Cary Grant

  • The Awful Truth (1937)

    The Awful Truth (1937)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, May 2018) Considering that The Awful Truth is the movie that created Cary Grant’s comic persona, we should be grateful for its existence and for director Leo McCarey’s instincts in guiding Grant toward his vision of the role. This is a late-thirties screwball comedy that practically exemplifies the sophisticated and urbane “Comedy of remarriage” so characteristic to the years following the introduction of the Hays Code: Here we’ve got Grand and co-star Irene Dunne as an unhappily married couple that decides to divorce, then sabotage each other’s new affairs before realizing that they are each other’s best partners. (Try not to think too much about the liberties allowed to only the very rich people in the 1930s.) It’s decently funny—maybe not as much as other later efforts from Grant, but still amusing, and Dunne has good timing as well. (Plus Skippy the dog!) Divorce has rarely been so much fun. The comedy isn’t just about the lines, but the physical performances of the actors and their interactions—read up on the improvisational making-of imposed by McCarey to learn more about how the picture was shaped by on-set ideas and follow-up. If I didn’t already know how much I love screwball comedy, The Awful Truth would have taught me.

  • Monkey Business (1952)

    Monkey Business (1952)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (In French, On Cable TV, May 2018) It’s easy to see why Monkey Business is often considered to be a loose follow-up to Bringing up Baby—Howard Hawks is back with a fast-paced comedy, Cary Grant reprises his silly intellectual mode, Ginger Rogers steps in as the wilder female partner and the film is at its best when it’s just goofing around. Thanks to a high-concept premise (what if a serum gave you back your youth … or at least made you regress back in age mentally?), there are plenty of opportunities for random silliness. The film never gets better than seeing Day play at being a bratty schoolgirl, although seeing Marilyn Monroe vamp it up as a voluptuous secretary is also fun. While it’s technically a science-fiction film, Monkey Business is best seen as a farce reteaming Hawks and Grant together and just having fun along the way. (This being said, the film’s best laugh comes early on in the opening credits sequence, as the director tells Grant “not yet” and to go back behind the door before making an entrance. Alas, the film doesn’t go back to metatextual comedy.)  It’s really not quite up to Bringing up Baby’s standards—the film is occasionally annoying (the monkey), occasionally dull (anything with the scientists), occasionally offensive to modern sensibilities (never mind “the secretary”; I have in mind the “Indian scalping” schoolyard playing.)  It’s still not a bad time thanks to the aforementioned goofing off, but it could have been better.

  • Charade (1963)

    Charade (1963)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, March 2018) It does take a while before Charade comes into focus. It begins strangely, with a contrived meet-cute at a ski resort in the Alps that turns into an even stranger succession of events once the heroine comes back to Paris to find out that her husband has died, a large amount of money is missing, and three strangers really hated her ex-husband. The artificiality of the setup is almost overpowering, and even the comforting presences of Audrey Hepburn as the widow and Cary Grant as a mysterious free agent aren’t quite enough to unpack the heavy-handed setup. But as the deaths and double-crosses being to pile up, Charade does acquire a nice velocity, and even answers the questions raised in the first act. Hepburn is adorable as the endangered heroine, despite being too young for the role. Meanwhile, Grant is terrific as someone who may or may not be friendly—he’s occasionally very funny (ha, that shower scene!), and his last grimace of self-revelation at the very end is like seeing a split-second callback to the classic comedies early in his career. Also noteworthy as supporting roles for Walter Matthau, George Kennedy and James Coburn. Great scores and visual design by Henry Mancini and Saul Bass round up an impressive crew. Surprisingly not directed by Alfred Hitchcock, Charade is increasingly endearing the longer it goes on, and satisfyingly blends romance, comedy and suspense. It’s well worth watching. Just make sure to give it more than thirty minutes to make sense.

  • Bringing up Baby (1938)

    Bringing up Baby (1938)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On Cable TV, January 2018) All right. This is it. I am a contended cinephile. When I embarked on a conscious program to watch older movies, I did so supposing that sooner or later, I’d watch a movie that I’d fall in love with. While I’ve been really happy to revisit some old favourites and see them hold up (2001: A Space Odyssey, for instance), or to confirm that some beloved classics are beloved for a reason (Singin’ in the Rain, anyone?), I started watching Bringing up Baby without any expectations other than crossing off a popular title from 1938. Within minutes (specifically the torn dress sequence), however, I was squarely identifying with Cary Grant’s proto-nerd protagonist, falling in love with Katharine Hepburn’s drop-dead gorgeous romantic interest and gasping at the speed and precision of director Howard Hawks’ movie. To put it simply: Bringing Up Baby is as funny, witty and fast as any contemporary romantic comedy, and the 1938 year of release is irrelevant. The plot is a big ball of nonsense that has something to do with a paleontologist, an heiress and a tame leopard. But never mind the plot, as the real strength of the film is in its witty fast-paced dialogue. Hepburn is an instant favourite as a character too crazy to be true … but the entire film is like that, and it plays beautifully even eighty years (!) later. Those who complain that “old” movies are dull and slow clearly haven’t seen Bringing up Baby. It’s raucously funny even today—while contemporary comedic theory holds that chicken and monkeys are the funniest animals, the film makes a strong case that leopards may be a comic engine of their own, as several of the film’s funniest sequences hinge on the eponymous “Baby.”  (To be fair, one scene also involves chicken. Being eaten by the leopard.)  Considering that the film is often upheld as a representative example of screwball comedies, I have a feeling that I’ve just discovered an untapped vein of pure cinematic bliss. At the pace at which I see movies, I often see them and move on, never to re-watch again. In Bringing up Baby’s case, however, I ended up ordering it on DVD (along with three other similar Hepburn comedies) within days of seeing it. I have a feeling I’ll be extolling its virtues and often lending the DVD in the next few years.

  • Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)

    Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, January 2000) I can testify that Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid works pretty well as a comedy without catching any of its references to the noir genre it’s so obviously parodying. This fabulous cinematic experiment intercuts actual scenes from classic 1930-1950 films into its own B/W footage, and so includes Steve Martin and the gorgeous Rachel Ward interacting with the great Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Vincent Price, Cary Grant, Greta Garbo… and a few others. It presumably blows the mind of the fans of these type of films, but as a total neophyte to this period, I though the film was pretty darn successful without knowing the references. You’ve got to love the recurring tie gag.

    (On DVD, November 2021) How interesting it is to revisit Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid after watching a few hundred noir films – the basic comedy of the film is still the same, but now I can recognize the actors, and sometimes even the clips used by Carl Reiner and Steve Martin in putting together their homage. The distinction of the film is not only having Martin play a private investigator in 1940s Los Angeles, but especially having him interact (through clips from older movies) with Classic Hollywood actors. While the film features a heroic re-creation effort in set design, cinematography and costuming (sometimes from people who had worked on the original films, such as Edith Head!), the difference between the original and new footage is quite obvious on DVD: Since Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid was shot in 1980s widescreen and the original footage is in 4:3 “Academy ratio,” the older footage is zoomed into widescreen format and the grain difference is perceptible. Still, that doesn’t do much to lessen the fun of Martin arguing over the phone with Barbara Stanwyck, telling Humphrey Bogart what tie to wear, sharing a train cabin with Cary Grant or getting hit on by Joan Crawford. While the film’s first two acts can often feel disconnected as the protagonist goes investigating and lands in separate films, the last act is more cohesive given how it borrows much of the sequences from The Bribe. While the comedy has its ups and downs, it’s all good fun – and having the beautiful Rachel Ward as the original-footage femme fatale doesn’t hurt either. Martin sports dark hair and is a good sport about the silliness asked of him – Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid is clearly part of his early-1980s heyday as a film comedian, and still a funny film today… although it’s a different kind of funny for film noir fans.

  • North By Northwest (1959)

    North By Northwest (1959)

    ByChristian Sauvé Movie Review

    (On TV, August 1999) With Hitchcock’s 100th anniversary celebrations, two local TV stations ran some of his films. While I was not interested enough by Psycho to keep watching it beyond the infamous shower scene and couldn’t muster the interest to see most of The Birds (watched the set-pieces and returned to my book for the remainder of the film), I must admit that North By Northwest still works very, very well forty years later. Okay, most of the special effects are weak and the beginning could be tightened, but the dialogue and the plotting gradually build to a high pitch of interest. Interestingly, the movie uses (defined?) most of the modern conventions of thrillers, up to the gimmicky ending at A Famous Location. Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint are great in their roles, and the overall result is worth a look.

    (Second Viewing, On Cable TV, January 2019) Revisiting North by Northwest after seeing so many other Hitchcock or Cary Grant films seemed inevitable—now that I’m more familiar with that era of filmmaking, now that I know the quirks of Hitchcock and the charm of Grant’s performances, would it be as good? Happily, not only is it just as good as I remembered it—it’s even better. There’s a thrilling sense of adventure, plot twists, set-pieces and humour to the film, as Cary Grant becomes the prototypical Hitchcockian man on the run alongside Eva Saint-Marie, going from New York to the Rushmore monument along the way. The conclusion is abrupt, but there’s something to be said for not overstaying one’s welcome. The direction is top-notch, the actors couldn’t be more likable, and the mystery/suspense just keeps going. North by Northwest is simply a fantastic film no matter how you look at it, and no matter when you look at it.¶