Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief
Michaela Owens defines what makes Hollywood icon Cary Grant such a fascinating and endlessly watchable star.
Seeing Cary Grant’s face is a religious experience. With his impossibly deep tan, expressive chocolate-brown eyes, glistening black hair, and famously dimpled chin (who else can say they have an instantly recognizable chin?), Grant could convert anyone to the Church of Cary with a single look. That’s what happened to me on a summer day almost 20 years ago when I saw Alfred Hitchco*ck’s To Catch a Thief (1955). The film was not only my first encounter with Hitchco*ck — a filmmaker who is now incredibly important to me — and Grace Kelly, it was also my formal introduction to Grant, whose absurdly handsome visage coupled with his striped sweater, polka-dotted scarf, and bemused demeanor stopped my world in just one close-up. Who was this guy?
Many have noted that Grant didn’t really have to do anything to make you hang on his every gesture, and To Catch a Thief is an exquisite example. His wordless walk through his garden is more elegant than an impeccably bespoke tuxedo, while his deadpan expression at a cage of twittering birds next to him on a bus somehow makes you chuckle at a joke that isn’t really there. When he talks with another character in a restaurant, he casually puts his foot up on a chair and it is suddenly the best a man has ever looked. He exudes mystery and intelligence and class just by existing, fueling your curiosity and investment in not only his characters but his offscreen life as well.
The romantic, and by extension sexual, element of Grant’s mystique has always been the most overpowering. Film critic Pauline Kael, who once dubbed him “The Man from Dream City,” was among the first to point out that part of his sex appeal was how his leading ladies chased him instead of the other way around, particularly when Grant became older and his co-stars became younger. “Grant was a romantic ideal,” scholar James Naremore elucidates, “not an aggressive lover.” By shifting the power dynamic in his onscreen affairs so the woman is the one in pursuit, Grant was an idyllic and collaborative partner who, especially in his screwball comedies, amplified the talent of his leading ladies, which then manifested in a more textured and interesting romance to watch.
Rosalind Russell established her fast-talking dexterity in The Women (1939), but opposite Grant’s wily energy in His Girl Friday (1940), she was forced to think funnier and go harder in her characterization of newswoman Hildy Johnson, resulting in one of cinema’s greatest rom-coms. In Bringing Up Baby (1938), Grant was right at home with the bizarre broadness of the script’s antics, causing Katharine Hepburn to recalibrate her Serious Actress instincts and learn how to go for broke in a performance unlike anything else she ever did. With Charade (1963) and To Catch a Thief, Grant’s enigmatic smoothness allowed Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly — women whose serene regality and pop-culture prevalence often flatten them into simplistic iconography — to play characters who declare their sexual appetites and their yearning for excitement outside of domesticity.
The epitome of the movie star, Grant has often been accused of not taking risks with his film roles and essentially playing himself throughout his career. After all, when you’re a new standard for male beauty, what more do you need to do than be your inherently funny, charming self? Conversely, when you’re in the audience, what more do you notice about a Grant performance other than his dazzling looks and physicality? With his stunning naturalism blinding you to the intricacies of his work, Grant’s smokescreen of effortlessness made his filmic persona his greatest creation, fooling even himself into believing the mythology of Cary Grant, Movie Idol. Born Archibald Leach to an impoverished family in Bristol, England, he escaped as a teenager by joining a traveling acrobatic troupe which took him to the United States. Wrestling with childhood trauma, intense insecurities, and anxiety for many years, he would later admit, “I think I became what I portrayed.” Another insightful quote comes from when he gave his name to a woman in public and she told him that he didn’t look like Cary Grant, causing him to reply, “I know, no one does,” an acknowledgment of the disconnect between reality and the Hollywood dream factory.
It’s been said that Grant was American cinema’s first heartthrob whose powerful romantic capabilities co-existed with a willingness — an eagerness, in fact — to not take himself seriously as he embraced the kind of physicality we’d only previously seen from the likes of Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin. While this idea does indulge in some unforgivably sacrilegious erasure of William Powell (whose more unconventional good looks are perhaps why he is traditionally eliminated from this line of thinking), it is easy to see what critic Andrew Sarris meant when he wrote about The Awful Truth (1937), “The talkies had found at last a well-tailored gentleman with the physical gifts of a baggy-pants comedian.” Delighting in an irreverence that would see him leaping in a fuzzy negligee, taking a fully clothed shower, singing a duet with a dog not once but twice, whinnying from joy or disbelief, getting clobbered with flowers by a little old French lady, and much, much more, Grant was seemingly fearless in where he would go for the sake of comedy. (I say “seemingly” because the truth is he would obsessively worry about whether something like the shower scene in Charade would generate laughs, driving his directors and screenwriters crazy as they kept assuring him it would work.) It’s a template we are still seeing in the years since his heyday — think of Paul Newman, Hugh Grant, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, and Glen Powell, all of whom have been compared to Grant in some fashion or other.
Perhaps because he was someone who so thoroughly tapped into people’s aspirations of wealth and sophistication with his otherworldly style and wit, Grant wasn’t usually accepted in roles outside of the cosmopolitan confines of modern-day cityscapes. Period pieces like The Howards of Virginia (1940) and The Pride and the Passion (1957) have been cited among his weakest films, while two of the movies he loved the most because he considered his characters reflections of himself — None But the Lonely Heart (1944) and Father Goose (1964) — still to this day do not receive the attention they deserve. The trap of the Cary Grant persona also meddled with the complexity of his roles, the most famous example being Suspicion (1941).
Portraying a scheming, opportunistic liar who seduces Joan Fontaine into marrying him, the script and the Francis Iles novel it was based on ended with Grant successfully poisoning his wife for her money. According to director Alfred Hitchco*ck, the studio, worried about Grant’s image, forced a different ending that absolved his character because his murderous intentions were all in Fontaine’s imagination, rendering the film a frustrating (albeit still very entertaining) glimpse at what the actor’s career could have been like had he been more encouraged to play men of malice. His work in Hitchco*ck’s Notorious (1946) is further proof of the depths he could plumb. Simultaneously simmering with rage and devastated by heartbreak, it is a brutal performance that turns his beauty into a mask of psychosexual anguish and cold bitterness, his stillness a masterclass in how to convey everything while doing presumably nothing.
When Shirley Temple becomes smitten with Grant in The Bachelor and the Bobbysoxer (1947), her exasperated sister Myrna Loy tosses off an acidic remark about Grant’s “fatal fascination” and how fleeting his allure will be to Temple. While she is soon proven wrong when she falls for the man herself, it does strike me that audiences, including myself, tend to act like Temple’s lovestruck teenager when it comes to Grant’s work. Much like how she pictures him as a literal knight in shining armor, we swoon over the fantasy of Cary Grant and the exciting possibilities he represents. We understand the glint that comes into Grace Kelly and Audrey Hepburn’s eyes as they spin fantastic theories about his shady past in To Catch a Thief and Charade; the beguilement that keeps Joan Fontaine by his side even though she distrusts him in Suspicion; the way Katharine Hepburn leaves her wealthy family for an uncertain life with him in Holiday (1938); why Nancy Carroll would let him whisk her away from her gossipmongering hometown in Hot Saturday (1932); and why Ingrid Bergman would embark on an illicit affair with him after he appears in her apartment as if by magic in Indiscreet (1958). Famously quoted as saying, “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant, even I want to be Cary Grant,” the man who was rightfully cast as an angel in The Bishop’s Wife (1947) was the perfect vehicle for others’ desires and dreams.
Watching To Catch a Thief today, it is obvious why 12-year-old Michaela would get stars in her eyes. A gorgeous ex-jewel thief who makes clever quips and slinks around the south of France while trying to clear his name? Sign her up! For present-day Michaela, she is still overwhelmed by the sheer eye candy of both Grant and the film, but now she can see the subtleties — the tiniest of smirks when an egg is thrown and explodes by his face, the electricity of him simply crouching in the dark on a green-tinted roof, the quick flash of pain after he is blamed for the death of an ally-turned-enemy, the potency of just one eye as his face is eclipsed by a golden Grace Kelly in the final shot… Really, is it any wonder I’ve been a devotee ever since that summer day 20 years ago?
Join IU Cinema as it celebrates Grant with the four-film series Everyone Wants to Be Cary Grant. Screenings include His Girl Friday on September 7, To Catch a Thief on September 14 with a Q&A on costume design, Charade on September 21 with a Q&A on film scoring and Henry Mancini, and Bringing Up Baby on September 28.
