LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Cary Grant: Performances
built 620 days ago
Topper: [W]as the film that made Cary Grant a star, which is hard to believe since he's invisible throughout half of the movie. It was ... one of the first films that really benefited from the full-effect of the Grant persona. His dashing wit, playfulness and menacing jealousy helped make Topper a runaway success. They still holdup today, along with delightful performances from Roland Young (Uncle Willie from the Philadelphia Story) as Cosmo Topper and Contance Bennett as Marion Kerby. The second half of Topper relies too heavily on dated special effects, which have a certain nostalgic charm. "Susan, Susan, Susan"
Source:
Undoubtedly inspired by the success of The Thin Man (which was released just two years prior), Big Brown Eyes casts Cary Grant and Joan Bennett as squabbling, on-again-off-again couple Danny Barr and Eve Fallon. Following a rash of jewelry heists, the pair are forced to put their differences aside and work together to catch the culprits (one of whom accidentally kills a baby during a hasty escape from the cops!) Screenwriters Bert Hanlon and Raoul Walsh (the latter of whom ... directs) have infused Big Brown Eyes with a reasonably interesting storyline and dialogue that's often ridiculously snappy (ie "you've got a kind face, too - the kind I don't like!"), while Grant and Bennett are likable and convincing as the bickering twosome. And although the whole thing never quite adds up to much, Big Brown Eyes generally remains an agreeable piece of work that's undoubtedly elevated by the uniformly engaging performances.
Source:
It was in 1935, when the director George Cukor cast him as a loud-mouthed product of the British slums--a con man and strolling player--in the Katharine Hepburn picture "Sylvia Scarlett," that Grant's boisterous energy first broke through. He was so brashly likable that viewers felt vaguely discomfited at the end when Brian Aherne (who had given an insufferably egotistic performance) wound up with Hepburn. Grant, on loan from Paramount to RKO, doesn't play the leading male role, yet his con man is so loose and virile that he has more life than anything else in the picture. Grant seemed to be enjoying himself on the screen in a way he never had before. Cukor said that Grant suddenly "felt the ground under his feet." Instead of hiding in his role, as usual, he expanded and gave his scenes momentum.
Source:
The perfect format for displaying Grant's verbal and physical agility was in the screwball comedies of the 1930s. These films are marked by their fast pace, unconventional characters, and absurd situations. Grant's romantic sparring with Irene Dunn in McCarey's The Awful Truth, Rosalind Russell in Hawks's His Girl Friday, and Katharine Hepburn in Cukor's Holiday and Hawks's Bringing Up Baby displayed Grant's deft comic touch. His role as the daredevil flyer in Only Angels Have Wings and his Oscar-nominated performances in Penny Serenade and None But the Lonely Heart show that Grant was a capable dramatic actor as well, but it was in sophisticated comedy that his real strength lay. Throughout his career, Grant continued to successfully play the charming leading man, even as late as 1964, with the film Charade.
Source:
In 1937, Grant's contract with Paramount studios expired. He decided to freelance as an actor, which proved to be a wise decision. Grant's performances in romances and action films were always a box office smash, but comedies seemed to be his calling. He lit up the screen with his playful charm.
Source:
Now, though, Grant found a novel way to treat women in film: he clearly related to his heroine as a sexually attractive woman—and ... as a witty, intelligent, and idiosyncratic one. Often he conveyed this by adopting the seemingly obvious but previously overlooked strategy of simply listening to her. (With both his male and female costars, Grant would emerge as probably the best—that is, the most unobtrusively generous—listener in Hollywood; watch his affectless performance while he takes in Stewart’s three-plus-minute drunken harangue in The Philadelphia Story.) The result was that Grant allowed the actress’s performance to emerge and flourish. He thus transformed his leading ladies “into comic goddesses,” as Kael nicely put it—a feat that was something of a miracle in the case of the cute-’n’-toothy Irene Dunne, or the self-important, inherently humorless Katharine Hepburn.
Source:
MORE ABOUT
Performances