Cary Grant and Mae West

An excerpt from Cary Grant: A Biography by Marc Eliot.

I like it because it captures, for me, why Cary Grant (so young) stood out in this movie. (Actually – in terms of “young actors” – he wasn’t young. Success came to Grant relatively late. He was not a 21, 22, 23 year old star. Success came to him when he was in his 30s.) It was hard for men to be paired with Mae West, and still get a good manly performance. She was such an open lascivious personality – that men ended up either being emasculated, or sexualized to the point of a loss of personality. (Not that there’s anything really wrong with that – that was Mae West’s whole thing. She was a huge star – her movies were written by her, they were all about HER … The guys were supposed to be eye candy, and that was the whole joke of it, the whole titillation. To see a woman treat a man like a man treats a woman. blah blah. BUT – She Done Him Wrong is interesting because of how Cary Grant handles her. And how he handles being treated like that.) I talk about Archie Leach’s early career and this film here.

Now for the excerpt from Eliot’s book:

Filming began on November 21, after the full seven-day rehearsal period that [Mae] West had insisted upon. Set in a Bowery bar at the turn of the twentieth century, the sanitized but still raunchy story centers on Lady Lou, the proprietor of the Dance Hall (a standard euphemism for a house of prostitution), corun by West’s husband (Noah Beery Sr.), which sells beer to the boys while also dealing in a little white sexual slavery on the side. Captain Cummings, aka “The Hawk” (Grant), is an undercover cop running a nearby missionary and is bent on “saving” her. One of the most famous (and often misquoted) lines in all of film history is uttered in She Done Him Wrong with a moistness hard to misinterpret, when Lil meets Cummings for the first time and says, “Why don’t you come up sometime, see me, I’ll tell your fortune.” By the end of the film, after a series of bizarre plot twists, love changes and redeems them both. In the final scene, Cummings leads her away, with the strong suggestion he is going to reform her first, then marry her. They get into a cab and Grant removes all the rings on her fingers so he can slip a single small diamond on one. Lou looks into his eyes and murmurs, “Tall, dark, and handsome,” to which he replies, “You bad girl.” “You’ll find out,” she says, sucking in her cheeks and smiling wickedly as the film ends. [Note from Sheila: The way Cary Grant says “You bad girl” is prophetic of the movie star he eventually would become. You can see it ALL, there, in that small moment. The gloves come off, and out comes this reeeaaaallly masculine tough sexy guy … It’s fabulous.]

Now – onto the analysis of Grant’s performance opposite the daunting Mae West:

It was also the eighth and final film Grant made in 1932 and, after this highly productive year, the one that brought him closer than ever to the first rank of Paramount’s leading men. Ironicially, it was Grant’s approach to playing the romantic lead in She Done Him Wrong that did it. His onscreen aloofness, a reflection of nothing so much as his own uncertainty as to how to play a love scene opposite the voracious West, was taken by the public to be just the opposite — manly, moral resistance to Lil’s many charms — and created a new type of romantic sophisticate, not only for Grant, but for the legions of actors who would thereafter try to imitate him. Grant’s “Hawk” was underplayed and always gentlemanly, resistance translated into self-assurance and moral righteousness, all highly glossed with what would become his trademark shimmering elegance.

No one was more surprised than Grant at how successful he was opposite the voracious West. As in the past, he had tried to mask what he thought of as his own lack of any true acting style by emulating his performing idols, Chaplin, Noel Coward, Jack Buchanan, Rex Harrison, and Fred Astaire. Years later, Grant perceptively and graciously summed up his acting in She done him wrong as a combination of pose and impersonation. “I copied other styles I knew until I became a conglomerate of people and ultimately myself,” he told an interviewer. “When I was a young actor, I’d put my hand in my pocket trying to look relaxed. Instead, I looked stiff and my hand stuck in my pocket wet with perspiration. I was trying to imitate what I thought a relaxed man looked like.” …

Opposite West, Grant’s arched body language seemed to react with bemused distaste, an apparent product of calculated wit. He smartly held his own by not allowing himself to get engaged in a competition he could not win. In the silvery sheen of sharp black and white, all Grant had to do was show up and let his irresistible face be photographed in shadowed cuts, as if caught in the flash of lightning. Holding his own, however, was not enough. Working with West had taught him a valuable lesson. As long as he was the pursuer, the focus was always going to be on the object of his affection. The thing to be in any movie was the one pursued. It was what all front-rank stars in Hollywood benefited from, and why he was not yet in their league. Should he ever have the opportunity to call the shots, as West had, he promised himself, he would make himself the object of his co-stars’, and by extension, the audience’s, heated pursuit. Eventually this decision would come to define the essence of, and the reason for, Cary Grant’s superstar persona.

Pauline Kael called Cary Grant “the most seduced man in history.” If you think of all of his famous film roles, he is so rarely the pursuer or the seducer. It doesn’t work. He is the object of desire. He is cagey, withdrawn … or (in the case of Bringing up Baby) too clueless and distracted to seduce anyone. Women in Cary Grant films chase this man DOWN.

Cary Grant developed a couple of techniques for love scenes – and if you think over his movies – you’ll see that he rarely deviated from it. He never went to the woman. He stayed still. He let them make the first move. Always. Instead of having that put him in a passive role, which you might think would be the result, it ended up adding to his power enormously. He was the pursued. He was the elusive object of desire.

Somehow – even with Mae West tormenting him throughout She done him wrong, and teasing him, and insinuating things at him … he holds back. He does not become just a sex object (even though that was the point, for Mae West.) Grant, like he always did, performed a little magic trick there – and got away with it. His persona was juuuuust starting to take hold.