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Cary Grant: Paramount Pictures
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Cary Grant is the male love object. Men want to be as lucky and enviable as he is--they want to be like him. And women imagine landing him. Like Robert Redford, he's sexiest in pictures in which the woman is the aggressor and all the film's erotic energy is concentrated on him, as it was in "Notorious": Ingrid Bergman practically ravished him while he was trying to conduct a phone conversation. Redford has never been so radiantly glamorous as in "The Way We Were," when we saw him through Barbra Streisand's infatuated eyes. But in "The Great Gatsby," when Redford needed to do for Mia Farrow what Streisand had done for him, he couldn't transcend his immaculate self-absorption.
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In 1931, Mr. Grant appeared in his first film, "Singapore Sue." He wanted to try his hand at the movies, so he traveled to Los Angeles, where he made a screen test for Paramount executive B.P. Schulberg. Paramount offered Grant a five-year contract, highly suggesting he change his name to Cary Lockwood; Cary didn’t like the name of Lockwood so they settled on the name Cary Grant.
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CARY GRANT was a knockout in his dapper young days as a Paramount leading man to such suffering sinners as Sylvia Sidney, Carole Lombard, Tallulah Bankhead, Marlene Dietrich, Nancy Carroll. He appeared with this batch in 1932; Paramount threw him into seven pictures in his first year. In some two dozen roles in four years, he was a passable imitation of Noël Coward or Jack Buchanan, though not as brittle as Coward or as ingratiatingly silly as Buchanan. He played a celebrated javelin thrower in "This Is the Night," a rotten rich roué in "Sinners in the Sun," the husband of a diva in "Enter Madam" and of another diva in "When You're in Love." He was a flier who went blind in "Wings in the Dark;" he wore a dinky mustache and was captured by the Kurds in "The Last Outpost;" he used a black bullwhip on the villainous Jack La Rue in "The Woman Accused." But that's all a blur.
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Through all this, Grant found escape in the newly emerging "picture palaces." There he would lose himself in the exciting adventures of movie heroes and heroines and laugh at the comic antics of silent-screen stars.
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It was after Grant's contract at Paramount ended that he made what turned out to be a very wise, creative and financial decision. He signed two non-exclusive contracts with RKO and Columbia. Grant retained script approval and was able to choose the best projects, for the highest salaries, not being tied to one studio. At a time when actors taking percentages of films was unheard of, Grant worked out a deal whereby he retained all the rights to his films after seven years distribution. This alone made him a millionaire many times over.
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