Cary Grant

  • Howard Hawks – Monkey Business (1952)

    1951-1960ClassicsComedyHoward HawksMarilyn MonroeScrewball ComedyUSA

    Description: Barnaby Fulton is a research chemist working on a fountain of youth pill for a chemical company. While trying a sample dose on himself, he accidentally gets a dose of a mixture added to the water cooler and believes his potion is what is working. The mixture temporarily causes him to feel and act like a teenager, including correcting his vision. When his wife gets a dose that is even larger, she regresses even further into her childhood. When an old boyfriend meets her in this state, he believes that her never wanting to see him again means a divorce and a chance for him.Read More »

  • Howard Hawks – Bringing Up Baby (1938)

    1931-1940ClassicsComedyHoward HawksUSA

    Synopsis wrote:
    David Huxley is waiting to get a bone he needs for his museum collection. Through a series of strange circumstances, he meets Susan Vance, and the duo have a series of misadventures which include a leopard called Baby.

    Rob Nixon, Kerryn Sherrod & Jeff Stafford wrote:

    Why BRINGING UP BABY is Essential

    In the eyes of many critics, Bringing Up Baby is the quintessentialscrewball comedy, incorporating all the standard elements of the genre such as themadcap heiress, a hapless leading man virtually victimized by herattentions and a group of stuffed shirts whose pomposity is deflated by thefarcical goings on. It also stands as a prime example of the liberatinginfluence of eccentricity (and the female) in the screwballcomedy.Read More »

  • Stanley Donen – Charade (1963)

    1961-1970ComedyMysteryStanley DonenUSA



    Plot:
    Romance and suspense ensue in Paris as a woman is pursued by several men who want a fortune her murdered husband had stolen. Who can she trust?

    Review:
    Stanley Donen’s Charade occupies a special place among sixties thrillers. In an era of spy films resplendent with macho-driven eroticism (the James Bond series), cynicism (Michael Caine’s Harry Palmer series), or farcical irreverence (Casino Royale; the Flint movies, with Charade costar James Coburn), it was the only successful take on the genre to place a woman at its center.Read More »

  • Clifford Odets – None But the Lonely Heart (1944)

    1941-1950ClassicsClifford OdetsDramaUSA

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Plot Synopsis by Hal Erickson
    Cary Grant delivered Oscar-calibre performances all his life, but only when he played against type in None But the Lonely Heart did the Academy Awards people break down and give him a nomination. Grant plays a restless, irresponsible cockney who seeks a better life but doesn’t seem to have the emotional wherewithal to work for such a life. The hero’s shiftlessness extends to his love life; musician Jane Wyatt genuinely cares for him, but he prefers the company of fickle gangster’s ex-wife June Duprez. June’s former husband George Coulouris convinces Grant that the quickest means to wealth is a life of crime, but Grant drops this aspect of his life to take care of his terminally ill mother Ethel Barrymore. While Cary Grant did not win the Oscar he so richly deserved for None But the Lonely Heart, Ethel Barrymore did cop the gold statuette. Written and directed by Clifford Odets, None But the Lonely Heart unfortunately lost money for RKO, which could have used a little extra cash after paying the expenses of temporarily closing Ms. Barrymore’s Broadway play The Corn is Green.Read More »

  • Leo McCarey – An Affair to Remember (1957)

    1951-1960DramaLeo McCareyRomanceUSA

    Quote:
    Handsome playboy Nicky Ferrante and beautiful night club singer Terry McKay have a romance while on a cruise from Europe to New York. Despite being engaged to other people, both agree to reunite at the top of the Empire State Building in six months. However, an unfortunate accident keeps Terry from the reunion, and Nicky fears that she has married or does not love him anymore. Will he discover the truth behind her absence and reunite with his one true love, or has fate and destiny passed them by?Read More »

  • Richard Brooks – Crisis (1950)

    1941-1950DramaRichard BrooksThrillerUSA

    29f7c043f76a2bde437fd0d52a185152

    Plot:
    Dr Ferguson is a brain surgeon, on vacation with his wife in a small Spanish-speaking country. This is actually a dictatorship ruled by tyrant Raoul Farrago.Read More »

  • Alfred Hitchcock – Notorious (1946)

    1941-1950Alfred HitchcockFilm NoirThrillerUSA

    Quote:
    One of Hitchcock’s finest films of the ’40s, using its espionage plot about Nazis hiding out in South America as a mere MacGuffin, in order to focus on a perverse, cruel love affair between US agent Grant and alcoholic Bergman, whom he blackmails into providing sexual favours for the German Rains as a means of getting information. Suspense there is, but what really distinguishes the film is the way its smooth, polished surface illuminates a sickening tangle of self-sacrifice, exploitation, suspicion, and emotional dependence. Grant, in fact, is the least sympathetic character in the dark, ever-shifting relationships on view, while Rains, oppressed by a cigar-chewing, possessive mother and deceived by all around him, is treated with great generosity. Less war thriller than black romance, it in fact looks forward to the misanthropic portrait of manipulation in Vertigo. — GA, Time Out Film Guide 13Read More »

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