OT: Cary Grant and LSD doc. at Cannes 2017
The Guardian has the story:
http://tinyurl.com/llf82o4
Very interesting.
Cary Grant's professed love of his LSD trips was a real zany detour within his career and his carefully guarded life. But he sure did give some interviews about it. Interesting, too, that once LSD got illegal and all the hippies started using it...he rather backed off of it.
But this: the article really focusses on Grant having a "peak period" as the "top movie star" in the years of North by Northwest and Charade.
And all these years later it looks like...yeah.
Could it be that Cary Grant, along with Hitchcock, along with Wilder, along with Preminger, along with John Wayne, along with Sinatra, was a "peak 50's/60's cusp superstar"? And that his earlier three decades were just the warm-up?
Possibly. You know, Grant made a lot of so-so movies in the 50's: Dream Wife, Kiss Them for Me, Indiscreet, The Pride and the Passion. In some ways, To Catch a Thief and NXNW saved his career "for the ages" -- and Charade was rather like their offspring.
Moreover, while Anthony Perkins is mainly remembered for Psycho because he really never had a role of that magnitude again -- in some ways, Cary Grant is now remembered "near exclusively" for ...North by Northwest! Even as Grant had MANY other roles. Grant himself noted near the end of his life: "North by Northwest is my favorite movie of mine...it wasn't always, but it is everybody's else's , so now it is mine."
I'm not sure if James Stewart's Hitchcock roles "beat" his work in Wonderful Life; perhaps Stewart made more classics than Grant.
But this: the article really focusses on Grant having a "peak period" as the "top movie star" in the years of North by Northwest and Charade.I think that the article's author is just wrong about this. Grant certainly went out on top, as it were, but the high he achieved in the late '30s/early '40s is higher: from 1937-1941 his films include the following 10 classics and near-classics: Topper, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, Gunga Din, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, My Favorite Wife, Philadephia Story, Penny Serenade, Suspicion. That's averaging two at least near-classics every year for five straight years, and almost all of these films were hits, albeit not box office smasheroos the way some of Grant's later films (and especially those with Hitch) were. Grant was a one-man (w/ lotsa great leading ladies) Golden Age. People just tend not to get this unless they're forced to take a '30s film class in college!
Grant's an amazing figure esp. in Romantic cinema because in his prime he's the perfect same-age romantic leading man for Kate Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, etc.....and twenty years later he's the perfect older romantic leading man for a completely new generation: Audrey Hepburn (remember Grant *should* have been in Sabrina too!), Eva Marie Saint, Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Doris Day (only Ingrid Bergman basically bridges the generations of Grant's leading ladies). share
But this: the article really focusses on Grant having a "peak period" as the "top movie star" in the years of North by Northwest and Charade.
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I think that the article's author is just wrong about this.
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Fair enough and...I'm with you. Though in one particular way, not entirely. "We shall review."
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Grant certainly went out on top, as it were, but the high he achieved in the late '30s/early '40s is higher: from 1937-1941 his films include the following 10 classics and near-classics: Topper, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, Gunga Din, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, My Favorite Wife, Philadephia Story, Penny Serenade, Suspicion.
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Yep...that's a steady supply of classics, hits, famous films...and one right after the other.
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That's averaging two at least near-classics every year for five straight years,
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Here we edge into my "vote" for the final years of Grant being, er...interesting? And just like Hitchcock's in a way. In the forties, Hitchcock AND Grant were fully active, one project after another(more, in Grant's case, an actor can always do more work than a director), fully committed to their rich-making profession at a young, committed, fully fit and healthy age.
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almost all of these films were hits, albeit not box office smasheroos the way some of Grant's later films (and especially those with Hitch) were.
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Interestingly, there were more people going to the movies in the forties(no TV) than later, but Grant racked up some big hits in the fifties/sixties, nonetheless.
Irony: in 1959, when Grant and Hitchcock delivered THEIR biggest hit together with North by Northwest at summer, Grant went off at Christmas to have an even BIGGER hit : Operation Petticoat, probably because Tony Curtis was along at HIS young peak and it was a WWII Navy comedy(very warm and nostalgic, not a "grim" war movie at all.)
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Grant was a one-man (w/ lotsa great leading ladies) Golden Age. People just tend not to get this unless they're forced to take a '30s film class in college!
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Here again we find the comparison to Hitchcock: Grant AND Hitchcock were massively prolific in the 30s and 40s , but those are "way back there" eras, and their "new films"(ha -- now 50-60 years old) are the ones that still "connect" to modern times: North by Northwest, Psycho, The Birds, Charade.
But also this: it was more a function of health in Hitchcock's case, but came the 60's, Hitch and Grant pulled back from giving us a film (or two, in Grant's case), every year.
For Hitchocck, it was almost 3 years from Psycho to The Birds, 2 from Marnie to Torn Curtain, over 3 from Torn Curtain to Topaz, almost 3 from Topaz to Frenzy, and a whopping almost-four from Frenzy to Family Plot.
For Grant, he skipped 1960, and then gave us one film a year 1961(The Grass Is Greener, barely remembered), 1962(That Touch of Mink with Doris Day, big hit, rather duller than with Rock), 1963(Charade--rather the companion piece thriller epic to NXNW, with Audrey Hepburn finally a co-star), 1964 (Father Goose, with Leslie Caron rather Hepburn-ish and Grant out to win a grizzled drunk Oscar). Nothing in 1965 and then the utterly fitting swan song "Walk Don't Run"
In "Walk Don't Run," Grant's a suave older guy matchmaker of a younger couple -- Jim Hutton and Samantha Eggar. But as he leaves the film in a rented limosine(he's in Japan for the '64 Olympics, time to go home to London)...he declares an intent to impregnate his "Lady"(wife) when he returns. It was just about a perfect way to go out the sexually romantic leading man without having had to be one in the movie.
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I dunno. Perhaps Cary Grant's final films (aside from NXNW and Charade) were less meaningful than Hitchcock's near-final films(the stretch from Vertigo through The Birds), but these films are the "modernish, big hits" that helped pave the way for where the movies are today. They were events, not just regularly-produced assembly line quality product as was made in the 40's.
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Meanwhile,in the sixties while Hitchocck was beginning a personal descent of health and age...Cary Grant was experimenting with LSD, marrying the much-younger Dyan Cannon and siring his only child(a beloved daughter), eventually marrying one more time at the end, retiring from movies and becoming a businessman/board member(Faberge) elder statesman. Grant's final years were a bit more fun than Hitchcock's.
1962(That Touch of Mink with Doris Day, big hit, rather duller than with Rock)I thought I'd seen TTOM a long time ago (and kinda shrugged) but when I watched it the other night I didn't remember or recognize anything.... so, what did I think now? Boy! The difference a Donen/Stone or Hitchcock/Lehmann makes! TTOM is just flat as hell, and Cary Grant looks and sounds far older and less interesting than he would a year later in Charade. Really, he's completely checked out, happy to let whoever he's in a scene with take the scene away from him. I dare say that Grant's character never seems *that* interested in Doris Day (and that he actually seems most alive in the short scenes where he's having dinners with a succession of model-types, where Day's character interrupts him with phonecalls). And Day's character reads now as just too silly and uncomposed to be of interest to a mature man, maybe not to any man. [But I never *understood* the Bridget Jones movies either - Bridget was shown to be completely incompetent at everything and it was really a mystery - except for being purest female wish fulfillment - why literally the best guy in England (Colin Firth's character) would fall for her.]
So, how to be a legendary star: be in *really* good movies made by the best directors as much as possible! Grant in TTOM w/ Delbert (Marty) Mann directing is no better or more charismatic than any hapless modern male star. Cary Grant with Hawks, Hitchcock, Stevens, Cukor, Donen, or McCarey (and their great scripts), however, is cooking with gas...
An interesting test: compare films like TTOM with their '40s equivalents, i.e., with films Grant made in 1937-1947 with non-virtuoso directors and writers. (This might take a little digging since things like the excellent My Favorite Wife may have been directed by Garson Kanin but he was a close protege of McCarey's and McCarey co-wrote/produced/oversaw the project in any case. So it's not really comparable to TTOM.) share
1962(That Touch of Mink with Doris Day, big hit, rather duller than with Rock)
I thought I'd seen TTOM a long time ago (and kinda shrugged) but when I watched it the other night I didn't remember or recognize anything.... so, what did I think now? Boy! The difference a Donen/Stone or Hitchcock/Lehmann makes! TTOM is just flat as hell, and Cary Grant looks and sounds far older and less interesting than he would a year later in Charade.
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Reviews of the time and retrospectives today note that Grant -- considered the great comic romantic leading man of his time -- really came out second best to Rock Hudson against Day. Its very understandable, I think: Rock Hudson LIKED Doris Day, felt he was comfortably matched with her, enjoyed working with her. Grant seems to have been (as usual) cajoled and negotiated into doing this one(to work with Doris Day for the first time, for the bucks) and gave a performance accordingly. Funny thing: the NEXT year, he would be teamed with Audrey Hepburn for the first time, and those two seemed really simpatico. But it was a better script, a better director..and if not a better cast, a more interesting one.
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Really, he's completely checked out, happy to let whoever he's in a scene with take the scene away from him.
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Whereas Rock had always been sidekicked by the neurotic Tony Randall, Cary is given the rather handsome and dapper Gig Young and...it doesn't play for much of anything(other than Gig trying to screw over his unflappable rich boss and constantly failing.)
Peter Bogdanovich tells a funny story about Grant and That Touch of Mink. As a young critic, Bogdo got to go to a studio screening of TTOM, attended also by Grant. Grant asked Bogdo what he thought of the film and Bogdo said "Quite funny but...the detail was wrong about how to get unemployment benefits." (Day gets them early in the film; Bogdo was getting them in real life.)
Grant EXPLODED. "Young man, I am a co-producer of this film, and everything was checked for accuracy, including how to get unemployment benefits." Evidently Grant remembered this outrage the next two or three times he saw Bogdo! So Grant cared about THAT.
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I dare say that Grant's character never seems *that* interested in Doris Day (and that he actually seems most alive in the short scenes where he's having dinners with a succession of model-types, where Day's character interrupts him with phonecalls).
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Pretty true. The film is weird. Grant buys all the seats on a jetliner to fly Doris to Bermuda but...he just doesn't seem that in to her. He does it because the script says so.
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And Day's character reads now as just too silly and uncomposed to be of interest to a mature man, maybe not to any man.
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Well, the history on this one is that Doris Day was playing "a shopgirl who wins a rich prince." This was as pure and basic a fantasy as , evidently, all the 1962 shopgirls could want. Which I guess seems insulting today. Things changed, pronto.
So, how to be a legendary star: be in *really* good movies made by the best directors as much as possible! Grant in TTOM w/ Delbert (Marty) Mann directing is no better or more charismatic than any hapless modern male star.
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I think this happened to Grant more than it did to Bogart. Simple reason: Grant didn't always care all that much about his director or even the material. He cared about how the story fit his image. He cared about his pay. He cared about his profit participation. Its not that he made bad movies or was uncommitted to them. Its just that sometimes the business deal was more important than the property, and Grant knew (as later, I'd say Clint Eastwood knew) that his stardom could carry the weakest scripts to box office.
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Cary Grant with Hawks, Hitchcock, Stevens, Cukor, Donen, or McCarey (and their great scripts), however, is cooking with gas...
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Grant seems to have realized that almost belatedly. He tried to leave NXNW, and to back out of other films.
Here's a roundelay:
Cary Grant was set to do "Man's Favorite Sport" for Howard Hawks in 1963. Grant quit that to do "Charade." Rock Hudson took "Mans Favorite Sport." Around the same time, Hudson turned down both To Kill a Mockingbird and Marnie. So Grant and Hudson were circling the same roles and trading them off -- with Gregory Peck winning big and Sean Connery getting his Hitchcock. (Man's Favorite Sport and Marnie were released in 1964.)
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An interesting test: compare films like TTOM with their '40s equivalents, i.e., with films Grant made in 1937-1947 with non-virtuoso directors and writers. (This might take a little digging since things like the excellent My Favorite Wife may have been directed by Garson Kanin but he was a close protege of McCarey's and McCarey co-wrote/produced/oversaw the project in any case. So it's not really comparable to TTOM.)
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That would be fun...I don't think I could do it, but I'd love to read about it.
OK, after a little digging here's probably the best test-case: Mr Lucky (1943).
It's directed by H.C. Potter, who'd shortly make the good-to-very-good The Farmer's Wife (1947) and the good Mr Blandings (1948) again with Grant. He's not chopped liver then but nowhere near 'a great'. Comparable career-wise to TTOM's Delbert Mann (Mann got a best directing Oscar for Marty but otherwise was pretty mediocre and ended up doing lots of tv-movies and mini-series).
Writers are guys for whom Mr Lucky is probably their peak.
So the test is this: Does early '40s, working-hard-for-his-stardom Grant elevate Mr Lucky's (let's suppose) middling script and direction more than early '60s, do-I-really-need-this-beep? Grant elevates TTOM's middling-to-subpar script and distressingly TV-ish direction?
Will report back in a few days.
Update: BTW, Mr Lucky (1943) isn't widely available. If you're in the US (or you can use appropriate software trickery to make look to the internet that that's where you are) then your best option is probably to watch it through Warners Archives on youtube for $3.
So the test is this: Does early '40s, working-hard-for-his-stardom Grant elevate Mr Lucky's (let's suppose) middling script and direction more than early '60s, do-I-really-need-this-beep? Grant elevates TTOM's middling-to-subpar script and distressingly TV-ish direction?
Will report back in a few days.
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I look forward to reading the comparative report.
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There does seem to be an element whereby certain stars DID "work hard for it"(Cary Grant in the forties) and then rather lose steam in later, wealthier years(Cary Grant in the sixties.)
This happened with Marlon Brando certainly. And then there's Warren Beatty, who worked steadily in the 60's and 70's...but dropped to two films in the 80s(Reds and Ishtar) and a few in the 90's...and nothing for 15 years after 2001's Town and Country. (Rules Don't Apply, last year.) Steve McQueen famously checked out in the 70's after Towering Inferno paid off...and then came back in 1980 with two movies(The Hunter, Tom Horn) only to die the same year! And then there was Bill Murray, who, having hit huge with Ghostbusters in 1984, did one serious film(The Razor's Edge") and then moved to Paris for four years before coming back with Scrooged(less a cameo in 1986's Little Shop of Horrors.)
Cary Grant rather famously "retired" FIRST around 1953. He felt that Brando and the Method Boys had rendered him obsolete; he even felt that Bill Holden was the New Model Grant. But Hitchcock lured him back with "To Catch a Thief" and Grant gave movies another 10 years. Then he quit for good.
I'll be interested in swanstep's report as well, although I'm not sure how definitive the comparison proposed can be.
Mr. Lucky doesn't really fit in to the My Favorite Wife/That Touch Of Mink romcom universe. Following The Philadelphia Story, Grant was concentrating on more serious fare (Penny Serenade, Suspicion, The Talk Of the Town, Once Upon A Honeymoon - which sounds like a romcom but was more romantic espionage thriller - and Destination Tokyo). Mr. Lucky fits into this group: it's light drama with only comedy relief courtesy of supporting players such as Alan Carney.
Along with this is something about TTOM that can't be ignored: it's a "two star" picture, and more a Doris Day one than a Cary Grant one: it would have worked just as well with Rock Hudson, Rod Taylor or even James Garner...possibly even better, for one of its primary weaknesses is its lazy dependence upon Grant being Grant: Day is angry at him before even meeting him (for splashing her when his limo drives through a puddle), and her intention to tell him off is derailed in quite literally the first moment she lays eyes upon him (the only thing missing is an optically printed gleam upon his dazzling smile, Ã la Tony Curtis in The Great Race), and she ends up apologizing to him! Grant pretty much coasts through the film, whereas any of those other actors could have been expected to work at selling the too-good-to-be-true aspects of this overachieving character.
Here's some interesting context: Grant had never cracked the top five moneymakers (according to an annual exhibitors' poll) until 1959, and did so only twice more before his retirement ('60 and '62). Day accomplished the same feat the very same year, and remained there every year thereafter until '67.
Day is angry at him before even meeting him (for splashing her when his limo drives through a puddle), and her intention to tell him off is derailed in quite literally the first moment she lays eyes upon him... and she ends up apologizing to him!This is a truly dreadful plot-point, one that's made worse by the fact that Doris Day is mid-to-late 30s at the time so her acting like a starry-eyed teen around Grant's character is as embarrassing as it is implausible. It *should* be a huge turn-off for Grant's character that she should so easily lose her composure. I guess that I just didn't get TTOM!
Anyhow, my comparison of Mr Lucky to TTOM is based strictly on the fact that both seem like fundamentally mediocre projects about which we can ask, 'Does Grant elevate the material at all?' Maybe the different genres will introduce too much incommensurability to allow meaningful comparison. We'll see. share
Of all of Day's so-called professional virgin roles, this one's the hardest to take. It comes the closest to a stereotypical "dumb blond" one, and the incongruity of approaching-middle-age Day and Audrey Meadows - who seems to harbor an unnatural obsession with Day's virtue, spending much of the film in states of either high dudgeon or tearful hysteria over the "fate worse than death" prospect of its being lost - sharing a bedroom like sixteen-year-olds borders on the creepy. And the less said about aspects like attempting to extract humor from gay subtext - neither the first nor last time it would crop up in one of the Day/Ross Hunter pictures - in Gig Young's psychiatric sessions, the better.
I'm sure I won't prejudice you, for I know of the independent-mindedness of your opinions, but I won't be at all surprised if you should find Mr. Lucky, while perhaps formulaic for the mid-war era, a step or so above mediocre. At the very least, it provides Grant with a character of some dimension who finds himself facing more than one moral crossroads.
Along with this is something about TTOM that can't be ignored: it's a "two star" picture, and more a Doris Day one than a Cary Grant one:
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One wonders: the script was likely prepared for Doris and Rock...but somebody figured "Hey, lets get her together with someone new." And Cary Grant was the BIG one to get. James Garner and especially Rod Taylor were "second tier" at the time(and Taylor never really rose above it and Garner ended up back in TV.)
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it would have worked just as well with Rock Hudson, Rod Taylor or even James Garner...
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As the 60s went on, Garner and Taylor were Doris' men of choice(two movies each with her.) Hudson came back in '64 for "Send Me No Flowers" and I can only assume THAT wa a big deal: "He's back!"
As the 60s further went on, it got a little harder to find that man who matched Doris: we got Richard Harris, Patrick O'Neal(with whom Doris had an affair), Brian Keith...even Peter Graves. Methinks the men were figuring out that Doris was aging and "under fire."
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for one of its primary weaknesses is its lazy dependence upon Grant being Grant: Day is angry at him before even meeting him (for splashing her when his limo drives through a puddle), and her intention to tell him off is derailed in quite literally the first moment she lays eyes upon him (the only thing missing is an optically printed gleam upon his dazzling smile, Ã la Tony Curtis in The Great Race), and she ends up apologizing to him!
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Yes. Grant was a bit of a sport to allow his "greatness" to be a focal point of the film. He accepted great big drooling close-ups of him smiling lightly and then they would cut to Doris melting over him, practically swooning over him...just because he WAS Cary Grant. I expect this was a nod to Grant being willing to do the film. I'm reminded of Robert Redford "deigning" to act opposite Streisand in The Way We Were...Redford is treated much the same way in that film: as the ultimate male for a female fantasy. (But things work out badly in The Way We Were.)
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Grant pretty much coasts through the film, whereas any of those other actors could have been expected to work at selling the too-good-to-be-true aspects of this overachieving character.
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And it might have played a LITTLE harder for the male actor. Rod Taylor, especially -- his face wasn't perfect like Grant's(even in older age). But James Garner's was...he just lacked "longtime star gravitas."
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I've seen Charade enough to notice that Grant sort of "coasts" through that one, too. Walter Matthau is out to prove how deadpan funny he is and James Coburn is overdoing the drawling Texan.. Grant quietly glides through the film, the object of Hepburn's affection. I think Pauline Kael wrote that "Grant knew what his persona could do for him, he holds back in still, quiet control." Even a now-aging Grant could do that.("The saddest news of Charade," wrote Andrew Sarris, "is that Cary Dorian Gray Grant is finally showing his age.")
I suppose that's so about Grant and Charade, although it seems in many ways to be a distillation of the Grant persona at that point: we get samples of the "athletic action" Grant; the comically indifferent one; the goofy and absurd one; the suavely elegant one. And I don't know the film well enough to recall: are there samples of the stoically cold one (of Only Angels Have Wings, Suspicion, Notorious or Crisis, for example)?
I'm leaving off the brash, fast-talking one (Topper, The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, for instance), as that seems to have been an aspect that he'd shed by the close of the '40s.
I suppose that's so about Grant and Charade, although it seems in many ways to be a distillation of the Grant persona at that point: we get samples of the "athletic action" Grant; the comically indifferent one; the goofy and absurd one; the suavely elegant one.
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That's all true. He runs in the film, and has a very physical fight scene(however "staged") with George Kennedy as well. So physically he was there, and he took a few of his other personas out for a ride. The bit where he takes a shower with his clothes on and affects a vocal tone somewhere between goofy and...gay?..is something he didn't even do in NXNW.
It is NXNW, by the way, for which I think Cary Grant should have won the Best Actor Oscar(yeah, he wasn't even nominated.) He did all of his personas in THAT one, too, and in very classic film. On a lesser note, I'd say that NXNW to Grant was as True Grit was to John Wayne -- a "career compendium" even as the guys had more movies ahead of them.
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And I don't know the film well enough to recall: are there samples of the stoically cold one (of Only Angels Have Wings, Suspicion, Notorious or Crisis, for example)?
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Well, one issue with Charade is that, as the suspects all die one by one...it starts to look like ONLY Cary could be the killer. He affects a certain coldness near the end to suggest...could it be?...he IS the killer(as in his final confrontation with a LIVE James Coburn.)
1963 audiences who hadn't figured out the real killer may well have been nervous: NOT Cary Grant. Please. Well....not Anthony Perkins, please, either.
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I'm leaving off the brash, fast-talking one (Topper, The Awful Truth, His Girl Friday, for instance), as that seems to have been an aspect that he'd shed by the close of the '40s
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Well, screwball and Howard Hawks overlapping fast talk seems to have gone out by the 50's -- Grant doesn't do that in Monkey Business and by the time Hawks makes Rio Bravo(1959), its all gone.
But more to the point: is fast-talking ever done effectively by older men and women?
I can think of only one example: James Cagney at 50-something(60-something?) in "One, Two, Three"(1961.) For Billy Wilder.
Cagney in One, Two, Three...well done; excellent citation. The only other one I can think of still getting away with it at that time (and age) was Gable: a bit gruffer and a bit wearier, perhaps, and he effectively worked his maturity into such roles in the second half of the '50s (in '59's But Not For Me as a high-powered B'way producer, his age itself is the basis of both a central theme and a series of running gags and droll quips from the likes of Lili Palmer and Lee J. Cobb as he makes a last stab at recapturing his professional and personal vigor).
Veering off-topic, have you ever seen The Gallant Hours, which Cagney did immediately before One, Two Three? It suffers from a primary weakness of heavy-handedness, but Cagney's work therein was a revelation. I thought I'd seen all the sides he had to show, but he displayed nuances, subtleties and a quiet, deeply-felt intensity that was eye-opening, and makes the film worth viewing for his performance alone.
Still further off topic, has it come to your notice that we seem to have the MovieChat forum(s) entirely to ourselves? There are maybe a couple dozen classic non-Hitchcock "go to" movies that I regularly monitored on IMDB, and not a one has had any activity, save for the archiving of IMDB threads as of the time of their discontinuation.
Or maybe I'm simply not monitoring the right films.
Cagney in One, Two, Three...well done; excellent citation.
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Thanks.
Cagney quit movies after doing that one. He thought for good...but he came back 20 years later for Ragtime.
Still, evidently, One Two Three was very hard to do for Cagney.
I liked that Cagney "went out on top" in One, Two, Three like Grant in Walk Don't Run and even the posthumous Tracy in Guess Who..Cagney got the star part in a Wilder film right after the back-to-back triumphs(with younger stars Lemmon, Curtis, Monroe and MacLaine) Some Like It Hot and The Apartment.
But he didn't really STAY "out on top." He was good in Ragtime, but it was a short role at the end and he looked old. And then some terrible TV movie...
Veering off-topic, have you ever seen The Gallant Hours,
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Not entirely off-topic -- The Gallant Hours came out in '60, yes? The year of Psycho and indicative of the more "normal" film of that Postwar year(even at 15 years post-war.)
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which Cagney did immediately before One, Two Three? It suffers from a primary weakness of heavy-handedness, but Cagney's work therein was a revelation. I thought I'd seen all the sides he had to show, but he displayed nuances, subtleties and a quiet, deeply-felt intensity that was eye-opening, and makes the film worth viewing for his performance alone.
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I have not seen it other than glimpses on TV when I was younger...I will take your recommendation and try to see it.
Cagney is like Tracy and Grant for me, alas. I'll never see ALL their movies. Nicholson, I have, since Easy Rider. (I know I've mentioned this point before, but now I'm adding Cagney.)
I really LIKE Cagney. How he could play gangsters and do musicals. His hyper personality. And I swear in his young face ONLY..I see Sean Connery in the latter's snarling, sadistic curled lip mode, and around the eyes.
I would like to see Cagney adding a few colors to his palette in The Gallant Hours.
Which reminds me: John Wayne played the same Navy man that Cagney did, as a fictional version, in Preminger's "In Harm's Way." A guilty pleasure of mine (great on the bureaucratic realpolitik of war; soupy on the sex and sudden veer into rape and suicide.)
Still further off topic, has it come to your notice that we seem to have the MovieChat forum(s) entirely to ourselves?
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But hey...if we DO have the forums all to ourselves...we can go off topic ALL THE TIME. Like crazy. Just talk about Marvel Movies here. I'm just kidding, sort of.
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There are maybe a couple dozen classic non-Hitchcock "go to" movies that I regularly monitored on IMDB, and not a one has had any activity, save for the archiving of IMDB threads as of the time of their discontinuation.
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Yes, something's up. I posted a little at Rear Window, Vertigo, North by Northwest and Frenzy. (Which makes those plus Psycho my fave Hitchs, let's face it. Oh, Strangers on a Train, too.) Only Vertigo drew some hits.
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Or maybe I'm simply not monitoring the right films.
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I"ve peeked at some of the Marvel boards and Trump/Clinton boards, and there's lots of activity. Moviechat.org is likely a very mainstream place of "now."
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The way I figure it, I count about five or six regulars posting here from the great imdb past...and that's enough for me. Its like coffee around a table late at night with friends. Or in a bar...
...but we have drawn a few "new faces" here, and maybe over time, we'll draw more.
But the issue remains: perhaps the Psycho board is the only place we WILL draw this kind of group, for now. The other Hitchcock boards aren't active enough even for US to go to them and talk.
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Thus, I think we've used this Psycho board much as we used the imdb board. Psycho is dutifully discussed -- and there is something new Psycho-wise all the time(right now: 78/52 is coming) BUT we use the board for controlled off-topic discussions.
I think we almost HAVE to use the Psycho board for off-topic discussions. We've covered every nook and cranny of Psycho over the years, and until a new crew shows up to take over...Psycho is the anchor for OTHER discussions here. On other movies, except as we know -- Psycho practically intersects with everything.
IMHO.
Here's some interesting context: Grant had never cracked the top five moneymakers (according to an annual exhibitors' poll) until 1959, and did so only twice more before his retirement ('60 and '62).
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Well, that's interesting. It demonstrates that with the PUBLIC, that fifties/sixties cusp is exactly when Grant became the biggest star. Those years would encompass Indiscreet, North by Northwest, Operation Petticoat, The Grass is Greener, and That Touch of Mink. But not Charade.
Still, I expect that Grant was "steadily a star" in the 30's and 40's and 50's(even through retirement.)
James Mason(jealously?) told some reporter in the 60's that James Stewart in a Hitchcock picture earned the movie one million more than Cary Grant in a Hitchcock picture. Figures, I guess. To 50's America, James Stewart was THEM. Everyman. Middle America. Grant was perhaps too cool, urban and aloof? (But how right could Mason be? Vertigo vs NBNW?)
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Day accomplished the same feat the very same year, and remained there every year thereafter until '67.
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I seem to recall Doris Day and John Wayne often touted as the biggest stars of the 60's, even as guys like Newman and McQueen were working their way up on the male side. The female side had Liz, Monroe(for a little bit) and..Shirley MacLaine(who kept getting roles turned down by Liz or that MM died before undertaking.) Interesting that vs Liz, MM, and Shirley, DD was far less OVERTLY sexual -- and yet her movies were all ABOUT sex..whether being courted as a single, or serving her husband.
And then there was Audrey Hepburn, a top star with some sort of weird cerebral sex appeal...
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Its a great "what if" that Doris didn't play Mrs. Robinson. Nichols sent Day the script first -- but her manager husband said "no."
And so Doris Day was quite viciously targeted(on the one hand) even as she did age on the other. Came the 70s, TV was her way out.
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Continued...
Mr. Lucky, on the other hand, would have worked well with any attractive leading man adept at playing fast-talking charmers (Gable would have been an optimal alternative, although someone like David Niven, Joel McCrea or even Cagney would have served well), but works better with Grant, who exercises one of his rare opportunities to integrate his Cockney heritage into the character, and has no competition for the spotlight from an equally high-powered leading lady (Laraine Day, who's reprising her Foreign Correspondent "I trust him-love him/I trust him-love him not" balancing act).
Perhaps the big difference between the 1943 and 1961 Cary Grants was that the first was still artistically hungry and ambitious, and still had new sides of himself to show to audiences, who had already seen the earnest younger leading man, the goofy comic one who was willing to deflate his own urbane sophistication with a pratfall, the serious one with a hard edge, and had had only a hint in The Philadelphia Story of the one that would finally stick, and would carry him through films like Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, To Catch A Thief, North By Northwest and, perhaps its ultimate expression, Charade.
Grant himself had famously said, "Everybody wishes they were Cary Grant. Even I wish I were Cary Grant." And by the time of TTOM, he was, as far as the viewing public was concerned. And for better or worse, was stuck with it.
So the test is this: Does early '40s, working-hard-for-his-stardom Grant elevate Mr Lucky's (let's suppose) middling script and direction more than early '60s, do-I-really-need-this-beep? Grant elevates TTOM's middling-to-subpar script and distressingly TV-ish direction?
Mr Lucky uneasily mixes romantic comedy, romantic melodrama, a double-crossing heist/long-con plot, and war propaganda. Grant it must be said gives his all to this odd concoction, doing *something* inventive in almost every scene. Some of the bits of business feel like they were found/invented on set...this is *not* the smooth Cary Grant we're used to seeing with Hitchcock/Hawks/Cukor/McCarey et al. but it's a fun Grant nonetheless. Reading around a bit it seems that Grant chose the script and was otherwise very involved in setting up Mr Lucky - he'd have a Producer credit in today's world - and Grant's performance feels like a very active, very Tom Cruise-y contribution from him.
In sum, then, Mr Lucky, while a bit of a contraption, has none of the truly glaring absurdities of TTOM. It's a classier piece of work, and Grant works hard throughout to give it some real brio. Laraine Day's at her most beautiful and Irene Dunne-ish in Mr Lucky, but he framing story of her coming down to the dock each night waiting for Grant's ship to come in (it's not clear whether this is supposed to be truly hopeless in her part - has she heard that Grant's ship was torpedoed? that he'd gone into the military and so wasn't on the ship?) feels overdone and movie-romantic, I couldn't quite buy it. Mr Lucky hasn't done enough with its melodrama side to justify this turn (it's not The Ghost and Mrs Muir or Wuthering Heights or Casablanca) - a more nonchalant, 39 Steps-ish or Holiday-ish ending would have worked better I think. share
That sounds like a fair assessment.
The melodrama of the denouement is something I guess has to be chalked up to the wartime era. The very same year as Mr. Lucky, even something as overtly innocuous as a Fred Astaire musical (The Sky's the Limit) concluded on a melodramatically uncertain note, with Flying Tiger Astaire returning to combat, leaving bravely optimistic Joan Leslie behind as onscreen proxy for thousands of stateside wives, sweethearts and family members carrying on in anxiety-ridden hopefulness.
Grant's Joe Adams/Bascopolous represents one of the last of the brash fast-talkers to which I referred in my recent reply to ecarle, and which had been a regularly-revisited facet of the Grant persona during his first decade or so of films.
In sum, then, Mr Lucky, while a bit of a contraption, has none of the truly glaring absurdities of TTOM. It's a classier piece of work,
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I've rather stayed away from discussing Mr. Lucky because as you and doghouse know, I'm weak before the 50's (and after, on international film.)
That said, it would figure that Mr. Lucky is a classier work. TTOM has a rather "too basic" feel to it -- one wants to avoid snobbery, but it seems a bit beneath Cary Grant's talent, especially so soon after NXNW. Mr. Lucky would seem to be a cool 40s film.
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and Grant works hard throughout to give it some real brio.
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Well, he was younger, more interested in succeeding...he needed to really earn his wealth back then, by the fifties, it was rolling in from investments, royalties and even ownership of a few negatives (like Indiscreet.)
And heck, for all of us of "a certain age" now...I know I was capable of a lot more energetic work in MY 30s...
...though I don't feel that old now.
PS. This I DO know about "Mr. Lucky": it was a 50s/60s cusp TV series with a Henry Mancini theme song just a few levels down from the more famous "Peter Gunn." My parents had a few albums of Mancini in those days: movie themes(Breakfast at Tiffany's, Experiment in Terror, Hatari), TV themes (Peter Gunn, Mr. Lucky...)
Grant's an amazing figure esp. in Romantic cinema because in his prime he's the perfect same-age romantic leading man for Kate Hepburn, Irene Dunne, Carole Lombard, Ginger Rogers, etc.....and twenty years later he's the perfect older romantic leading man for a completely new generation: Audrey Hepburn (remember Grant *should* have been in Sabrina too!), Eva Marie Saint, Grace Kelly, Deborah Kerr, Doris Day
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As we know, lots of "old guy stars" (Bogart, Cooper, Gable, Crosby) were paired with much-younger women in the 50's...but only Cary Grant seemed youthful enough to make the pairing look well-matched. I mean, in To Catch a Thief, the 50-year old Grant did bathing suit scenes with his shirt off, and looked great. Grace Kelly(much younger) seemed so much better matched with Grant in To Catch a Thief than with Stewart in Rear Window.
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(only Ingrid Bergman basically bridges the generations of Grant's leading ladies).
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And there-in lay a sad statement about male and female movie stars back then.
In "Notorious", Grant and Bergman are rather matched beauties.
In "Indiscreet," Grant has aged into even GREATER beauty(lightly gray-haired distinguished handsomeness) and Bergman is, well...a bit matronly. She had never been a tiny , birdlike woman to start with, and her rather strapping frame and full face aged into something older-looking than Grant's look in his fifties.
Unfair at the time. Pretty well corrected in this age when Susan Sarandon is a 70-ish sexpot. And Jane Fonda, too.