Cary Fucking Grant

Dave Kehr gets all Soto-ish in the NY Times:

In February 1957, when “An Affair to Remember” went into production, Cary Grant was 53 and facing an uncertain future. At the end of World War II he had been able to navigate the difficult transition from dashing, young romantic lead (“Holiday,” “Only Angels Have Wings”) to middle-aged, slightly less romantic husband and father (“Night and Day,” “Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House”). But now the gray was beginning to appear around his temples (he admirably chose not to cover it up entirely), and wrinkles and crinkles were starting to show where once there had been only smooth perfection.

So far the 50s had not been good to him. With his old associate Howard Hawks (“Bringing Up Baby,” 1938), Grant had made an underrated comedy, “Monkey Business” (1952), that directly addressed the subject of aging and firmly came out in favor of it (even when the enticements of youth were represented by a young Marilyn Monroe).

But Grant’s attempts to move into socially significant drama (Richard Brooks’s 1950 “Crisis,” Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1951 “People Will Talk”) had not proved satisfying, and only Alfred Hitchcock’s self-consciously slight “To Catch a Thief” (1955), with Grace Kelly, had recaptured the old magic.

Coming off Stanley Kramer’s leaden Napoleonic war epic, “The Pride and the Passion,” one of the most difficult shoots and very likely one of the worst films of his career, Grant must have been relieved when another old associate, the director Leo McCarey (“The Awful Truth,” 1937), came to him with a simple proposal: a remake of McCarey’s 1939 film “Love Affair.” Grant would step into the role of a notorious international playboy (originated by Charles Boyer), who during a trans-Atlantic voyage unexpectedly falls in love with a down-to-earth shipmate (Irene Dunne in the original film, Deborah Kerr in the remake). Here was something familiar and comfortable that Grant could have played in his sleep.

That he instead took the opportunity to re-examine and reinvent his screen persona is one of several reasons that “An Affair to Remember,” which Fox Home Video has reissued in a beautifully remastered two-disc 50th-anniversary edition, is one of the best and best-loved films of classical Hollywood. Instead of trotting out the old Cary Grant charm one more time (as he did in the dismal 1953 “Dream Wife,” his first film opposite Kerr), Grant reached inside himself for the performance he had unsuccessfully strained to give in his 1944 Oscar bid, “None but the Lonely Heart.”

A glum tale of a Cockney hustler and his dying mother, “Lonely Heart” had been Grant’s effort to come to terms with his origins as Archibald Leach, the working-class boy from Bristol, England. “An Affair to Remember” would be his reckoning with “Cary Grant,” the personality he had carefully constructed since his arrival in America. “I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be,” he said, in a widely quoted remark. “And finally, I became that person. Or he became me.”

From the moment Grant’s Nickie Ferrante makes his entrance in “An Affair to Remember” — he descends a flight of stairs from the ocean liner’s unseen upper deck, into a gaggle of middle-aged women who ask for his autograph — he is portrayed more as a movie star than as the mere gossip-column celebrity postulated by the screenplay. With no visible means of support, other than marrying rich women, Nickie seems a pure abstraction of Grant’s allure: the self-amused smile; the perfectly fitted tuxedo offsetting the easy, relaxed stance; his hands in his pockets or clasped at his waist.

“I’ve read so much about you in Life and Look,” says Kerr’s Terry McKay, a professional singer, with just enough mockery in her voice to let him know that she is aware of his pose and sees through it.

Only one other woman can make that claim: Nickie’s charming, birdlike grandmother (Cathleen Nesbitt), whom Nickie and Terry visit when the ship briefly docks at Madeira. Terry prays in the grandmother’s small private chapel — a key scene for McCarey, a deeply committed Roman Catholic for whom marriage was a sacrament — and later listens as the old woman describes her beloved grandson as a talented painter, whose restlessness has prevented him from fulfilling his talent.

As in “Love Affair,” in which the Catholic theme is even more pronounced, McCarey depicts the relationship between his characters as a step-by-step development from a casual sexual attraction to a sanctified union, a transformation that must be earned through sacrifice and suffering. “An Affair to Remember” evolves effortlessly, almost invisibly, from light romantic comedy to a kind of spiritual drama, as the characters cast off their public identities (they are both performers: he in the tabloids, she on nightclub stages) and approach their essences: Nickie as a practicing (though still unsuccessful) painter, Terry as a singing teacher who now must use a wheelchair.

Is there another line of dialogue in American movies as gloriously absurd, as heart-stoppingly direct, as Terry’s climactic expression of faith, “If you can paint, I can walk”?

“Yes, darling, yes, yes, yes,” replies Nickie, in a burst of affirmation that constitutes the couple’s true marriage vow. The words burst out in a spontaneous rush (as they may well have on the set: McCarey always left ample room for his actors to improvise), without protective varnish. Grant attains another level here, confounding the melodramatic and the sublime.

Grant continued to explore “Cary Grant” in several films after “An Affair to Remember.” Four, independently produced or co-produced by Grant, have been reissued in a disappointingly cheap collection from Lionsgate, inelegantly titled “Cary Grant 4-Disc Collector’s Set.”

Here, in ancient and muddy letterboxed transfers, are two romantic comedies of unusual emotional and moral complexity, directed by Stanley Donen, “Indiscreet” (1958) and “The Grass Is Greener” (1960), which reveal a frightened, lonely man behind the impeccable Grant exterior; Blake Edwards’s raucous war comedy “Operation Petticoat” (1959), in which Grant concedes his fatal charm to a young upstart played by Tony Curtis; and Delbert Mann’s tasteless and mirthless “That Touch of Mink” (1962), with Grant as a chilly, remote financier who tries to hire Doris Day as his mistress.

“We didn’t expect emotional revelations from Cary Grant,” Pauline Kael wrote, in apparent praise of the actor she called “The Man From Dream City”: “He appeared before us in his radiantly shallow perfection, and that is all we wanted of him.” But it is enough to look at these late films to realize what a supremely accomplished, subtly expressive and emotionally revealing performer Grant was — one of the greatest artists the movies have produced.

Oh, so this isn't a Mythbusters thread?

lol all those early poll threds r coming back to roost

nevermind u_u

haha IIRC kehr once called "monkey business" "one of the greatest works of the american cinema" or somesuch.

It has its champions.

An Affair to Remember is overstarched kitsch.

I'm sad that <i>I Was A Male War Bride</i> and <i>Only Angels Have Wings</a> didn't get at least one vote.

fucking bbcode

Even HTML can't fix italics tags terminated with anchors.

i think i should've bumped this one re Doc Casino's sniff at To Catch a Thief

the seething contempt of notorious is burned into my brain and would be my vote