The Books: “Cary Grant: A Celebration” (Richard Schickel)

Daily Book Excerpt: Entertainment Biography/Memoir:

Cary Grant: A Celebration, by Richard Schickel

This book and Pauline Kael’s essay “The Man From Dream City” are indispensable to understanding Grant. Both are brilliantly written, first of all, and second of all – both provide fascinating interpretations and analysis of Cary Grant’s persona, his thing … and this is harder than it looks. If you’ve seen the body of work, you can get a sense of how complex it is … the Cary Grant of Affair to Remember put up alongside the Cary Grant of Bringing Up Baby … Is there a thruline to the career? An organizing principle? What the hell is it? It’s easy enough to say Grant was elegant, or funny, or talented, or had star power … but to dig into the nuts and bolts of the exact elements that made up Grant’s particular persona … Pauline Kael gives it a shot, as does Schickel, in this book-length analysis of Cary Grant’s career. Schickel came up with one of the best lines about Grant – which I reference here in my piece about Jeff Bridges: Schickel is talking about Grant’s portrayal of Geoff Carter in Only Angels Have Wings:

Grant’s character here isn’t playing hard to get. He is hard to get.

This goes a long long LONG way towards explaining the specificity of Grant’s particular appeal … because not all leading men have that particular energy – but I had never heard it put so well, so perfectly. The difference between “playing hard to get” and actually “being” hard to get is huge. Grant has something un-gettable in him. This is what Pauline Kael focuses on in her essay – how Grant was usually the “object” in any love story, it was always the woman who did the pursuing. I think Kael called him “the most pursued man in Hollywood”. He truly IS hard to get – it’s not a GAME to him … and so, of course, women, like men, love a challenge. They are off chasing him because he IS hard to get … in the same way that men chase women who seem un-gettable … It’s part of the whole love-chemistry thing. But Grant embodies a particular aspect of it that really is his own, if you compare it to his peers. Gary Cooper, James Cagney, Humphrey Bogart, Clark Gable … These are not interchangeable men. You couldn’t really plop Bogart into a Cooper role and have it work. Each one has a staked-out territory. Grant, though, remains elusive, and therefore flexible. He made his name in the screwball comedies of the 1930s … but Hitchcock had always sensed a darkness beneath the crazy humor, maybe a remoteness … who knows what it was he sensed. So he put Cary Grant in Suspicion. Hitchcock was not altogether happy with the results, since he was forced to tack on a last-minute happy ending. So he tried again. This time he hit the jackpot with Notorious. Cary Grant had never been asked before to reveal so much, and my God, what a fantastic movie. He is so so good in it. Everyone is good in it. Grant is truly remote in this film … without the softening aspects of romantic comedy … and to allow yourself to be revealed like that … Grant wouldn’t trust just anyone with his persona, but he trusted Hitchcock. Hitchcock is responsible for some of Grant’s greatest hits, and it is amazing to look at those films side by side with the films Grant did for Howard Hawks. It is only then that it becomes clear as day just how versatile this guy really was. Untouchable, really.

Richard Schickel, in his book, analyses all of this as though it is a science experiment. Or, more accurately, a recipe. In this film we had a smidgeon of this, a dash of that … in THIS film we added a tablespoon of this, took out the smidgeon, and poured on a dose of THIS … It’s truly obsessive, a book for true obsessives, and for me it was a revelation. I had already seen all of Grant’s work by the time I found Schickel’s book, and once I read the book I had to go back and watch it all again. So that I could see it at work.

One of the best sections of the book is Schickel’s analysis of what happened in Cary Grant’s career in the early to mid 40s. Screwball comedy is over. Notorious hadn’t happened yet. It’s not that Grant lost his way, but there are a couple of “transition” movies in there … which probably didn’t feel like “transitions” to Grant … He was just trying to continue his career in the new more serious 1940s. Would he survive? Many screwball comedy actors did NOT survive the transition. But Grant not only survived, he went on to dominate. How did that occur? What choices did he make that helped him survive? One of the key aspects of talent and a long career is flexibility. To know when you need to change. I guess that’s one of the definitions of evolution as well. The creatures that survive are not, perhaps, the strongest, but the ones who are able to change. Grant always had a madcap level to his humor, but the styles of movies had changed in the 40s … He adjusted. Some of the movies are more successful than others, and when Notorious came out, a whole other aspect of Cary Grant was shown to the public – who all said, in unison, “WE LIKE!!”

Two of the “transition” movies are Talk of the Town, with Jean Arthur (his costar in the earlier Only Angels Have Wings) and Ronald Colman (a wonderful performance) and Mr. Lucky – a movie I absolutely adore. I included it in my Under-rated Movies list.

Richard Schickel analyzes both of these films in the following excerpt. Brilliant.

EXCERPT FROM Cary Grant: A Celebration, by Richard Schickel

And so Cary Grant, having skipped blithely through the depression, his social conscience entirely unburdened, came at last to concern, involvement, the big issues: in The Talk of the Town (1942) and Mr. Lucky (1943). They are not bad. They are better, for example, than Once Upon a Honeymoon (also 1942) in which he was a newspaperman trying to get a stripteaser out of Europe ahead of the advancing Nazi hordes, or Once Upon a Time (1944) in which he was seen as the manager of a dancing caterpillar, two travesties which a merciful memory now almost entirely veils. By contrast, The Talk of the Town and Mr. Lucky are both well made. If they ground his spirit they ground it gracefully, with a certain intelligence. In the first, co-written by Irwin Shaw and Sidney Buchman, with George Stevens directing, he is Leopold Dilg, who has been a nuisance, a classroom cut-up in the town where he was born. Somewhere along the line his anarchical spirit was politicised. (“Some people write novels. Some people write music. I make speeches on street corners.”) One does not quite believe it – Cary Grant on a soapbox! – but since the film does not actually require us to contemplate this depressing spectacle, we can perhaps ignore the naggings of disbelief. In any event, he has been falsely accused by the town’s leading citizen – the owner of its principal factory – of arson and murder, and the film opens with him escaping jail and taking refuge in a country house owned by Nora Shelly (Jean Arthur) which she is preparing for a new tenant, Prof. Michael Lightcap (Ronald Colman), a legal scholar and civil libertarian – Justice Douglas with an English accent – who is moving in to write a book in peace. We are on the bring, here, of violating one of the madcap comedy’s most sacred conventions. The green place is about to be polluted by politics, the disorders of the world are about to intrude upon the retreat, the purity of which was essential to the restoration of bedevilled perspective. There is, however, some nice knockabout as Arthur tries to keep Grant hidden from her visiting professor, some nice irony when, her secret revealed, the two men take a liking to one another, and begin discussing the gap between the law as theory and the law as reality – the idea being largely to disabuse the professor of his innocence on the latter point. That’s good populist stuff. And his involvement in Dilg’s case, which includes doing a little rough-and ready private detective work before taking it to court, gets him out from behind his books and will surely make him a better, more humane Supreme Court justice, which is what he becomes at the end of the picture.

Grant makes a good fugitive. He can use his natural wariness, his alert passivity, to advantage. And sometimes when the talk is thick we can see that he is not paying attention to it. What does all this chat have to do with the fact that the cops are on his tail, and have previously demonstrated but small interest in defending him from a lynch mob? It is right and good that his mind wanders from abstractions to survival. Archie Leach’s would have. If he has a problem here, it is not with his playing but with his image. That he is a man of mischief has been long since established; that he is a man of the serious left, a true radical capable of inflaming a whole community, no, that does not quite go down.

Mr. Lucky is, on that ground – but only on that ground – shrewdly calculated, for it does not discover Grant committed to anything. His Joe Adams is at the outset a gambler with a boat, a floating casino which he anchors offshore to conduct his business, with an eye fixed exclusively on the main chance. Nor is his history an open book. “Nobody ever knew what he was – except tough,” says his friend, narrating the story after it appears that the criminal had died a heroic wartime death, torpedoed at sea. Especially since the lighting is noir-ish, it seems that what we are about to witness is Grant’s Casablanca, the story of a shady soul regenerated by popular front idealism. But as we move into the tale, the mood brightens and the pace quickens. Looking for a respectable cover, Joe aligns himself with a war relief organisation managed by a group of society ladies, and is soon enough smitten by its deputy director, Dorothy Bryant (Larane Day). We are now suddenly in the country of romantic comedy – society dame and a mug from the wrong side of the track (or docks) falling for each other. Whereupon we fall over into the land of the screwballs. The ladies set Grant to work knitting in a window where passers-by can see him. It is a great Grant moment – a drag scene without a drag outfit, and charmingly goofy. Not long thereafter, Joe and Dorothy head in the classic manner to the green world – Dorothy’s family home in the country. We expect a romantic peacefulness to fall over their scrappy affair. Wrong again. When she proposes marriage, he fires back the opening barrage in what will quickly turn into class warfare: “To people like you, folks like me are animals … We’re so bad and you’re so very good … You look through me like I was a dirty pane of glass …” and so on. Then, however, a priest tells him tales of children suffering under wartime hardships and the filthy pane is cleansed; one can see through it now to a heart of gold. A plan by some of Joe’s mob pals – to steal the take from a gambling concession Joe is managing at a charity ball managed by Dorothy’s organisation – is foiled by him and … It is by this time like a breathless tale made up by a child, all hasty twists and turns, eager to please at any cost.

It is amazing. It is weird. It defies description. What is this movie? What is its main line of business? It never makes up its mind. And that reflects its curious beginnings. The original story is by one Milton Holmes, who was a tennis pro at a club where Grant played. He approached the star with the basic idea and the actor got the studio to buy it and assign Holmes to turn it into a script. Given his inexperience, however, it was thought prudent to bring in a more seasoned partner – none other than Adrian Scott, who would soon enough find a larger fame as one of the Hollywood Ten. There must be one of the great unwritten farces in this situation – the tennis bum and the gentlemanly communist sitting down to collaborate on a comedy for one of the world’s most glamorous stars.

And one in which he was taking a personal interest. For there is a third element of interest in the film – a minor but palpable autobiographical note. Grant occasionally uses Cockney rhyming slang (most notably “Lady from Bristol” which means “pistol” in the argot). There are references to a poverty-stricken past and of a mother going hungry so that her child would be fed. His character is also given a rationale for not entering military service, which was something of a touchy subject for Grant who, despite his age – he was close to forty – seems to have felt guilty about not entering the service. “I had my war,” says Joe, “climbing out of the gutter. I won that war. It’s the only war I recognize.”

It might have been a recipe for disaster, this unlikely collaboration between a man who had been a servant in the upper class world that madcap comedy had purportedly represented, a critic of that world (educated on a scholarship at Amherst, Scott’s background was working class) and an actor, who besides trying to breathe new life into the genre that had given him life as a star, was also, at this moment, as we shall shortly see, interested in expressing something of his own lower-class roots in his work.

The result, perhaps surprisingly, was not a disaster. If Mr. Lucky is hardly a great movie it is not a bland one or a stupid one either. It is in fact more memorably dislocating than many of Grant’s smoother and better loved movies. At least on the subject of class it is, for example, more abrasive, more emotionally honest, than something like The Philadelphia Story.

But of course, it is critically a dangerous movie. The mixture of personalities in the writer’s office, the resultant mixture of moods and motives in the film itself, have such a tempting historical symbolism – that one perhaps finds it more interesting than it really was. But if one must guard against claiming too much for the picture, this much is certain: it is an apt and convenient place to mark the end of an era, an end to the giddy delights of a kind of movie making for which we lost the taste for seeing, then the knack for making.

Grant lost something almost immediately – his main line. He would, in time, find another one, though never one as interesting, as quirky, as full of surprises for us, for himself, as the comedies of this period had provided.