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Boston Globe (01/Dec/1986) - Cary Grant, a charmer who could scare you

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Cary Grant, a charmer who could scare you

APPRECIATION

Almost immediately after Cary Grant's death yesterday, the obits and tributes were filled with such adjectives as "suave," "debonair," "elegant," "romantic" and "stylish." Certainly Grant was all of those. He personified them as well as or better than most other Hollywoodicons. But those words don't go far enough to account for the power of Grant's appeal. Most of the great Hollywood stars were stars because they projected a persona that accumulated weight and impact from film to film. Grant had such a persona, and it was grounded in more than his ability to use his good looks and impeccable timing to make us laugh. Coexisting with his comic gifts was a sense of danger, and not just in thrillers. He had a light side and a dark side, and an ability to give us both simultaneously. Grant was the black diamond of American film.

Think of the double takes in the great screwball comedies he made for Howard Hawks, "Bringing Up Baby" (1938) and "His Girl Friday" (1940). Even in "Arsenic and Old Lace" (1946), a comedy he never much cared for, he projects a sense of equilibrium on the verge of being forever shattered. He did it with breathtaking economy, often by simply widening his eyes and drawing his head back, as if receiving an invisible jab to his cleft chin. Not for nothing was Grant an acrobat in his youth. His physical grace was so functional and so unobtrusive that we always took it for granted, just as we learned to accept his startled postures and wide-eyed amazement that his world was about to fly apart once again. Although he never got much credit for it, he was one of the pioneers of body language. It was as important to his work as the clipped accent that impersonators always fastened upon.

His Hollywood career got rolling when Mae West seduced him in "She Done Him Wrong" in 1933, drawling, in a line often misquoted, "Why don't you come up sometime and see me?" In the films that followed, Grant often was depicted as a passive man, laboring, usually in vain, to keep women at a distance, and often looking askance at their moves. Think of the sheltered paleontologist in "Bringing Up Baby," who knocks himself out coping with madcap heiressKatharine Hepburn. Yet even against Hepburn, the first of a series of formidable screen partners that was to include Irene Dunne, Joan Fontaine, Ann Sheridan, Myrna Loy, Ingrid Bergman, Grace Kelly, Eva Marie Saint and Audrey Hepburn, among others, he was far from helpless. In "Sylvia Scarlett" (1936), he played a Cockney con man opposite Hepburn. In "The Philadelphia Story" (1940), he placed his hand on Hepburn's face and shoved her to the ground.

In "Penny Serenade" (1941), he reveals a callous side as the hard-luck newspaperman whose moody withdrawal nearly wrecks his marriage to Irene Dunne after their child dies. Dunne later was to say that Grant's dark moods were the real thing, that he was "afraid of sentiment," a view in which Granthimself concurred, saying shortly before he reached the age of 80, that "it took a long time for me to mature." In "Suspicion" (1941), he was worse than callous. As a ne'er-do-well playboy, he was convincing as a man who might well be plotting to poison his virtuous wife, Joan Fontaine. It's an astounding balancing act Grant achieves here — we can see why Fontaine is charmed by him, yet he chills us.

This was as close as Grant came to showing us the iron beneath the silken manner he cultivated. Not even in such male-dominated films as "Gunga Din" (1939) and "Only Angels Have Wings" (1939), was he as tough. It's no accident that "Suspicion," Grant's most fascinatingly double-edged film, was the first of four he made for the man he later was to call his favorite director, Alfred Hitchcock. Aside from their respective Cockney backgrounds, both shared a tendency toward repressed emotions, which perhaps explains why Grant was so perfect an expression of Hitchcock's idealized projection ofhimself. Through Grant, Hitchcock was able to inscribe a sort of fantasized autobiography, starting with the playboy able to get away with almost anything in "Suspicion."

From there, it was a short leap to the cloak-and-dagger games Grant played with Ingrid Bergman, at her sexiest as a spy in "Notorious" (1946). Grant handles Hitchcock's food obsessions deftly and amusingly here, from his reaction to the news that deadly uranium is being stored in wine bottles to his nibbling of Bergman during a long kissing scene on a balcony. When prodded by an interviewer, Grant admitted that "Indiscreet" (1958), a lesser comedy made with Bergman, was the film he recalled most fondly. Grant and Hitchcock reached a blithe apex in the frothy "To Catch a Thief" (1956), in which Grant plays a Riviera jewel thief snared by Grace Kelly, who naughtily offers him his choice of a breast or a leg — of cold chicken — then asks him, in a further triumph of innuendo, if he'd like to stick around for a fireworks display.

"North By Northwest" (1959) is perhaps Grant's most famous film, as well as the quintessential expression of Hitchcock's phobias. Here, Grant plays an executive whose secure world crumbles without warning. He finds himself chased by pursuers of lethal intent and, in a visual metaphor central to Hitchcock's oeuvre, finds himself clinging to the side of a cliff, Mt. Rushmore, before getting to bed the blonde Eva Marie Saint. Although he couldn't have been more physically different than the dumpy Hitchcock, they shared conservative tastes. Grant's devotion to the director was unswerving during Hitchcock's last failing years, when biographies began ruthlessly unmasking the psychic sources of the director's inspirations.

Grant had plenty of competition, but no equals when it came to playing dashing dapper types in such fleet comedies as "The Awful Truth" (1937) or "Topper" (1937). They'll live. So will Grant's reputation as Hollywood's greatest tall, dark, handsome comedian. It wasn't his smoothness that made Grant such a matchless comedian; it was the hint of madness with which he was able to tinge his comedy. Nobody ever got more comedic mileage out of aloofness, prickliness and even malice than Grant did.