I never used to understand how people could devote themselves to studying one topic or one person. I used to think biographers must get so tired of reading constantly about one person all the time. But I can understand that continuous fascination now - at least, in regards to Cary Grant.
I've only seen six or seven of his movies, and they're all from the 1930s, the decade of Screwball Comedy, which is wonderfully underrated these days. Every once in a while, I'll get on a Cary Grant kick, and become absorbed in watching movies starring him or reading more about him. When I first started reading Marc Eliot's biography of him, before I knew anything about Cary Grant, I wasn't expecting very good writing - it's over 380 pages. Granted, he went into pretty rich detail about many of Grant's 70+ films and about what Hollywood was like back then, but even without all the extra depth, it'd still be a long book: Cary Grant was fascinating.
As an actor, he was amazing. I haven't seen him in any of his more serious roles, but I will soon. Even without that, Cary Grant was wonderful at comedies. On screen, he was charismatic, charming, witty, and quick-tongued; since he was originally trained as an acrobat for Vaudeville performances, he was great at physical comedy as well, from trips to double takes and pratfalls in general. Yet you would never mistake him for a slapstick actor: he always did it gracefully and made it look so easy. The funny part is, everything he did was calculated. He didn't like performing spontaneously, he didn't like improvisation - he liked rehearsing over and over until everything was perfect. As much as he could, he chose his roles and directors carefully, never wanting to be the pursuer - always the pursued. In the comedies, he was the quintessential leading man; in the more serious films, his darker side came out beautifully. Hitchcock perfected that, it's said. I also read once that Cary Grant and Jimmy Stewart were Hitchcock's favorite leading men for his films - he directed them four times each over the course of their careers - because Cary Grant represented Hitchcock as he wanted to see himself, and Jimmy Stewart represented Hitchcock as he existed.
As a part of classic Hollywood, Cary Grant is legendary. Even disregarding his status as a performer. He was the first major actor to break the studio system. It used to be that an actor signed an exclusive contract with a studio and could only make movies for that studio, unless the studio heads agreed to lend him out to another studio for another picture. The actor didn't have much say in his career decisions. Cary Grant, though, got his agent Frank Vincent to negotiate nonexclusive contracts with both Columbia and RKO simultaneously. The Academy punished him for that. He never won an Oscar; the only Academy Award he received was an honorary one in the 1970s. 1973 I believe. There are several films where this is conspicuous - you can look at the list of who was nominated for the film, and the absence of his name is extremely noticeable, like The Philadelphia Story - Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart, and Ruth Hussey (the other 3 leads) were all nominated, and it was also nominated for Best Screenplay, Director, and Picture. Jimmy Stewart won (though he said it was his reward for not winning the year before for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington) and it won Best Screenplay. Grant didn't even to go the ceremony.
His early family life wasn't boring either. He came to the U.S. as a teenager in a Vaudeville troupe. His mother Elsie was committed to a mental institution before then; she'd been considered mad since her first son, Cary's older brother, died as a little boy. This was back when Cary Grant was still just Archie Leach from Bristol. He lived in New York with the troupe for a while, eventually finding his way to Broadway. His last stage role was a character named Cary Lockwood, then he signed with...Paramount I think. Publicists recommended he change the "Lockwood" because, I think, another star already had a similar name. Since the C and G initials were apparently doing Clark Gable and Gary Cooper well, he chose Grant.
He was married five times. His first wife was jealous of his relationship with friend/housemate and possible lover Randolph Scott. His second wife was an heiress who was giving money to her Nazi-supporting ex-husband. He had to start spying on her for J. Edgar Hoover so as not to be sent back to Britain and be drafted for the war. His third wife got him into the psychotherapy program she was in - which got him into LSD when the drug was still in experimental stages. His fourth wife gave him his only child, his daughter Jennifer, when he was about 62. And his fifth wife was still Mrs. Cary Grant when he died at 83.
The idea of the "real" Cary Grant still mystifies people. On screen, he had that charming, comedic, leading-man persona. So that's who he became in real life. He worked hard to maintain his physique, and to make sure he was always dressed impeccably. The man isn't still a style icon for nothing. In life, his look was carefully planned, yet on screen, he carried himself with a careless grace in such a way that you didn't think of him as a distant, unobtainable star, but as a human. The comedies focused on his light, ideal romantic side, while it's said that Hitchcock brought out the real Cary Grant by focusing on the dark, which I love. I like to think that the lines between the actor and the person blurred in his own confusion, and I hope there was a side to him that no one ever truly discovered. Everything about him was calculated - he shaped an image and persona and career that he wanted people to identify him with - and I heard a critic say that he stands out among actors from that period in that he never let himself become identified with an era. Clark Gable and Gary Cooper aren't seen today the way Cary Grant is, and their body of work doesn't hold up the same way his does.
"Everybody wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant. I have spent the greater part of my life fluctuating between Archie Leach and Cary Grant; unsure of either, suspecting each. I pretended to be somebody I wanted to be until I finally became that person. Or he became me."
- Cary Grant
Showing posts with label cultural icon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cultural icon. Show all posts
Sunday, September 28, 2008
Sunday, July 27, 2008
The world could use a few more cowboys.
I really enjoy the image of the cowboy as an Americanized version of the knight, and the chivalrous ideas it conjures. Well, a twisted, roughed-up version of chivalry. And honor.
The American cowboy is kind of archaic nowadays - not too many of 'em around. It's a shame. The world could use a few more cowboys.
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Now playing: Paula Cole - Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?
(I thought it was appropriate. Hehe.)
The American cowboy is kind of archaic nowadays - not too many of 'em around. It's a shame. The world could use a few more cowboys.
----------------
Now playing: Paula Cole - Where Have All the Cowboys Gone?
(I thought it was appropriate. Hehe.)
Tuesday, February 26, 2008
Detective Philip Marlowe
"Chandler seems to have created the culminating American hero: wised up, hopeful, thoughtful, adventurous, sentimental, cynical and rebellious."
That is from the New York Times Book Review for The Big Sleep, as quoted on the back of the Vintage paperback edition I have of it for my Crime: Fiction & Film class. We read it this week, and quite frankly, it was awesome. Though his work was traditionally dismissed as trashy "pulp" mystery stories, it really is great genre stuff. The style fascinated me. On the one hand, it was dry and plain, but it was so rich in detail and description - the figurative language and imagery were great. And come on: murder, porn, blackmail, kidnapping - all in one book! The guy definitely can plot.
Our protagonist and narrator, private investigator Philip Marlowe, is a fantastic character. On the surface, he's the stereotypical hardboiled P.I.: he's a hard, thick-skinned wiseass who speaks in similes and isn't afraid of bending a few laws to protect his client. His disregard for the law, though, is born of his years working for the LAPD and witnessing the corruption first hand. He's kind of gutsy, and sticks to his principles. And yes, he actually has principles: he's got his own idea of what it means to be honorable and noble that defies contemporary society's dictums. Though he's pretty misogynistic, it's almost understandable - Chandler paints his female characters in such a negative light, you almost don't want Marlowe to treat them as ladies, though he does anyway. And while he never states it outright, we discussed in class how Marlowe seems to consider himself a knight of sorts. He's very Rick Blaine. And a bit old Western cowboy.
In an essay about realist crime stories, Chandler concludes with what he thinks a realist detective should be:
"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in the world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am not quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
"He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
"The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."
- Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”
Now playing: Chris Ayer - Fade
That is from the New York Times Book Review for The Big Sleep, as quoted on the back of the Vintage paperback edition I have of it for my Crime: Fiction & Film class. We read it this week, and quite frankly, it was awesome. Though his work was traditionally dismissed as trashy "pulp" mystery stories, it really is great genre stuff. The style fascinated me. On the one hand, it was dry and plain, but it was so rich in detail and description - the figurative language and imagery were great. And come on: murder, porn, blackmail, kidnapping - all in one book! The guy definitely can plot.
Our protagonist and narrator, private investigator Philip Marlowe, is a fantastic character. On the surface, he's the stereotypical hardboiled P.I.: he's a hard, thick-skinned wiseass who speaks in similes and isn't afraid of bending a few laws to protect his client. His disregard for the law, though, is born of his years working for the LAPD and witnessing the corruption first hand. He's kind of gutsy, and sticks to his principles. And yes, he actually has principles: he's got his own idea of what it means to be honorable and noble that defies contemporary society's dictums. Though he's pretty misogynistic, it's almost understandable - Chandler paints his female characters in such a negative light, you almost don't want Marlowe to treat them as ladies, though he does anyway. And while he never states it outright, we discussed in class how Marlowe seems to consider himself a knight of sorts. He's very Rick Blaine. And a bit old Western cowboy.
In an essay about realist crime stories, Chandler concludes with what he thinks a realist detective should be:
"In everything that can be called art there is a quality of redemption. It may be pure tragedy, if it is high tragedy, and it may be pity and irony, and it may be the raucous laughter of the strong man. But down these mean streets a man must go who is not himself mean, who is neither tarnished nor afraid. The detective in this kind of story must be such a man. He is the hero; he is everything. He must be a complete man and a common man and an unusual man. He must be, to use a rather weathered phrase, a man of honor—by instinct, by inevitability, without thought of it, and certainly without saying it. He must be the best man in the world and a good enough man for any world. I do not care much about his private life; he is neither a eunuch nor a satyr; I think he might seduce a duchess and I am not quite sure he would not spoil a virgin; if he is a man of honor in one thing, he is that in all things.
"He is a relatively poor man, or he would not be a detective at all. He is a common man or he could not go among common people. He has a sense of character, or he would not know his job. He will take no man’s money dishonestly and no man’s insolence without a due and dispassionate revenge. He is a lonely man and his pride is that you will treat him as a proud man or be very sorry you ever saw him. He talks as the man of his age talks—that is, with rude wit, a lively sense of the grotesque, a disgust for sham, and a contempt for pettiness.
"The story is this man’s adventure in search of a hidden truth, and it would be no adventure if it did not happen to a man fit for adventure. He has a range of awareness that startles you, but it belongs to him by right, because it belongs to the world he lives in. If there were enough like him, the world would be a very safe place to live in, without becoming too dull to be worth living in."
- Raymond Chandler, “The Simple Art of Murder”
I think I'd like to meet Philip Marlowe. I liked the NY Times reviewer's choice of adjectives, and liked even more that he chose to lump them under the title of "American hero". Marlowe really is a very American hero. He's smart and strong, sensitive but not soft, cynical yet hopeful. He's honorable effortlessly, and he has a certain disregard for authority that the rebellious side of Americans has always admired. In his narration, there is a lack of pretentiousness (that again, haha), a plainness that is appealing to Americans, who don't have formal social classes. Like Chandler says, he's a common man who walks among common people. And, perhaps most notably, Marlowe is independent - and very much alone, in an almost romantic way. That, I think, is one of the most brilliant aspects of the novel: that it manages to capture so many traits and ideas that are considered to be very American, and that are respected by Americans.
On a side note, I also thought it was really interesting how Chandler used animal imagery and comparisons nearly every time a woman showed up, especially with this one crazy and promiscuous girl, Carmen. It reminded me of how Albee's plays tend to come back to the idea of the animal side of human nature. But, while Albee doesn't distinguish between the animal nature in men from the animal in women, Chandler does, and he uses it to degrade women. I just thought it was interesting how they both use the idea, just to different ends.
That is all.
----------------Now playing: Chris Ayer - Fade
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