Cary Grant-blogging

Cary Grant is my all-time favorite movie actor. Here's a great post (via Stephen Green) about Grant's performance in She Done Him Wrong. And here is a great series of pleasantly obsessive posts about Grant and his acting. I'm getting into dangerous territory here, because I can easily see myself falling into obsessive CaryGrant-blogging, at which point my co-bloggers will be leading the mob to the old mill with the torches lit.

If I were forced at gunpoint to choose a favorite Cary Grant performnace, I'd have to choose his role as Walter Burns in His Girl Friday. I have seen that movie many times, and I still laugh out loud every time -- especially at the scene in which Burns (Grant) strides menacingly toward Bruce's (Ralph Bellamy's) mother and says, "Excuse me, madam, were you referring to me?" Never before or since has bullying an old lady been quite so funny.

Here's what James Harvey has to say, in Romantic Comedy in Hollywood from Lubitsch to Sturgess, about His Girl Friday and about the appeal of Grant's performance as Walter Burns:

Hawks [Howard Hawks, the film's director] has turned the editor's role into a kind of extension and expression of Grant's own extrahuman quality, that seeming detachment from ordinary life and feelings, that standing-apart quality that marks Grant more than almost any other major star. Walter Burns may not be as intelligent or incisive as some Grant heroes are -- he is a vulgarian, and sometimes . . . the joke is on him ("Leave the rooster story alone, that's human interest!"). But he is still the romantic hero, tough newspaperman version. And where earlier screwball comedies tend to tone down this hero's more disreputable side, to suit him for the romance . . . Hawks and Grant do just the opposite. Take, for example, Grant's ineffable way of responding to the news of an employee's illness, a reporter he was particularly depending on. "Where is Duffy?" he shouts into the phone. "Diabetes!" he shouts even louder, making it sound not only loathsome but obscene. "I should know better," he says, hanging up, flinging his arms wide and dancing with impatience, "than to hire anybody with a disease!" And this apparent inhumanity isn't . . . a cover for a deeper, more genuine humanity underneath. This Grant hero is just as outrageous as he seems, and remains so to the end. It's true he loves Hildy (it's almost surprising how convincing that is) and that he fights the crooked mayor and sheriff; but in every other respect he is unregenerate. Not only is he going through the door first in the last shot of the film, but Hildy is carrying the suitcase -- in her arms . . .

That unregenerate quality is at the heart of this movie . . . The Hawks version is even clearer and less apologetic about its own subversive instincts -- and the joy that goes with them. Grant's outrageousness is so wonderfully elated. That's one reason we don't squirm -- just the opposite, in fact -- to see Hildy scuttling out the door after him at the end . . . She's following the Wizard, so who cares if she has to carry the bags? Where cynicism and romanticism may seem to go together in other movies, for Hawks they are almost the same thing: the cynicism is the romanticism. Above all, it's the deliverance from cant: the absolute refusal, in the fantasy of this comedy, ever to talk shit again.

That's enough for now. But Archie Leach and I will be back.