Cary Grant: The Complete Filmography - Watching All Of His Movies (1 Viewer)

[Josh Steinberg]

I feel a bit sad as I think you implied as by the completion of this project, you have no more Grant films to see.

Yeah, I was bumming a little last night when I realized I had about half an hour left of Walk Don't Run - Grant is offscreen for a few minutes in the middle section, which caused me glance at the clock and realize that I was so close to being done.

But on the bright side - I watched so many movies so quickly that I don't have 100% recall on them. While I know something like North By Northwest by heart, there are a lot that I only remember the basic details, so they'll still be fun to revisit. And I also think there's something about watching a movie I've seen before with someone who's never seen it making it seem new again, and there are quite a few that I'd like to show to my wife eventually. So while they won't be knew, they won't exactly be played out either.

One of the things I was thinking about too is how Grant didn't do a lot of media interviews. Finding an actual video of him talking is extraordinarily difficult to do, and there are few print interviews as well. On one hand, that means we're denied the chance to enjoy more of Grant outside of the films. But on the other hand, it really lets the work stand for itself, and it keeps the mystique. At this point, I don't think there's anything that could come out that would be like stepping behind the curtain - so what we're left with is just the magic Grant left up on the screen. It's one heck of a legacy. I think I already understood this before I started this project, but now that I'm at the end, there's no doubt in my mind - we will never see someone exactly like him again. And his best works will stand the test of time because of that.

 

[Allansfirebird]

Walk, Don't Run might have been one film too many, and I think Grant recognized that. But though the film rarely reaches the heights of his best work, it does have a few genuinely hilarious moments, culminating with Grant's race walking posture, which has to be seen to be believed.

I've always wondered what might've happened with Hitchcock's "Torn Curtain" had Cary picked that one instead of "Walk, Don't Run." I remember reading that everyone was pushing Hitch to reconnect with John Michael Hayes to do an extensive rewrite of the script, and to get Cary to star in it. This is not to say that I don't like "Walk, Don't Run" (I have a rather soft spot for that one), it's just another fascinating what-if scenario to ponder.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I will have to revisit Torn Curtain - I only saw it once and I don't have a strong memory of the movie. But I think I have it in the Hitchcock box set, so I think I can get to that.

another fascinating what-if scenario to ponder.

I would have loved to have seen Grant on the small screen as the star of a sitcom, but I have this feeling that by the time he retired, the type of sitcom I would have enjoyed him in probably would have seen dated to the audience of the time. Jimmy Stewart ended up doing a sitcom for one season in the early 1970s, and as much as I enjoyed it, I also understand why it wasn't a hit - it's a 1950s style show coming out right when everything in the culture was the opposite of that. I think it would have been the same problem for Grant - but he wasn't interested in the first place, so we'll never know. But the Mr. Blandings radio show proved to me at least that seeing Grant recur as a continuing character would have been something really enjoyable.

It's a miracle that the studios weren't able to lure him back for one of those all star 1970s disaster movies - just about everyone else did one.

 

[bujaki]

And now that you're done with Walk, Don't Run, visit the original: The More the Merrier, directed by George Stevens. Charles Coburn won a best supporting actor AA for his performance in the role later played by Grant. It doesn't hurt that the leads are played by Jean Arthur and Joel McCrea. I'd like to read your take on comparing both films. Hint: the original is stronger.
Congratulations on your tenacity and insights.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Jose, as I was reading about Walk, Don't Run and discovered it was a remake, I definitely had the thought that I wouldn't be surprised to find the original was better. There were little things about the plotting that suggested it was based on something older, with some of the ideas perhaps working better in their original time. I wasn't around back then, but would a man sharing an apartment with a woman in 1966 for a temporary period and in separate bedrooms really be that controversial? Eggar's character reacts as if the whole thing could lead to scandal, but certainly by 2016, no one would think twice about such arrangements. Especially with the added subplots of Tokyo being completely booked up and people doubling and tripling up everywhere, it just doesn't strike me as being any sort of a deal. Now, go back twenty or thirty years (in the time the original version was made) and suddenly that makes a whole lot more sense. There were a couple little things like that scattered throughout the movie, nothing that took away from my enjoyment, but that kept it from feeling as contemporary as it was.

With the original featuring a cast like that, I think I will have to see it.

 

[Mike2001]

Thanks Josh. I really enjoyed taking this journey with you.

(and The More the Merrier is terrific.)

 

[Nelson Au]

Well, I've still got Evenings With Cary Grant to read after I get through Return to Tomorrow. That's sort of like hearing his voice.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

Well, I've still got Evenings With Cary Grant to read after I get through Return to Tomorrow. That's sort of like hearing his voice.

Absolutely. It's a marvelous book. And unlike Return Of Tomorrow, it takes less than 1000 hours to read

 

[Nelson Au]

Josh, I finally sat down to watch The Bishop's Wife. Like you I've managed to have not seen it before. I totally agree with your write up, Grant oozes an easy charm and seduces everyone and raises them up. Grant was smart to ask to switch roles with Niven and play Dudley. If the stories are true, that Niven had just lost his wife and was down and Young and Grant were not the best of friends during production, it doesn't show.

I saw the similarities to Its A Wonderful Life and I thought I recognized the kid who was the snow fight captain. But not just cast members, but the basic premise. While not exactly the same, similar themes of redirecting the lives of the lost.

I had to wonder if the ice skating sequences were actually done by Grant. I knew he was athletic and probably could skate. Some of the longer shots looked like a CGI Grant face was placed on the body of the stunt double. But if what I read on the Internet is true, Grant did all but the most demanding skating which is impressive.

It also interesting to see Elsa Lanchester in the film! This was made only about 11 years after Bride of Frankenstein and she looks so different, and older.

I've also finally seen a Henry Koster film. Eventually I'll get to Harvey.

 

[RMajidi]

Eventually I'll get to Harvey.

Aaah - Jimmy Stewart, Josephine Hull and that 'hop, hop, hop, hop, hippity-hop' rabbit!

 

[davidmatychuk]

I had to wonder if the ice skating sequences were actually done by Grant. I knew he was athletic and probably could skate. Some of the longer shots looked like a CGI Grant face was placed on the body of the stunt double. But if what I read on the Internet is true, Grant did all but the most demanding skating which is impressive.

I think Pee-Wee Herman was thinking of the "Bishop's Wife" figure skating (especially the cab driver's figure skating) when he put this in his rather wonderful Christmas Special:

 

[Dick]

#72 - Walk, Don't Run (1966)
Viewed on December 30th, 2016
Viewing Format: Vudu HDX 1080p Streaming Rental (Sony)

Well, here we are. After nearly an entire year, and over seventy films, I've finally come to the end. It seemed fitting from the start to end with Walk, Don't Run, the last of Cary Grant's 72 features. As a 62-year-old leading man, Grant isn't afraid to show his age here. Not hiding his greys, and making more than one reference to not being a young man anymore, Grant stars as an English businessman visiting Tokyo to conclude an important deal. His plan to arrive a few days in advance ends up backfiring, as the presence of the 1966 Tokyo Olympics has resulted in a shortage of available rooms. With nowhere to stay, and the British embassy unimpressed by his credentials, he talks his way into subletting a room with a British woman who had been hoping to find a female roommate (Samantha Eggar). Soon after, Grant meets an architect-turned-Olympian (Jim Hutton) who finds himself in a similar predicament, and ends up sub-subletting half of his room to him, much to the dismay of Eggar. The buttoned-up Eggar reveals that she has a fiance (and a personality, for that matter); in fact, its the embassy worker who was so dismissive of Grant in the first place. Grant notices that there's an unspoken chemistry between Eggar and Hutton, and quietly begins trying to push them towards each other.

In an interesting departure from Grant's other romantic comedies (and this film must be considered at least partially a romantic comedy), while Grant is the film's star, he's not the romantic lead. (Though I greatly enjoyed his combination of distinguished sophistication and slight befuddlement.) His character has been married for twenty five years to a wife we never see onscreen, but of whom he speaks fondly. Instead, any of the sparks that fly are flown between Eggar and Hutton. They're good, but its a little bit amateur hour compared to the kind of screen romance you'd see with Grant. Samantha Eggar is gorgeous, and she plays the role well, allowing us to see her character's rigid exterior slowly crumble as the movie progresses. Jim Hutton is a little more uneven, but I can't decide if that's him or just how the character is written. Teru Shimada (Mr. Osato in "You Only Live Twice") and George Takei (Sulu in "Star Trek") both have small roles, and it's always welcome to see familiar faces in different parts. The movie is a minor entry in Grant's filmography; it's not bad and quite pleasant in fact, but not at the level of its immediate predecessors. (This movie immediately followed Father Goose, Charade and That Touch Of Mink). In many ways, this reminded me tonally of the string of minor comedies that Grant made right before his first retirement, movies like Room For One More and Dream Wife; they're all enjoyable to watch but don't have the substance of his best works. Walk, Don't Run might have been one film too many, and I think Grant recognized that. But though the film rarely reaches the heights of his best work, it does have a few genuinely hilarious moments, culminating with Grant's race walking posture, which has to be seen to be believed.

The 1080p HDX stream from Vudu of a master provided by Sony was very nice. The audio is very good, and the video quality is similarly high. It's not completely spotless, but nearly so. It didn't appear to be a brand new master, nor did it appear to be ancient; if I had to guess, I would suspect that it was probably created as the source for the DVD version. It goes without saying that I would happily purchase a Blu-ray on Day One if Sony were to make one available.

Walk, Don't Run is an unremarkable end to a remarkable career, and while it probably won't be at the top of anyone's list, it's an entertaining film that gives Grant a chance to do his Cary Grant thing one last time. As the movie was playing, I realized a fun coincidence. In Grant's first film, he plays a javelin thrower in the 1932 Olympics and the entire plot is set in motion when he returns home early from the event. In his last film, Grant is a businessman in Tokyo during the 1966 Olympics, and the entire plot is set in motion when he arrives early for the event. There's a nice symmetry to that; I wonder if he was aware of it at the time.

For different reasons, I disliked this film about as much as I did ARSENIC AND OLD LACE. Grant is certainly in better (i.e. grounded) form here than he was in AAOL, but this movie bored me. I wish he'd gone out on a better vehicle. But, credit where credit is due: like Johnny Carson, he quit while he was ahead, and never looked back. You have to admire an actor who doesn't refuse to acknowledge his or her age and the potential for popularity decline, and who bows out gracefully while still in demand. Too many others just keep pushing the age envelope and wear out their welcomes with too-old performances (i.e. Woody Allen, Joan Crawford, etc) when they might better be focusing on other things. So, I salute Mr. Grant. His career as a whole has been stellar.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I had to wonder if the ice skating sequences were actually done by Grant. I knew he was athletic and probably could skate.

I can't say for sure, but watching it on my projector (rather than my TV), it looked like all of the long shots were a double, and any of the closeups where you see their faces is him. It's not as apparent on normal size screens, but when you start blowing it up, you can start to see that the physicality of the double is different than Grant's. Between having access to larger screens at home than ever before, and discs being mastered from elements closer to the negative than prints would have been, some of these Blu-rays can make it easier to look behind the curtain than the filmmakers at the time would have ever imagined.

 

[Nelson Au]

That whole ice skating sequence reminded me of the Chris Reeves Superman sequence when he takes Lois Lane for a flight around Metropolis. As long as they were touching, she could fly. So while Dudley is skating with Julia, she could skate better.

I just had a look at the IMDB page of trivia for this movie where they say the long shots are not Grant, but a double wearing a Grant mask! Maybe that's why I thought it looked like bad cgi. The whole production went through a few major changes according to the page, but the results were a success.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I wanted to offer a few random thoughts looking back on a year of Cary Grant watching:

-72 movies. Wow. And the first 25 or so were completed in his first four years. That kind of productivity is something we're not likely to see again in the post-studio system environment.

-His filmography really seemed to fit into three distinct categories: his contract years (roughly 1932-1936), from The Awful Truth to his first retirement (1937-1953), and then his encore as he returned from retirement (1955-1966).

-Of those periods, I think that "encore" period is my favorite. What an incredible run - he did thirteen movies, and in my view, only one of them was a stinker (The Pride And The Passion, which is more dull than terrible). There's an almost unfair number of masterpieces (To Catch A Thief, An Affair To Remember, North By Northwest, Charade), some really great movies that if they're not quite at the level of the others, are still extraordinarily good (Kiss Them For Me, Indiscreet, Operation Petticoat, The Grass Is Greener, That Touch Of Mink), a couple that are good if not quite great (Houseboat and Walk Don't Run), and then perhaps my favorite of the whole filmography, Father Goose. At that point, Grant was fully in charge of his career, only appearing in movies that appealed to him, most of which came out of his own production company. Here we have a man who knew exactly where his strengths were, and set out to make a series of films that played to them.

-Most of the contract films are forgettable; there are amusing moments throughout, and it was worthwhile seeing them, but I can easily imagine that most of the titles would have been even more obscure were it not for Grant's presence. But because he's in them, the movies have been released, and they serve as a great window into the past. There's nothing like watching over a dozen films made by a single studio in just a couple years to get a sense of how that system actually worked. Although many of the titles weren't masterpieces, there was something about the construction and work ethic behind those films that I appreciated. The studios owned the backlots, the stages, the costumes and props and equipment, and had all of the creatives under contract - with these movies, you can see what it looked like when people just showed up to work to make movies the way you or I might go to the office everyday. It was enjoyable to watch films that had a certain workingman quality to them.

-The period from Grant's prime, let's say The Awful Truth until his first retirement, is also really quite something. He's mostly within his persona, but he does step outside of that box a few times. There's a great deal more variety in the pictures in this period than there was in his encore period. Not everything works (Night And Day was pretty bad in my book), but taken as a whole, it was a very productive period. The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, Arsenic And Old Lace, Notorious, The Bishop's Wife - in another actor's filmography, you could make an argument that each of those was their masterpiece.

-In terms of representation on home video, I think there's a lot of good and a bit of bad. On the plus side, 70 of his 72 films are available on some disc format or another. (Sinners In The Sun and When You're In Love do not have home video releases anywhere, although TCM has started showing a new restoration of When You're In Love, so it may come out at some point. Sinners In The Sun is part of Grant's Paramount contract years that are now owned by Universal; since it didn't come out in their Vault set of Grant's contract titles, I'm not very hopeful on an official release for that one.) There are lots of combos and box sets and bundles with different configurations of titles, and I got some really great deals on some of his best films. The downside is that the majority of the catalog is only available on DVD, although some of those titles can be rented and streamed in HD. Olive has performed a small miracle by putting out highly watchable Blu-rays of movies that had looked terrible on VHS and DVD. Warner has a couple TCM legends sets that go for $10 or less and include four movies each. There are some great deals to be had, and the majority of titles are at the least watchable and many are even better than that. As far as bad news, the worst is that the Universal Vault set was botched, introducing a loud hum and hissing noise to a bunch of films that had never had that problem before. Many of the titles aren't available on Blu-ray, and I suspect it may remain that way - a shame for sure. But at least the majority of his movies are available.

 

[Joel Arndt]

Excellent summation and I believe your breakdown of the three distinct eras of Grant's career is very accurate. Thank God he didn't end his career with Dream Wife in '53. If he hadn't continued into the "encore" era I don't believe he would have been as well remembered today. Many of the "encore" films were not only box office blockbusters in their day, but classics as well. Consider 1959, both North By Northwest and Operation Petticoat were released. Again, great job and see you back on HTF soon.

 

[Matt Hough]

Cary was offered roles in what turned out to be two real classics: Norman Maine in the 1954 A Star Is Born and the older brother in Sabrina. As much as I love both of those movies as they now stand, I surely would love to have seen what he would have done with those roles in those two movies. Especially Sabrina since I've always felt Bogart was miscast and the weak link of the movie.

 

[Robin9]

Cary was offered roles in what turned out to be two real classics: Norman Maine in the 1954 A Star Is Born and the older brother in Sabrina. As much as I love both of those movies as they now stand, I surely would love to have seen what he would have done with those roles in those two movies. Especially Sabrina since I've always felt Bogart was miscast and the weak link of the movie.

When Cary Grant turned down the role in Sabrina, Billy Wilder should have offered it to Fred MacMurray who would have been far better than Humphrey Bogart.

 

[Joel Arndt]

I've read that Grant was offered the part of Norman Maine in A Star is Born and it would've been interesting to see his interpretation, however, now I can't imagine anyone other than James Mason in the role. Magnificent performance and quite a memorable voice as well.

Cary was offered roles in what turned out to be two real classics: Norman Maine in the 1954 A Star Is Born and the older brother in Sabrina. As much as I love both of those movies as they now stand, I surely would love to have seen what he would have done with those roles in those two movies. Especially Sabrina since I've always felt Bogart was miscast and the weak link of the movie.

 

[Josh Steinberg]

I guess I am in a minority but I really like Bogart in Sabrina - I think the entire story works better when he's (physically) obviously the older and less attractive brother. If you put, say, Cary Grant in the role, well, who wouldn't pick Cary Grant over William Holden? But if you're just going for looks and charm, it's easy to see how that could be a competition between Holden and Bogart - or if not a competition, easy to see how a younger woman would prefer the more typically matinee idol looks of Holden over Bogart.

I think that's a small part of why the remake didn't work as well. I love Harrison Ford, and if you make it a competition between Harrison Ford and Greg Kinnear, Harrison Ford is gonna win every time, which then weakens the story idea that Sabrina wants to be with Kinnear but is "stuck" with Ford. In her case, getting "stuck" with Ford is like getting a free upgrade!

The notion of Grant in a Billy Wilder-directed movie is fantastic, but I love Sabrina as-is.