© 2007 William Ahearn


Cary Grant is Cary Grant and either he works for you or he doesn’t. Unlike most actors, his better work is in his later films. Grant’s appeal to me works on a flick-by-flick basis and Grant did numerous films for Hitchcock. “To Catch a Thief” is the best of the lot and may be Grant’s best film for anyone. His screen presence is just so damn likeable. Even his personal image is endearing. One telling quote of Grant’s that I always found amusing was when a reporter told him, “we’d all like to be Cary Grant,” Cary Grant replied, “so would I.”


Yes, “To Catch a Thief” is another innocent man – well, he’s a reformed jewel thief who straightened out working for the French underground during the war – on the run trying to clear his name. With a good cast – Grace Kelly is the love interest – this flick could be seen as a prototype of the early James Bond films. It’s good popcorn fun without all the silliness and self-importance that bogs down a lot of Hitchcock’s films.


This is more of a romantic comedy
with a Riviera backdrop and an international cast than the usual MacGuffin-hunting with rear-projected scenery and a side order of ice-cold blond that had become Hitchcock’s stock in trade.


Hitchcock made several romantic comedies, like “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” (not to be confused with that mess that starred Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt) with Carole Lombard and Robert Montgomery that pretty much unfolds as your basic screwball comedy. The one to see is “The Farmer’s Wife,” a silent film that is shot and directed so competently that you completely forget it’s a silent film. There is also the romantic comedy, “Rich and Strange” that has little of the first and plenty of the second. In a way, it’s very similar in plot to “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” in that a couple is rethinking its marriage but “Rich and Strange” has a visual language that “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” doesn’t and it’s vedy, vedy British and worth a peek if you haven’t seen Hitchcock handle this type of material.


“Notorious” is Grant’s second best film for Hitchcock
and only because Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman are so good together. It has two of Hitchcock’s favorite themes: The redeemable bad girl and a Macguffin. It also begins Hitchcock’s deterioration as a visual artist with sloppy rear-projections and cardboard villains and that this film is even remembered is a testament to the star power of Grant and Bergman. Their relationship rises above what is slowly becoming generic style for Hitchcock. This film would be among the five Hitchcock films that I would like to own but only because the actors save it. Pretty funny considering how much Hitchcock despised actors.


(Unfortunately for Bergman her other films for Hitchcock
weren’t as transcendental. She appeared in the absolutely ridiculous “Spellbound” with Gregory Peck that functioned as a psychological thriller for masochists. Utterly miscast and based on a dreadful and uninteresting script that featured a dream sequence by Salvador Dali who must still be laughing in his grave about his check.)


She also appeared in “Under Capricorn”
a completely unwatchable film with Joseph Cotton set in Australia and dealing with past crimes and other totally unnecessary turgid nonsense. Stay away from "Under Capricorn." Really.


Not that Gregory Peck fared all that well in his other film for Hitchcock
. He starred in “The Paradine Case” where Hitchcock, the master of suspense, keeps you waiting for an hour and a half to say, basically, that the redeemable bad girl in this case isn’t redeemable. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.


“North by Northwest” is one of the films
that Hitchcock fanatics love to point to as work indicative of his cinematic genius. It is anything but that. (Let me say just one thing at the jump, having worked as a copyeditor in advertising for too long: I know that advertising executives don’t actually do anything. They get other people to do things. If you think about, you’ll realize that the entire advertising business is based on that concept. So an advertising executive as an action figure is pretty funny.) My real criticism of this film is that it’s just a generic mishmash of Hitchcock themes writ large. What’s the recipe? Let’s take a monument or two, a Macguffin, a redeemable bad girl, some really good music and a scene where a biplane hits a gas truck and throw it all together with Cary Grant, Eva Marie Saint and James Mason and off we go.

It is also one of the sloppiest films Hitchcock ever made. In the dining car of the train scene with Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint, Grant is in the outside seat for the filming of his lines and the inside seat for the filming of her lines. There are microphones all over the scene in Grand Central Station. The trees wobble in that stupid studio shoot where they’re supposed to be in a forest in South Dakota. It’s a flimsy and generic Hitchcock film that goes nowhere and satisfies less. A lot of people really admire this film and I’m totally baffled by why they do. This is also the last MacGuffin movie and it seems to be Hitch’s “Goodbye to All That,” as he never made anything like it again. It’s a totally over-rated film that seems to be a cynical dig at the audience on Hitchcock's part.


“Suspicion” is another Hitchcock film where nothing happens.
Grant plays the loveable cad and Joan Fontaine (“Rebecca”) plays his wife. Is he going to kill her? Did he kill Beaky? With all the great or even good films out there, it would be easy to avoid sitting through this. (Although I’ve heard good things about the book that I haven’t read yet.) Many people like this film and undoubtably it's because of Grant's and Fontaine's performances. If that's your cup of tea, have fun with it.

 

williamahearn@yahoo.com