North by Northwest
(Run! Cary Run!)

Cary Grant, the Screwball Guru
by the Crackpot Critic

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Even the most serious of Cary Grant movie has screwball moments; moments of confusion combined with sexual tension. None but the Lonely Heart is an otherwise dramatic and dark look at life in the East End of London. Cary Grant plays Ernie Mott, an impoverished guy, whose mom is dying and whose best girl is married to the mob. But in one scene, Mott stops to talk to an elderly neighbor lady, who tells him her troubles. Mott replies with a quirky smile, "whoever'd do that oughtta have they bullocks spanked" . The censors overlooked that one, because "bollocks" is only a naughty word in England.

This wacky, surreal humor is the reason that I made this rule a while back for myself, "I will watch any movie, no matter how inane and obscure, providing Cary Grant is in it." When you think about it, Cary Grant is a fairly unlikely comedian. How often did Hollywood send a square-shouldered, handsome leading man to play a comic role requiring some rather undignified stuff? The studios tended to use character actors or musical stars to be comic relief. Cary Grant is no Bob Hope, Danny Kaye or Barry Fitzgerald. But it's Grant's urbane charm that makes him the perfect comic foil. He looks so suave and sophisticated, that when he dresses in drag, does a pratfall or gets a hangover it seems all the more hilarious.

Considering that disdain for authority is a trait common to most screwball comedies, Cary Grant is even more of a longshot as a comic talent. The police and the wealthy are frequent targets for screwball antics. Although he plays wealthy professionals, Cary Grant's authority is usually subserviant to a greater power. For example, he plays a laywer who has alot of trouble with a judge and a parzanoid hotel manager in My Favorite Wife. Grant's authority is further undermined by his willingness to be vulnerable to ridicule. In Cary's first great comic role, Jerry Warriner in The Awful Truth, it is appropriate that the moment in which Lucy Warriner (Irene Dunne) realizes that she's still in love with her husband is a moment of great public embarassment. Jerry bursts into her recital, expecting to find her in the arms of another man. Red-faced, he sits down sheepishly and gets ingeniously entangled in his chair. At this moment, his pommaded hair flopping as tries to free his hands from a little drawer, Cary Grant makes the audience fall in love with him too. The physical comedy move rapidly into wittier, more class-conscious humor as Grant and Dunne take potshots at both the powered elite and those who pretend to it. From the Nouveau riche fiancee (Ralph Bellamy) who's "in oil. Marinated in it," to the "Madcap Heiress" who turns out to be rather stuffy and snobbish, this Depression-era farce takes the stuffing out of the rich. By the time the cops come along, to be harassed, addled and used by Lucy's schemes to win back her husband, the audience is so desensitized to her whacky abuse that they don't flinch when she falsley accuses her husband of drunk driving.

Two of my favorite Cary Grant movies, Bringing Up Baby andThe Philadelphia Story, pair him with another unlikely comedian, Katherine Hepburn. Grant and Hepburn move with perfect timing and grace, turning whole scenes into comic ballet. In Baby, Grant plays the straight man to Hepburn's hi-jinx, while in Philadelphia Story , he plays the goofy antagonistic ex-husband trying to win back his wife. Jimmy Stewart won an Oscar for his role in the latter film, and deservedly so, but Grant's performance was equally terrific, especially considering that Stewart gets all the great lines, (Click here to download one of those terrific speeches), and yet Grant never took home the coveted gold statuette.

One cannot talk about Screwball comedies, without coming to Howard Hawks, the director who, along with Frank Capra, Americanized and popularized the form. In Bringing Up Baby, Hawks elevates sexual double entendre to an art form, a quality which partly explains the films popularity with contemporary audiences. The main characters David Huxley and Susan Vance, are searching for a "rare and precious" dinosaur bone. Even the most cursory, Beavis and Butthead-style screening of the movie yeilds a goldmine of innuendo. From the start Huxley wonders what to do with his bone, and concludes that he tried putting it in the tail yesterday. This is followed by a series of tail jokes that ends with Katherine Hepburn's exposed tail in the restaurant. One wonders how some of the more outrageous lines made it past the censorship board. The answer could be simply that the actors were speaking so quickly that the censors just didn't hear all the naughty lines. The most famous example of sophisticated dialogue from this film is Huxley's pronouncement while clad in a negligee that he just went Gay all of a sudden. Gerald Mast speculates in his book "Bringing Up Baby," that this line made it past the Hays office because it was merely the first mainstream useage of a word that had been back stage for years.

Hawks turned the satirical political play, The Front Page, into the screwball comedy His Girl Friday by changing the sex of the star reporter, from a man to woman. For sexual tension he threw in a broken marraige and a gulible fiancee (Ralph Bellamy). The result was a brilliant, rapid-fire comedy of finely honed insults. The love-hate rivalry between Walter Burns and Hildy Johnson is so intense and dynamic it makes your head spin to the point that you almost forget your in the midst of a political farce. Hawks earlier screwball comedy, Bringing Up Baby was a box office flop and only acheived notoriety as a cult classic, but His Girl Friday was a full-fledged hit. The film's success was particularily good for Grant because Walter Burns was a conniving, often cruel, operator, whose only saving grace was his personal charm, or as Hildy puts it, "that ridiculous hole in your chin." Walter Burns opened the door for more complex characters later in Grant's career

Cary Grant and Rosalind Russel in His Girl Friday

During the War, screwball comedies began to lose their appeal, but the Howard Hawks/Cary Grant team adapted the genre to fit the times in I Was a Male War Bride. Grant plays a newly wed who is unable to begin his honeymoon because his wife is still in the Army. Since there is no War Husband provision in the regulations, Cary must masquerade as a woman to get home to his wife. The Army Bureaucracy takes the place of the bumbling police from earlier screwball comedies, and voila, the next thing you know, Cary is parading around in drag on a naval destroyer.

Amongst Cary Grant's best movies, are the four films he made with Alfred Hitchcock, Suspicion, Notorious, To Catch a Thief and North by Northwest While one doesn't think of comedy when one hears the name, Hitchcock, all of these movies have their oddball moments. For example, during the courtship segment in Suspicion, there is an out-of place scene in which Cary Grant plays at being a hairdresser to Joan Fontaine.

In that same movie, CG turns that wacky screwball charm on its ear for the character John Aynsgarth, a menacing, con-man. Joan Fontaine won an Oscar for playing the suspicious, yet love struck wife. Grant also gives a flawless performance as the husband who is at once lovable and scary. He even makes his wife's pet nickname, "monkey face" sound at turns playful and foreboding.

Later in 1941, CG made Penny Seranade with Irene Dunne. CG and Dunne had worked together before in comedies, and their timing is still perfect in the lighter moments of this movie. They also pull off a difficult script which alternates visual slapstick and family tragedy so rapidly as to border on schitzophrenia. While the plot is often shamelessly manipulative, Grant and Dunne's grief and estrangement is tangible and human , setting the standard for serious performances by later comic actors, such as Steve Martin in Penny's From Heaven or Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People.

No longer content as Screwball Guru, Cary Grant made Notorious (1946) in which he played T. R. Devlin, a CIA agent sent to South America to spy on Nazi Scientists. Devlin falls in love with Ingrid Bergman, another operative whose job it is to seduce the head Nazi, (played by Claude Rains). For a while this plot has bad case of the Casablanca Blues, with the main characters forsaking personal hapiness in order to serve a patriotic cause. Grant is the original James Bond protype, smooth, cool and quick with a one-liner, but Bergman is the real hero of this story. The elements of screwball comedy--confusion, sexual tension, and disdain for authority, are present, but Hitchcock's relentless suspense and Bergman's visible pain, makes them seem unpleasant and even a bit sleazy. Like Walter Burns, Devlin tries to use the confused situation to manipulate a commitment from Bergman without offering one of his own. But the plan backfires when, Bergman, whose self-esteem is crushed by Grant's slick facade, agrees to marry the Nazi, who is at least, unabashedly in love with her. Grant's characteristic vulnerability is toned-down and Hitchcock only allows the audience to see it, until it's finally revealed in one of my all-time favorite Cary Grant lines. "I was a fat-headed guy full of pain," Grant confesses in a long close-up. Notorious is an example of how Grant managed to work within the fairly narrow slot that Hollywood dealt him, to play complex, multi-level characters in genre pictures.


Of the Grant/Hitchcock films, the most overtly screwball is North by Northwest. Grant plays Roger Thornhill, an advertising executive who gets accidentally tangled up in an international web of intrigue. The film opens with an assasination attempt that involves a bottle of burboun and a sportscar. Thornhill survives only to be admonished for public drunkeness by the cops, his lawyer and his mother (brilliantly played by Jessie Royce-Landis). The gag is right out of 1930s screwball comedy, with the macabre Hitchcockian down-hill driving sequence as the climax. The entire film is based on the classic fish out of water scenario, a plot device often used in comedy. The joy is watching Thornhill bumble his way along, while slowly adapting to his bizarre new lifestyle as a spy. James Mason, plays the villain, slick and urbane, the perfect rival for Cary Grant. Their scenes together are controlled, drawing room comedy, which underline the difference between the two characters. Grant's vulnerability, his weakness for double agent, Eve Kendall, is what makes him the good guy, while Mason never strays from his teflon personality.

Toward the end of his career, Grant took more risks with his persona, in movies that he produced himself. In Father Goose, Grant played a grumpy, sloppy old drunk who gets stuck taking care of a pack of adorable children-- the kind of character which would seem more suited to Walter Matthau or Humphrey Bogart. Although he named this film as one of his favorite, possibly because he didn't have to shave during filming, it was a disappointment at the box office. Grant made only one movie after that, before retiring from Hollywood.

Grant's last hurrah was a screwball comedy of the old style. In Walk Don't Run, he plays a business man forced to room with a young woman and a bachelor Olympic athlete during a Tokyo housing shortage. While remaining solidly within his urbane persona, he sets out to match make between the young couple. The results are hilarious, classic Cary, as he distracts her stuffy English fiancee (there will ALWAYS be a finacee) and gets mixed-up in a spy sub-plot. The movie reaches the peak of absurdity when Cary gets drawn into the Olympic games in his boxer shorts and is left to take a bus home in his underwear. As usual, Cary steals scene after scene with his polished expressions of disbelief/ bewilderment and the only time the film lags is when he's off camera. It is strange yet touching to see him above the fray of the sort of love triangles which were his trademark for years. I half-expected him to rush in and steal the girl at the last minute. Don't think for a minute that he couldn't of pulled it off! Cary Grant was still one of the most sought-after, romantic, leading men, up until his retirement at the age of 62.

It is fitting that Cary Grant's final scene on film is an homage to the first, great American screwball comedy, "It Happened One Night." He watches the young couple from the street below their room and manipulates a remote control to move the rice paper screen that divides the room (which is to "Walk Don't Run" as the Wall of Jericho was to "It Happened One Night") like a puppet master pulling the strings until they match his screwball aesthetic. Then he quietly gets in a cab and drives off screen forever. "Walk Don't Run," might be the last, true, screwball comedy similar to those Cary perfected during his prime.

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