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Boston Globe (07/Dec/1986) - Grant could make us laugh and scare us, too

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Grant could make us laugh and scare us, too

Of the late Cary Grant's 72 films, 29 have made it to video cassette. Some of the omissions ‑‑ "She Done Him Wrong," "Bringing Up Baby," "Holiday," "Only Angels Have Wings," "I Was a Male War Bride" ‑‑ are grievous. Yet, as indicated above, it's possible to assemble a representative sampling of films that encompasses the qualities that made Grant what he was. "The Awful Truth" and "Topper" give us Grant in screwball comedy, blithely wrecking his wife's new romance after they divorce in "The Awful Truth" and airily turning to ghostly fun with Constance Bennett as an ectoplasmic couple killed in a car crash in "Topper." The latter, immensely popular, spawned sequels and a long‑running TV series.

In "His Girl Friday," director Howard Hawks diverted "The Front Page" (the famous newspaper comedy by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur) into the screwball genre, turning the ruthless editor's star reporter into a woman, Rosalind Russell, and again letting Grant dump on Ralph Bellamy's hapless suitor, just as he did in "The Awful Truth." The joy of watching "The Philadelphia Story" lies in the fact that Grant's costars, Katharine Hepburn and Jimmy Stewart, are personalities just as strong as he is. It's fashionable today to dismiss "Penny Serenade" as a mere tear‑jerker because in it newspaperman Grant and his wife Irene Dunne lose their child. But it's here that Grant comes closest to allowing deeply‑held feelings to show through a gruff exterior.

The films Grant made for Alfred Hitchcock are extraordinary little psychodramas that amount to the last flowering of Grant's career. In all of them, Grant seems to serve as a fantasized Hitchcock surrogate, starting with the caddish and possibly lethal playboy in "Suspicion." In "Notorious," he first nibbles amorously on Ingrid Bergman, then turns cold when her spy games are unmasked. In "To Catch a Thief," the tables are turned as Grace Kelly, never sexier, makes jewel thief Grant jump through a few hoops on the Riviera. In "North by Northwest," possibly Grant's best‑known role, he peaks as the frazzled Hitchcock surrogate whose world flies apart when he's yanked into espionage by accident and finds himself clinging to the face of Mount Rushmore.

Grant was more than just the quintessential tall, dark, handsome star. There was a hint ‑‑ and often more than a hint ‑‑ of iron in his elegance. Later, it surfaced, or at least threatened to. There was danger lurking in his suave manner, a whiff of madness in his impeccable isolation. His youthful experience as an acrobat resulted in a sense of timing that made his comedy brilliant. And the physical side of his acting was so unobtrusive that its brilliance was often overlooked or taken for granted. Who else could make us laugh at his double takes, buoy us with his stylishness, and scare us once in a while with a hint of inner storms? Grant was unique.