Do yourself a favor: watch The Awful Truth on TCM, Friday morning, at 9:15. Don’t even TiVo it. Call in sick. Stay home. All about an unfaithful couple who divorces and then finally falls in love, it’s the real marvel of the ‘30s screwballs, more human and less ridiculous than Bringing Up Baby, as brawling Read More
Monday: Notorious
Some say Rear Window. Others, Vertigo. We say Notorious when asked to name our favorite Hitchcock film. Ingrid Bergman plays a boozy, sad beauty who must redeem herself—and her family name—by turning spy for government agent Cary Grant. The action takes place in 40s Rio de Janiero, where Bergman must marry a suspicious Read More
Posterity, and many high-end critics, seem to have simultaneously arrived at the general proposition that the greatest male star of the golden age was Cary Grant. He was, after all, both sexy and a superb comedian—the rarest combination in movies. And he contrived to almost always play variations on Cary Grant, which is the main Read More
Posterity, and many high-end critics, seem to have simultaneously arrived at the general proposition that the greatest male star of the golden age was Cary Grant. He was, after all, both sexy and a superb comedian—the rarest combination in movies. And he contrived to almost always play variations on Cary Grant, which is the main Read More
“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”—Cary Grant.
It seems so self-evident—who wouldn’t want to be Cary Grant? But the obvious answers (because he’s good-looking or charming or debonair) don’t get it done. The real answer may be what we’re left with after youth, and after physical strength, Read More
“Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”—Cary Grant.
It seems so self-evident—who wouldn’t want to be Cary Grant? But the obvious answers (because he’s good-looking or charming or debonair) don’t get it done. The real answer may be what we’re left with after youth, and after physical strength, and Read More
The Cary Grant centenary (1904-1986) is currently being celebrated in many venues. David Schwartz, the chief curator of film at the American Museum of the Moving Image, has provided an ultra-auteurist perspective with his “Cary Grant x 5″ series, focusing on Grant’s stellar appearances in films directed by Howard Hawks, Alfred Hitchcock, George Cukor, Leo Read More
Stiller Crazy After All These Years
The best thing to come out of the ill-fated The Ben Stiller Show was Mr. Stiller’s star turn in the 1996 David O. Russell–directed comedy Flirting with Disaster , which would become the prototype for his onscreen persona as a poor man’s Woody Allen. A tightly wound matzo ball Read More
Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie , from a screenplay by Mr. Demme, Steve Schmidt and Jessica Bendinger, has been widely panned for presuming to remake Stanley Donen’s Charade (1963), from a screenplay by Peter Stone, with Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton in the roles originally played by Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Indeed, I Read More
So you think you know your Hitchcock? O.K., let’s play a game. I
want you to link up the following Hitchcock movies, but without using date,
genre or actor. All you’re allowed is theme or, at a push, subtext-or
sub-theme, or inter-text, or whatever lingo is the flavor of the month on the
nation’s campuses. Read More
