Cary Grant is breaking out all over

Cary Grant has always been one of my favorite actors. Suave, debonair. oozing class, and the gentleman’s gentleman. Come to think of it they really don’t make them quite like that anymore. So, I’m happy to say that over the last two weeks my life has been deluged with Cary Grant one-thing-or-another. It started off with reading a review of what sounds like an exceptional new biography Cary Grant: A Brilliant Disguise by Scott Eyman. A night or two later I turn on TCM and there’s Eyman chatting with host Ben Mankiewicz in between a double feature of Grant and Ingrid Bergman’s Indiscreet (Stanley Donen 1958) and Grant and Doris Day’s A Touch of Mink (Ron Jeremy 1962). Then I get a Criterion Channel email announcing a whole slate of Cary Grant films they're showing this month. Wow! So, I caught Grant’s supposed breakout comedy The Awful Truth with Irene Dunne (Leo McCarey 1937), then The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (Irving Reis 1947) (top photo) and, by coincidence, last night on TCM, Grant and Rosalind Russell’s His Girl Friday (Howard Hawks 1940) (bottom photo). Grant’s roles in Indiscreet and A Touch of Mink were the more “mature” Grant I knew best, the aging but charming romantic dreamboat - the idealized older man - which we’d also seen in movies like Charade (Stanley Donen 1963) with Audrey Hepburn and North

by Northwest (Alfred Hitchcock 1959) with Eva Marie Saint. The earlier films showed a still unmistakable Grant but obviously younger and fresh or fresher from his stage work in Vaudeville. Thought I knew he’d worked on stage in the 1920s – he was also a juggler - it was in these early films you actually see the physical versatility, indeed, slapstick. Lithe, with an immensely correct posture, Grant could collapse into all arms and legs, like when he quickly tranforms into an adolescent hot rodder picking up puppy love teenage Shirley Temple in Bobby-Soxer. Or, when he takes part in an obstacle race in the same movie. When it comes to script, Grant’s characters can be immensely witty but in a droll sort of way. Not so in His Girl Friday where, as a tough as nails newspaper editor he verbally dukes it out in amazing spirals of witty repartee with co-actor Rosalind Russell and a collection of newsroom misfits. So, from the 1930s through 1960s, we catch glimpses of Grant’s multi-dimensional roles. And give credit to the actresses. Irene Dunne is attractively brainy, Rosalind Russell sharp as tacks, Myrna Lou (in Bobby-Soxer) seductively intelligent, and Shirley Temple, the more mature version of the adorable child actor. As for Grant he’s simply an actor for all time.