January 18, 2024 | For more than three generations, almost until the very day of his death at age 82 in 1986, Cary Grant was the gold standard for scintillating sophistication — a walking-and-talking Hollywood fantasy by which lesser mortals were measured and found wanting.
Women sensed in his roguish smile and courtly reserve a promise of what critic Pauline Kael termed “sex with civilized grace, sex with mystery.” Men viewed his impeccable tailoring, his smoothly virile grace, his cordial but coolly efficient mastery of each situation — and, more often than not, turned green with envy. Mind you, regular guys didn’t merely want to be in possession of what magic Cary Grant had. They wanted to be Cary Grant, period.
And guess what? They still do, whether they admit it or not.
But which Cary Grant? The pratfalling stuffed-shirt of Bringing Up Baby (1938)? The cold-blooded manipulator of Notorious (1946)? The devil-may-care ladies’ man of Indiscreet (1958)? The smooth-talking charmer who may be a killer in Charade (1963)? Grant himself spoke fondly of a specific image he invented, and scrupulously sustained, in most of his six-dozen films. “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be,” he freely admitted, “until I finally became that person. Or he became me.” (In his later years, according to legend, he glimpsed a young Warren Beatty surrounded by adoring beauties at a Hollywood party, and quipped: “That used to be me.”) But even Grant remained evasive about which facet of his public face was his favorite — and which bore the closest resemblance to the man behind the façade.
To celebrate the 120th anniversary of his birth – he made his debut appearance on Jan. 18, 1904 in the port city of Bristol, England – critics, academics and longtime fans would do well to consider the surprising depth and diversity of Grant’s film performances. Surprising, that is, because Grant too often has been dismissed – even, during his lifetime, by Grant himself — as a movie star rather than an actor, as if the two somehow were mutually exclusive, or as a jovial trickster rather than a serious artist.
More adeptly than most of his contemporaries — Clark Gable, Fred Astaire, Spencer Tracy and William Powell, among others — Grant was able to slip into different disguises. And even though the masks he wore never fully obliterated his mega-watt star power, he suggested a great variety of intriguing undercurrents stirring beneath the studied composure of those masks.
In his best films, Grant engages in a kind of heckling scrutiny, standing off to one side and observing the swirling madness with an almost unnatural calm. For romantic comedies, this reserve often transforms him into an alluring object of desire, pursued by women intrigued (and aroused) by his indirect manner. (Pauline Kael aptly described Grant as “the most publicly seduced male the world has known.”) For more dramatic films, however, the skeptical glint in his eyes and the vaguely contemptuous smile on his lips make him seem at once seductive and menacing, as though he once learned the hard way that no one should be trusted. (Raymond Chandler once admitted he envisioned Grant as private eye Philip Marlowe; Ian Fleming claimed he modeled James Bond after the urbane superstar.)
In comedy or drama, farce or tearjerker, Grant almost always evidences a reflexive urge for withdrawal, for maintaining a safe distance. Usually, this can appear as an infuriatingly condescending gesture on the part of an actor. But for Grant, it works — beautifully, consistently, well-nigh miraculously.
Director Howard Hawks skillfully exploited the star’s discomfort by turning Grant into a kind of befuddled Prince Charming for Bringing Up Baby. Later, Hawks again mussed up Grant’s dignity — with the star’s enthusiastic assistance — in Monkey Business (1952) and I Was a Male War Bride (1949). And in His Girl Friday (1940), the sex-changed remake of The Front Page, Hawks used Grant’s quick-quipping, determinedly cynical detachment as a running gag: Grant is a newspaper editor who’s obsessed with holding on to his star reporter, Hildy Johnson (a never-better Rosalind Russell), who just happens to be his ex-wife. But the editor never resorts to openly expressing his transparently obvious love for Hildy, because — well, because Cary Grant simply doesn’t do that sort of thing.
Only in Hawks’ Only Angels Have Wings did Grant play a typically Hawksian hero, the kind of self-assured professional who makes light of the danger in his work. He’s a mail pilot in South America who teaches Jean Arthur (cast as a stranded chorus girl) a thing or two about accepting what fate deals out without tears or sentiment. But pay attention to the scene where Grant waits outside a room where a comrade has asked to be left alone to die. Even a Hawksian hero isn’t always as tough as he looks.
Director Alfred Hitchcock felt a cold, disapproving edge in Grant’s urge for withdrawal. Quite possibly, Hitchcock projected his own fears and anxieties onto what he perceived as Grant’s personality. If he did, however, Hitchcock also idealized what he saw. In his book The Dark Side of Genius: The Life of Alfred Hitchcock, author Donald Spoto suggests James Stewart represented for The Master of Suspense what Hitchcock considered himself: a theorist of murder (Rope), a protective but basically manipulative husband and father (The Man Who Knew Too Much), the obsessed, guilt-ridden romantic pursuer (Vertigo) and the chair-bound voyeur (Rear Window). On the other hand, Spoto writes, Grant “represented what Hitchcock would like to have been: the suave, irresponsible playboy (in Suspicion); the ultimate savior of a blonde he nearly destroys (in Notorious); the wrongly accused hero who wins the glamorous Grace Kelly (in To Catch a Thief ); and finally (in North By Northwest), the theatergoing executive whose frantic, perilous journey ends with the blonde lifted up from espionage to bed.”
Certainly, the darker side of Grant’s skeptical disengagement is defined most sharply in Hitchcock’s Notorious, a disturbingly ambiguous 1946 romantic thriller that has Grant often coming off as extraordinarily cruel, if not downright sadistic. He stars as a glib federal agent who offers Ingrid Bergman, a hard-drinking good-time girl, the opportunity to make amends for her late father’s pro-Nazi activism. Naturally, he allows her to fall in love with him — that makes his job so much easier.
Bergman travels to Rio, where she’s supposed to keep tabs on an old family friend (Claude Rains) who’s now working in concert with assorted Nazi refugees. Unexpectedly, Rains falls in love with Bergman, and proposes. Bergman doesn’t want to marry the guy, but does so to please the man she really loves. Trouble is, Grant views her sleeping with an enemy agent, under any circumstances, as the behavior of a whore. And even when Bergman is placed in mortal danger, Grant remains churlishly critical, refusing to admit to her, or to himself, that he loves her — until it’s almost too late to matter.
Looking over Grant’s career, it’s interesting to note just how many of his characters depend on deceptions, impersonations and other stratagems to disguise true feelings. For most of Hitchcock’s Suspicion (1941), he leads us to believe he’s entirely capable of murdering his wife (Joan Fontaine) for her money. Two decades later, he uses his ambiguous charm to generate a similar tension during Stanley Donen’s Charade, in which he may (or may not) be Audrey Hepburn’s protector and savior.
Even in a lightweight romantic confection such as Donen’s Indiscreet, Grant plays a character who relies on deceit: He passes himself off as a married man, so there will be no messy complications as he dallies with a beautiful actress (Ingrid Bergman again). When Grant plays someone who is straightforward and sincere (as he does, movingly, in 1941’s Penny Serenade), or seriously, painfully heartbroken (as he does, again movingly, in 1957’s An Affair to Remember), his aching, open-faced vulnerability is all the more dramatically effective because it comes as such a shock.
For this most intensely private of superstars, playing Cary Grant off screen as well as on may have been his most demanding work as an actor. Heaven knows, he was successful at his task: He created a beloved public persona that even whispered innuendoes and divorce-court scandal couldn’t tarnish, that survived and thrived more than 20 years after Grant’s final film (Walk Don’t Run, 1966), and beyond. Fan and fantasists didn’t really want to know about the broken marriages, or the experiments with drugs. For them – and for almost everyone else, really — it was enough that Grant became what he invented. And, in every sense of the term, what he invented became him.
Grant transcended his humble beginnings as Archibald Leach, the little Cockney who joined an acrobatic troupe to leap from his impoverished youth in Bristol to the brave new world of Hollywood. (Time and again in his movie career, his effortless physical grace reflected lessons learned as a showbiz neophyte.) He invented a new name and a new identity, playing to perfection the role of a lifetime: A hearty, healthy fellow for whom life was a grand party. And when he recognized the possibility of embarrassing himself by remaining at the party too long, he walked away from movies, preferring to let his public savor the ageless memory preserved in Late Show revivals and, much later, home-video, cable and streaming reruns.
All we have left is the artistry through which Cary Grant remains immortal. A star may fade, but his movies always will be in the present tense, unveiling an alluring alternative reality at 24 frames per second. In this dream world, there are several Cary Grants, many more than you might think. And for all of them, we should be eternally grateful.
