Obsession Central: Cary Grant (“Sylvia Scarlett”)

Richard Schickel, after studying the earlier films of Grant, discerns a breakthrough in Cary Grant’s acting that occurs in this movie. Grant somehow freed himself up within this material, he let the goofball out of the bag – Schickel describes the breakthrough as Grant finally “taking some time off from good behavior” – a marked contrast to Grant’s earlier films, where he pretty much played your standard charming leading man.

One can see why Sylvia Scarlett so befuddled everyone at the time. What a strange little movie it is! There literally never has been, and quite likely never will be, a film quite like it. Not quite a romance, not quite a comedy, it might be described as a sort of brushed-off tragedy, in which nothing and no one is quite what they seem to be at first, and the characters’ responses to the events of the story are often inappropriate, sometimes dislocatingly so. The oddities begin with Katherine Hepburn’s title role, in which she appears for well over half the movie as a young man, a disguise she adopts to help her father … escape from France before he is arrested for his crimes.

They meet Jimmy Monkley (Cary Grant) on a boat crossing the English Channel, and having got the old man into trouble with Customs over some lace he is smuggling (in order to distract attention from his own activities in that line), Jimmy then casually inveigles the Scarletts into becoming his accomplices on some swindles in London …

Needing to lay low for a while, they take up the life of strolling players, working the more picturesque coastal towns…

It is, perhaps, no more stylized that most movies of its time, but its stylization was entirely unlike anything anyone was familiar with: from its never-never vision of rural England, to its becharmed view of low-level theatrical life (the little company works in Pierrot-Pierrette costumes) to its presentation of the creative life…

Yet it seemed to liberate Grant.

He had never worked with a director of Cukor’s quality, a man with a gift for creating a climate in which an actor or an actress could find things in themselves that they didn’t know they had. Nor had he ever had a leading woman of Hepburn’s spirit, either. And however loopy the story they were engaged in trying to tell, the contrast between it and the utterly routine things he had been doing at Paramount was not lost on him.

George Cukor remembered, “He was a successful young leading man who was nice looking but had no particular identity. In fact, if you see him with Mae West, he’s rather awkward. But in Sylvia Scarlett he flowered. He felt the ground under his feet.”

That ground was native ground, and one is speaking in more than the geographical sense. One imagines that the almost manic-depressive mood swings of the picture matched his sense, which experience had taught him, of how suddenly, shockingly, the taste and tone of life could change.

More importantly, Jimmy, the Cockney swindler, was formed, at least in part, by the forces, the society, that had shaped Grant. First glimpsed in a black coat and hat, a watcher in the shadows on that Channel boat, he later describes himself satirically as a “little friend to all the world, nobody’s enemy but me own,” more soberly as “a rolling stone, an adventurer”, who is neither a “sparrow” nor an “‘awk” — the two principal categories into which the world’s population falls, as he cynically sees it.

The analogy is obvious: both Jimmy and Grant have pasts they do not wish to discuss in any great detail, a sense that all alliances are shifting and temporary. Above all, both actor and character share a sense that a man is mainly responsible for his own survival — no small difficulty — and only after that for the formation of any fate he can manage that is of grander proportions, since no one is to help much, or for long, with either problem.

We don’t know, of course, precisely what Jimmy’s background was, probably even less elevated than Grant’s — but the actor had no trouble in understanding its dreariness and the kind of radical self-reliance it required to climb up out of it, the alienation and the incapacity to sustain love or intimacy for very long when those qualities are invisible in a cold, or merely economically hard-pressed, family…

Jimmy Monkley was, in effect, Cary Grant’s dark side — a cautionary figure. In him there is something of what Elias Leach [Grant’s father] had been, something of what Archie Leach [Grant’s real name] might have been had he not been blessed with looks and energy and the wit to imagine for himself a better self, living in a better place.

It is no wonder that suddenly in this role he forgot his manners, abandoned his passivity — and attacked. Attacked as he never had before.

“Cary Grant’s romantic elegance is wrapped around the resilient, tough core of a mutt,” [Pauline] Kael says, “and Americans dream of thoroughbreds while identifying with mutts. So do moviegoers the world over.”

But there is even more to it than that.

Some mutts touch us with their guts and their independence. But some scare us with their total unpredictability, their dangerous possibilities, as Jimmy Monkley did.

Now that he saw their possibilities, and his ability to control them — no matter how dashing he was, no matter how romantic he was — a little bit (and sometimes a lot) of those qualities would show in almost everything Cary Grant did for the next few years.