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THE MAN FROM DREAM CITY
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Grant's old name had long been a joke--to the public and to him. He had named his pet Sealyham Archibald, and when the dog ran away from his Los Angeles home (it is said that the dog ran out the door while Grant was carrying Virginia Cherrill over the threshold), he took large ads in the papers giving the dog's name. In "Gunga Din," when Grant, as the soldier Cutter, receives an invitation to a regimental ball, he reads the salutation aloud--"Arch-i-bald Cutter"--chewing the syllables and savoring their preposterousness. As the editor in "His Girl Friday," when Grant is threatened with prison by the mayor and the sheriff, he yammers out, "The last man to say that to me was Archie Leach, just a week before he cut his throat."
Yet when he played Ernie Mott in "None but the Lonely Heart" he became Archie Leach again; even the names are similar. "None but the Lonely Heart" was the first movie Clifford Odets had ever directed, and although the original material was not his but a best-selling novel by Richard Llewellyn, Odets gave it the rich melancholy of his best plays. Too much of it, however: the dirgelike, mournful, fogged-up atmosphere seemed fake and stagy. Odets worked up each scene (almost as one develops scenes in the theatre) and didn't get them to flow thematically, but he went all out. He brought off some hard-earned effects with an élan that recalled Orson Welles' first films, and there were unexpected crosscurrents. (Ernie's girl, played by June Duprez, was plaintive and distressed, and turned out not to be Ernie's girl at all.) It was an extraordinary debut film, and it is an indication of the movie industry's attitude toward talent that Odets got only one other chance to direct--fifteen years later ("The Story on Page One," in 1959). The complicated texture of "None but the Lonely Heart" made a pervasive, long-lasting impression. What can one remember of such Grant films as "Room for One More" or "Dream Wife" or "Kiss Them for Me" or "Houseboat"? But from "None but the Lonely Heart" one retains June Duprez's puzzlingly perverse face and voice; a scene of Grant and a buddy (Barry Fitzgerald) drunk in a tunnel, letting out their voices and teasing their echoes; and--especially--Grant and Ethel Barrymore together. She played his mother, and her great, heavy eyes matched up with his. In her screen roles, this statuesque, handsome woman usually substituted presence and charm and hokum for performance; she wasn't tedious, like her brother Lionel, but she was a hollow technician. Not this time, though. In a few scenes, she and Grant touched off emotions in each other which neither of them ever showed on the screen again. When Ernie, who has become a petty racketeer, is told that his mother has been arrested for trafficking in stolen goods, he has an instant's disbelief: "They got her inside, you mean--pinched?" Grant says that line with more fervor than any other line he ever delivered. And there are viewers who still--after three decades--recall the timbre of Ethel Barrymore's voice in the prison hospital when she cries, "Disgraced you, Son."
Grant is not as vivid in the memory as Ethel Barrymore is. Of the profusion of themes in the film, the deeply troubled bond of love between the mother and the son must have been a strong factor in his original decision to buy the book. Yet he didn't fully express what had attracted him to the material. His performance was finer than one might have expected, considering that in all his years on the stage he'd never actually done a play without music, and that he couldn't use the confident technique that made him such a dynamo in screen comedy, or the straightforward, subdued acting he depended on in the war film "Destination Tokyo." Grant was always desperately uncomfortable when he played anyone who wasn't close to his own age, and though he may have felt like the Ernie of the novel (a dreamy nineteen-year-old, an unformed artist-intellectual), as an actor he was too set in his ways. The slight stylization of his comic technique--the deadpan primed to react, the fencer's awareness of the camera, all the self-protective skills he'd acquired--worked against him when he needed to be expressive. Cary Grant acts from the outside; he's the wrong kind of actor to play a disharmonious character, a precursor of the fifties rebel-hero. Grant isn't totally on the surface: there's a mystery in him--he has an almost stricken look, a memory of suffering--but he's not the modern kind of actor who taps his unconscious in his acting. Part of his charm is that his angers are all externally provoked; there are no internal pressures in him that need worry us, no rage or rebelliousness to churn us up. If he reacts with exasperation or a glowering look, we know everything there is to know about his reaction. When we watch Brando, the dramatic stage is in him, and the external aggressions against him are the occasions for us to see the conflicts within; the traditional actor's distance and his perfect clarity are gone. Life seemed simpler with Cary Grant's pre-Freudian, pre-psychological acting-as-entertaining. But he couldn't split Ernie Mott apart effectively, and he couldn't hold him together, either. And--it was no body's fault--one reason Ernie wasn't as vivid a character as he needed to be was that it was Cary Grant trying to be grubby Ernie Mott. A movie star like Cary Grant carries his movie past with him. He becomes the sum of his most successful roles, and he has only to appear for our good will to be extended to him. We smile when we see him, we laugh before he does anything; it makes us happy just to look at him. And so in "None but the Lonely Heart," in the role that was closest to Grant's own buried feelings--the only character he ever played that he is known to have consciously identified with--he seemed somewhat miscast.
It's impossible to estimate how much this failure meant to him, but more than a year passed before he plunged into the inanities of "Night and Day"--the only year since he had entered movies in which he made no pictures, and a bad year in other ways, too, since his marriage to Barbara Hutton broke up. However, Cary Grant appears to be a profoundly practical man; after the disappointing box-office returns from "None but the Lonely Heart" (he did get an Academy Award nomination for it, but the award was given to Bing Crosby for "Going My Way"), he never tried anything except Cary Grant roles. As far as one can judge, he never looked back. He remained a lifelong friend of Clifford Odets; he was proud to be accepted by Odets, and Odets was proud that the handsome, tanned idol was there at his feet. But Odets' passion no longer fired Cary Grant to make business decisions. When Odets was trying to set up picture deals and needed him as a star, he didn't return the calls. This didn't spoil their friendship--they had both been living in Los Angeles a long time.
No doubt Grant was big enough at the box-office to have kept going indefinitely, surviving fables about caterpillars, and even such mournful mistakes as hauling a cannon through the Napoleonic period of "The Pride and the Passion." But if Alfred Hitchcock, who had worked with him earlier on "Suspicion," hadn't rescued him with "Notorious," in 1946, and again, in 1955, with "To Catch a Thief" (a flimsy script but with a show-off role for him) and in 1959 with "North by Northwest," and if Grant hadn't appeared in the Stanley Donen film "Charade" in 1963, his development as an actor would have essentially been over in 1940, when he was only thirty-six. In all four of those romantic suspense comedies, Grant played the glamorous, worldly figure that "Cary Grant" had come to mean: he was cast as Cary Grant, and he gave a performance as Cary Grant. It was his one creation, and it had become the only role for him to play--the only role, finally, he could play.
Had he made different choices, had taken more risks like "None but the Lonely Heart," he might eventually have won acceptance as an actor with a wide range. He might have become a great actor; he had the intensity, and the command of an audience's attention. But how can one tell? One thinks of Cary Grant in such a set way it's difficult even to speculate about his capacities. Yet, considering his wealth and his unusually independent situation, it's apparent that if he was constricted, it wasn't just Hollywood's doing but his own. Working within the framework of commercial movies, James Mason, who at one time also seemed a highly specialized star, moved on from romantic starring roles to a series of deeper character portraits. However, Mason had to move away from the sexual center of his movies to do it, and it's doubtful if Grant would have sacrificed--or even endangered--the type of stardom he had won. His bargaining power was probably more important to him than his deve1opment as an actor; he was a tycoon. Whatever his reasons were, they're concealed now by his brisk businessman's manner. He doesn't seem to know or to care whether his pictures were good or bad; he says that if they did well at the box office, that's all that matters to him, and this doesn't appear to be an affectation. He made a gigantic profit on the gagged-up "Operation Petticoat," which he produced in 1959; his friends say that he makes no distinction between that and "Notorious."
Cary Grant always looks as if he'd just come from a workout in a miracle gym. And it's easy for audiences to forget about his stinkers (they're not held against him), because he himself isn't very different in them from the way he is when he has a strong director and a script with some drive. It's his sameness that general audiences respond to; they may weary of him, but still he's a guaranteed product. (It's the pictures that aren't.) And if he didn't grow as an actor, he certainly perfected "Cary Grant." One does not necessarily admire an icon, as one admires, say, Laurence Olivier, but it can be a wonderful object of contemplation. (If Olivier had patented the brand of adorable spoiled-boy charm he exhibited on the stage in "No Time for Comedy," he might have had a career much like Grant's--and, indeed, in "Sleuth" Olivier played the sort of role which would then have been all that could be expected of him.)
As a movie star, Grant is so much a man of the city that he couldn't play a rural hero or a noble, rugged man of action, and so much a modern man that he couldn't appear in a costume or period picture without looking obstreperous--as if he felt he was being made a fool of. In "The Howards of Virginia," it wasn't just the hot-blooded fighter-lover role that threw him, it was also wearing a Revolutionary uniform and a tricornered hat, with his hair in a chignon; he waddled through the picture like a bowlegged duck. The thought of him in Biblical sackcloth or in a Roman toga or some Egyptian getup is grisly funny. And he's inconceivable in most of the modern urban films: how could Cary Grant play a silent stud or a two-fisted supercop? Grant never quite created another character--not even in the limited sense that screen stars sometimes do, using their own bodies and personalities as the base for imaginative creations. There are no Fred C. Dobbses or Sam Spades in his career. It's doubtful if he could even play a biographical character without being robbed of his essence. As Cole Porter, he wanders around in "Night and Day" looking politely oblivious; he's afraid to cut loose and be himself, yet he's too constrained to suggest anything resembling Cole Porter, so the hero seems to have a sickly, joyless nature. Composing song after song, his Cole Porter appears to have less music in his soul than any other living creature. Grant relaxes a little just once, while singing "You're the Top" with Ginny Simms.
He sings quite often in movies--as in "The Awful Truth," when he parodies Ralph Bellamy's version of "Home on the Range," or in "Suzy," in which he does the number that is included in "That's Entertainment," and he replaced Bing Crosby as the Mock Turtle in the 1933 "Alice in Wonderland," and sang "Beautiful Soup"--but he played an actual singing role in only one movie, early in his career: the disarmingly frilly 1934 "Kiss and Make Up," one of Paramount's many imitations of the Lubitsch musical-comedy style. A sense of fun breaks through when he shows off his vaudeville skills--a confident, fullhearted exhibitionism. He frequently plays the piano in movies--happily and enthusiastically--and he does off the screen, too. For the past decade, since the breakup of his fourth marriage--to Dyan Cannon--following the birth of a daughter (his first child), he's been in retirement from the screen, but he's been active as an executive with Fabergé, whose president, George Barrie, used to play the saxophone for a living (Barrie composed the title song for "A Touch of Class," produced by Brut, a subsidiary of Fabergé); they sometimes have jam sessions after board meetings, with Grant playing piano or organ. It's a corporate business right out of a thirties Cary Grant movie: in "Kiss and Make Up," he actually ran a swank beauty salon. Grant belongs to the tradition of the success-worshipping immigrant boy who works his way to the top, but with a difference: the success he believes in is in the international high style of the worldly, fun-loving men he played--he's got Rolls-Royces stashed away in key cities. He has lived up to his screen image, and then some; welcome everywhere, more sought after than the Duke of Windsor was, he's glitteringly--almost foolishly--hale at seventy-one.
Grant has had an apparently wide range of roles, but only apparently. Even in the era when he became a star, his sexual attraction worked only with a certain type of co-star--usually playing a high-strung, scatterbrained heroine, dizzy but not dumb. He would have been a disaster opposite Joan Crawford. With her gash smile, thick syrup voice, and enormous tension, she required a roughneck titan like Gable to smite her; she would have turned Cary Grant into Woody Allen. A typical fan-magazine quote from Joan Crawford in her big-box-office youth was "Whatever we feel toward the man of the moment, it is he who is our very life and soul." It hardly matters whether Crawford herself was the author of those sentiments; that was the kind of woman she represented on the screen. It's easy to visualize Cary Grant's panic at the thought of being some body's "very life and soul." He wanted to have a good time with a girl. It was always implicit that she had something going on her own; she was a free lance. She wasn't going to weigh him down--not like Crawford, who was all character armor and exorbitant needs. Crawford actually intended to take over the man of the moment's life and soul; that was what love meant in her pictures, and why she was so effective with skinny, refined, rich-hero types, like Robert Montgomery and Franchot Tone, whom she could scoop up. She gave the same intensity to everything she did; she inspired awe. But Grant didn't want to be carried away--nobody scoops up Cary Grant--and he didn't want an electrical powerhouse. (He's unthinkable with Bette Davis.) Once Grant became a star, there was a civilized equality in his sex partnerships, though his co-star had to be not only a pal but an ardent pal. When he appeared with Myrna Loy, they were pleasant together, but they didn't really strike sparks. Loy isn't particularly vulnerable, and she isn't dominant, either; she's so cool and airy she doesn't take the initiative, and since he doesn't either (except perfunctorily), nothing happens. They're too much alike--both lightly self-deprecating, both faintly reserved and aloof.
In dramatic roles, the women stars of the thirties and forties could sometimes triumph over mediocre material. This has been one of the saving aspects of the movie medium: Garbo could project so much more than a role required that we responded to her own emotional nature. Her uniquely spiritual eroticism turned men into willing slaves, and she was often at her best with rather passive men--frequently asexual or unisexual or homosexual (though not meant to be in the course of the films). Garbo's love transcended sex; her sensuality transcended sex. She played opposite Clark Gable once, and the collision, though heated, didn't quite work; his macho directness and opacity reduced her from passionate goddess to passionate woman. And Garbo seemed to lose her soul when she played mere women--that's why she was finished when the audience had had enough of goddesses. But for a time in the late twenties and early thirties, when she leaned back on a couch and exposed her throat, the whole audience could dream away--heterosexual men as much as the homosexuals (whom she was, indeed, generally seducing in her movies). Something similar operated, to a lesser extent, with Katharine Hepburn. In the thirties, she was frequently most effective with the kind of juveniles who were called boys: they were male versions of sensitive waifs, all cheekbone. She was effective, but there wasn't much sexual tension in those movies. And, despite the camaraderie and marvelous byplay of her later series with Spencer Tracy, she lost some of her charge when she acted with him. She was humanized but maybe also a little subjugated, and when we saw her through his eyes there seemed to be something the matter with her--she was too high-strung, had too much temperament. Tracy was stodgily heterosexual. She was more exciting with Cary Grant, who had a faint ambiguity and didn't want her to be more like ordinary women: Katharine Hepburn was a one-of-a-kind entertainment, and he could enjoy the show. The element of Broadway conventionality that mars "The Philadelphia Story" is in the way she's set up for a fall--as a snow maiden and a phony. Grant is cast as an elitist variation of the later Spencer Tracy characters.
Cary Grant could bring out the sexuality of his co-stars in comedies. Ingrid Bergman, a powerful presence on the screen, and with a deep, emotional voice (her voice is a big part of her romantic appeal in "Casablanca"), is a trifle heavy-spirited for comedy. She was never again as sexy as in that famous scene in "Notorious" when she just keeps advancing on Grant; you feel that she's so far gone on him that she can't wait any longer--and it's funny. Although Grant is a perfectionist on the set, some of his directors say that he wrecks certain scenes because he won't do fully articulated passages of dialogue. He wants always to be searching for how he feels; he wants to waffle charmingly. This may be a pain to a scenarist or a director, but in his own terms Grant knows what he's doing. He's the greatest sexual stooge the screen has ever known: his side steps and delighted stares turn his co-stars into comic goddesses. Nobody else has ever been able to do that.
When the sexual psychology of a comedy was right for Grant, he could be sensational, but if it was wrong and, his energy still came pouring out, he could be terrible: In Frank Capra's "Arsenic and Old Lace" (made in 1941 but not released until 1944, because, by contract, it couldn't open until the Broadway production closed) he's more painful to watch than a normally bad actor--like, say, Robert Cummings--would be, because our affection for Grant enters into our discomfort. As it was originally written, the Mortimer Brewster role--an acerbic theatre critic being pursued by his aggressive, no-nonsense fiancée--wouldn't have been bad for Grant, but the Capra film sweetened the critic and turned the fiancée into a cuddly, innocuous little dear (Priscilla Lane). Capra called Grant Hollywood's greatest farceur, but the role was shaped as if for Fred MacMurray, and Grant was pushed into frenzied overreacting--prolonging his stupefied double takes, stretching out his whinny. Sometime after the whopping success of "It Happened One Night," Frank Capra had lost his instinct for sex scenes, and his comedies became almost obscenely neuter, with clean, friendly old grandpas presiding over blandly retarded families. Capra's hick jollity was not the atmosphere for Cary Grant; and he was turned into a manic eunuch in "Arsenic and Old Lace."
In drag scenes--even in his best movies--Grant also loses his grace. He is never so butch--so beefy and clumsy a he-man--as in his female impersonations or in scenes involving a clothes switch. In "Bringing Up Baby," Katharine Hepburn takes his suit away, and he has nothing to wear but a flouncy fur-trimmed negligee. When Hepburn's aunt (May Robson) arrives and demands crossly, querulously, "Why are you wearing a robe?" Grant, exasperated, answers, "Because I just went gay all of a sudden." It doesn't work: he goes completely out of character. Burt Lancaster was deliriously, unself-consciously funny in a long drag sequence in "The Crimson Pirate" (a parody adventure picture roughly comparable to "Gunga Din"); he turned himself into a scrambled cartoon of a woman, as Harry Ritz had done in "On the Avenue." That's what Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon did in "Some Like It Hot"--only they did it by yielding to their feminine disguises and becoming their own visions of gorgeous, desirable girls. Bert Remsen does it that way in "California Split," anxiously seeing himself as a gracious lady of quality. But Grant doesn't yield to cartooning femininity or to enjoying it; he doesn't play a woman, he threatens to--flirting with the idea and giggling over it. His sequence in a skirt and a horsehair wig in the stupid, humiliating "I Was a Male War Bride" was a fizzle. He made himself brusque and clumsy to call attention to how inappropriate the women's clothes were on him--as if he needed to prove he was a big, burly guy.
The beautifully tailored clothes that seem now to be almost an intrinsic part of the Cary Grant persona came very late in his career. Decked out in the pinstripes, wide lapels, and bulky shoulders of the early forties, Grant, with his thick, shiny black hair, often suggested a race-track tout or a hood. He was a snappy dresser, and when he was playing Ivy League gentlemen, his clothes were often kingpin flashy, in the George Raft manner. Happy and hearty, he looked terrific in those noisy clothes; he wore baggy pants in "Only Angels Have Wings" and was still a sexual magnet. But sometimes his slouch hats and floppy, loose-draped jackets seemed to dominate the actor inside. His strutting appearance was distracting, like a gaudy stage set. As he got older, however, he and his slim-line clothes developed such an ideal one-to-one love affair that people could grin appreciatively in the sheer pleasure of observing the union. In "North by Northwest," the lean-fitting suit he wore through so many perils seemed the skin of his character; and in "Charade," when for the sake of a dim joke about drip-dry he got under the shower with his suit on, he lost the skin of his character--even though that character was "Cary Grant."
It's a peerless creation, the "Cary Grant" of the later triumphs "Notorious," "To Catch a Thief," "North by Northwest," and "Charade." Without a trace of narcissism, he appears as a man women are drawn to--a worldly, sophisticated man who has become more attractive with the years. And Grant really had got better-looking. The sensual lusciousness was burned off: age purified him (as it has purified Paul Newman). His acting was purified, too; it became more economical. When he was young, he had been able to do lovely fluff like "Topper" without being too elfin, or getting smirky, like Ray Milland, or becoming a brittle, too bright gentleman, like Franchot Tone. But he'd done more than his share of arch mugging--lowering his eyebrows and pulling his head back as if something funny were going on in front of him when nothing was. Now the excess energy was pared away; his performances were simple and understated and seamlessly smooth. In "Charade," he gives an amazingly calm performance; he knows how much his presence does for him and how little he needs to do. His romantic glamour, which had reached a high peak in 1939 in "Only Angels Have Wings," wasn't lost; his glamour was now a matter of his resonances from the past, and he wore it like a mantle.
Some stars (Kirk Douglas, for one) don't realize that as they get older, if they continue to play the same sort of parts, they no longer need to use big, bold strokes; they risk self-caricature when they show their old flash, and they're a bit of a joke when they try to demonstrate that they're as good as they ever were. But if they pare down their styles and let our memories and imaginations fill in from the past, they can seem masters. Sitting in an airport V.I.P. lounge a few years ago, Anthony Quinn looked up from the TV set on which he was watching "To Catch a Thief" and said, "That's the actor I always wanted to be" which is fairly funny, not only because Quinn and Grant are such contrasting types but because Quinn has never learned the first thing from Cary Grant. He's never understood that he needs to dry out a little. Some actors are almost insultingly robust. If you should ask Anthony Quinn "Do you know how to dance?" he would cry "Do I know how to dance?" and he'd answer the question with his whole body--and you'd probably wind up sorry that you'd asked. Cary Grant might twirl a couple of fingers, or perhaps he'd execute an intricate, quick step and make us long for more. Unlike the macho actors who as they got older became strident about their virility, puffing their big, flabby chests in an effort to make themselves look even larger, Grant, with his sexual diffidence, quietly became less physical and more assured. He doesn't wear out his welcome: when he has a good role, we never get enough of him. Not only is his reserve his greatest romantic resource--it is the resource that enables him to age gracefully.
What the directors and writers of those four suspense films understood was that Cary Grant could no longer play an ordinary man--he had to be what he had become to the audience. In box-office terms, he might get by with playing opposite Doris Day in "That Touch of Mink," but he was interchangeable with Rock Hudson in this sort of picture, and the role was a little demeaning--it didn't take cognizance of his grace or of the authority that enduring stardom confers. The special charm of "Notorious," of the piffle "To Catch a Thief," and of "North by Northwest" and "Charade" is that they give him his due. He is, after all, an immortal--an ideal of sophistication forever. He spins high in the sky, like Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers. He may not be able to do much, but what he can do no one else has ever done so well, and because of his civilized nonaggressiveness and his witty acceptance of his own foolishness we see ourselves idealized in him. He's self-aware in a charming, non-egotistic way that appeals to the very people we'd want to appeal to. Even when he plays Cockneys, he isn't English or foreign to us--or American, either, exactly. Some stars lose their nationality, especially if their voices are distinctive. Ronald Colman, with his familiar cultivated, rhythmic singsong, seemed no more British, really, than the American Douglas Fairbanks, Jr.; they were both "dashing" men of the world. Ingrid Bergman doesn't sound Swedish to us but sounds simply like Ingrid Bergman. Cary Grant became stateless early: he was always Cary Grant. Making love to him, the heroines of the later movies are an aware that he's a legendary presence, that they're trying to seduce a legend. "How do you shave in there?" Audrey Hepburn asks bemusedly in "Charade," putting her finger up to the cleft in his I chin. Her character in the movie is to be smitten by him and to dote on him. Actually, he had begun to show his age by that time (1963); it was obvious that he was being lighted very carefully and kept in three-quarter shots, and that his face was rounder and a little puffy. And although lampblack may have shielded the neck, one could tell that it was being shielded. But we saw him on Audrey Hepburn's terms: Cary Grant at his most elegant. He didn't need the show-stopping handsomeness of his youth; his style, though it was based on his handsomeness, had transcended it.
Everyone likes the idea of Cary Grant. Everyone thinks of him affectionately, because he embodies what seems a happier time--a time when we had a simpler relationship to a performer. We could admire him for his timing and nonchalance; we didn't expect emotional revelations from Cary Grant. We were used to his keeping his distance--which, if we cared to, we could dose in idle fantasy. He appeared before us in his radiantly shallow perfection, and that was all we wanted of him. He was the Dufy of acting--shallow but in a good way, shallow without trying to be deep. We didn't want depth from him; we asked only that he be handsome and silky and make us laugh.
Cary Grant's bravado--his wonderful sense of pleasure in performance, which we respond to and share in--is a pride in craft. His confident timing is linked to a sense of movies as popular entertainment: he wants to please the public. He became a "polished," "finished" performer in a tradition that has long since atrophied. The suave, accomplished actors were usually poor boys who went into a trade and trained themselves to become perfect gentlemen. They're the ones who seem to have "class." Cary Grant achieved Mrs. Leach's ideal, and it turned out to be the whole world's ideal. --PAULINE KAEL
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