing in a great film." Pretty harsh but not without it's truth. She did however appear in Leo McCarey's Good Sam which is great.



"Ça va by me, madame...Ça va by me!" - The Red Shoes

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Maybe the character did have British family, but nothing points to that in the film

There's nothing that precludes it either.

The point was that there is nothing intrinsically contradictory about a French officer speaking impecable English with an accent that is more English than American (really, no American speaks with an accent anything like Grant's unless they're doining an impression of him). Such people do exist.

Now if they let us hear him speaking French with a significant anglophone's accent, that would be inconsistent with the character.

Cary Grant is world-renowned as an American screen actor

Grant is / was a world renowned actor in American movies, which is not quite the same thing as being and "American screen actor"; see Russell Crowe, Nicole Kidman, Julie Andrews, and Audrey Hepburn (all of whom are known primarily for American movies, but none of whom are thought of as "American actors" by much of anyone). Cary Grant (or rather Archie Leech) wasn't just born in Britain, he grew up and spent his formative years there. He didn't cross the Atlantic to the States until he was an adult (granted, a relatively young adult).

I tend to suspect that the Grant accent that we know is probably not the one that he grew up with. It seems rather too "posh" for his background. I know that Claude Rains retrained himself into a much more upper class accent when he decided to start performing for a living (I've read that when Rains dropped back into his original Cockney his own children had trouble undertanding him). I suspect that Grant probably had to do that as well.

You mentioned To Catch a Thief. Recall that it becomes a somewhat significant point that he is considered to be "not American enough" to be believed as a vacationing American. For Grant, that made perfect sense; that same section of dialog would have been absurd if John Roby had been played by someone such as James Stewart or Henry Fonda or Burt Lancaster (to include another actor with the acrobatic background hepful for the role of The Cat).

Compare Charles de Gaulle with Winston Churchill and you'll have some idea of what I mean. De Gaulle has a longer face and a slimmer build, and more sallow skin. Churchill is broader and paler and has a round face.

Or we can invert the whole thing by changing the names. How about Gerard Depardieu or Jean Gabin on the French side and Basil Rathbone or Lawrence Olivier on the English side? I think you're overgeneralizing.

The French just have a different aura - a different appearance and a different way of holding themselves.

Actually, Grant's posture / carriage / "way of holding himself" in this movie reminds me a fair amount of Charles DeGaulle. They both have that bolt upright continental army officer thing going on in the way that they carry themselves. Again, I think that you were overgeneralizing.

Watch La Grande Illusion for a French depiction of differences in such things as personal bearing being more dependent on social class than on nationality. (At least within "The Western World".)

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