The trend of screwball comedies pretty much came and went in a 5 or 6 year period, and Cary Grant was an enormous and influential part of the trend Once the trend waned – Grant was smart enough to recognize its waning – and adjust his skills, go deeper, take risks. Not just try to keep repeating himself.
If he hadn’t grown past those screwball comedies, he would have been remembered still, for sure, but he might have been trapped in that brief decade. His career wouldn’t have lasted into the 1960s.
It was at the very point when screwball comedies were on the wane that Alfred Hitchcock came along, and put Cary Grant in Suspicion – which, if you look at it in the context of everything else Grant had been doing up until that point, is not just a huge departure – but a shattering, as well as a deepening of the Grant persona.
All of the things which made Grant charming, sexy, desirable – were now used in a different context – to make him seem … well … suspicious.
Watch His Girl Friday and then watch Suspicion and you’ll see what an astonishing feat it is – what a huge risk Grant took.
But Hitchcock saw something in Cary Grant – something attractive, and dark and fragile – and directed him again and again to great success. If Cary Grant hadn’t hooked up with Hitchcock, I don’t think his star would have shone for so long – although his screwball comedies in the 30s and early 40s would always be considered as classics. Hitchcock brought out another element in Grant’s persona – that disturbing element, the hardness, the lack of trust – which would turn him into a bona fide movie star.
So here’s Schickel on the surprise of Suspicion:
Alfred Hitchcock had also risen out of the English lower middle class, partly also by imagining a character for himself and then learning how to play it. He was as much a loner, and far more of an eccentric than Grant, and of course, saw in the actor precisely the qualities that reflected his own vision of life — a romantic and humorous surface with dark undercurrents running beneath, always ready to burst forth. All of Hitchcock’s anxiety — and he was as much the poet of anxiety as he was the master of suspense — was based on this unpleasant awareness that things were never what they seemed, that disorder always lurked below our treasured middle-class orderliness. All his movies were based on setting up a chain of circumstances that would bring his characters to an acknowledgement of that awareness.
There was not a single leading male figure in any Hitchcock movie that Cary Grant could not have played.
He began with him as early as 1941, with Suspicion, in whicih he played an obvious fortune hunter and a famous womanizer who takes an improbable interest in country mousey Joan Fontaine, keeps failing his promise to reform and take a job, and then appears to be planning to murder her for her money.
Grant is wonderful in the role; he is not quite smooth, so his comical high spirits make the threat he poses to the woman more than a mere menace. It brings the film close to the grotesque. His heightened playing underscores the film’s basic question, keeps forcing us to wonder if we are seeing him objectively or are we seeing him through her increasing paranoid eyes?
The film’s suspense derives entirely from that ambiguity…
What is significant about Suspicion is that, for the first time, one really feels the dangerousness of a charm as seductive as Grant’s. It was perhaps hinted at in Sylvia Scarlett, but the world of that film was so remote, and his character so exotic, that it did not menace as it does here, where Fontaine (who is very good and vulnerable) makes us feel its sexy lure, its ability, helplessly, to enthral.
Maybe I’m nuts, but I could read shit like this all day.
That, to me, is what is going on in that film. He is so charming, you feel you could not resist him. Why would you want to? He’s wonderful!
“Have you ever been kissed in a car?”
“What?”
“Have you ever been kissed in a car?”
“Never.”
He stops the car. Smiles at her. “Would you like to be?”
She’s beside herself. She nods.
But … something’s OFF there. Something’s not RIGHT, even though – he tells the truth doggedly throughout the scene. “I lay in bed one night, trying to count up the girls I’ve kissed … I stopped after I reached 73…”
“Are you always this honest with women?” she says. (Something like that.)
He’s chipper, straight-forward. “No. But there’s something about you that makes me want to tell you the truth.”
Alarm bells are ringing off all throughout the scene, alarm bells which she does not hear – first of all, because she’s naive, and has no experience with men – and also – I mean, come on – it’s CARY GRANT kissing you in the car! Her judgment flies out the window in the face of that …
Very good casting choice – and the 2 of them are wonderful in this movie.
Re Schickel’s comment that “there was not a single leading male figure in any Hitchcock movie that Cary Grant could not have played,” it is kind of fun to imagine him in the James Stewart role in Rear Window and Vertigo. I’ve given this all of 10 seconds thought, but I think in the latter case, there was something about the Stewart persona that worked particularly well for Vertigo and it’s hard for me to picture Grant in the role.
Interesting, too, to imagine Stewart in the role in North by Northwest … Hard to picture anyone but Grant doing that part.
Such fine actors, the 2 of them.