So says Ingrid Bergman to Cary Grant in the opening sequence of Notorious and who would argue with her? Not Eva Marie Saint, a few years later, in North By Northwest: (Grant: "When I was a little boy, I wouldn't even let my mother undress me." Marie Saint : "Well, you're a big boy now"), nor Grace Kelly, in To Catch a Thief, as she presents Grant with some cold chicken at a picnic: ("You want a leg or a breast?"), nor Audrey Hepburn, in Charade: ("Won't you come in for a minute? I don't bite, you know, unless it's called for.") It's true that when Ralph Bellamy tells Rosalind Russell, in His Girl Friday, that he finds Grant sort of charming, she responds: "Well, he comes by it naturally - his grandfather was a snake," but that was the early Grant, the pre-war Grant, the slapstick Grant of Bringing Up Baby, the bravura comedian of Gunga Din. No woman alive would have called the "Cary Grant" character of the post-war years a snake. That Grant, as Pauline Kael wrote in her monumental essay, The Man From Dream City, was:
...a peerless creation....[w]ithout a trace of narcissism, he appears as a man women are drawn to - a worldly, sophisticated man who has become more attractive with the years....[t]he sensual lusciousness was burned off: age purified him....His acting was purified, too; it became more economical. When he was young, he had been able to do lovely fluff like "Topper" without being too elfin, or getting smirky, like Ray Milland, or becoming a brittle, too bright gentleman, like Franchot Tone. But he'd done more than his share of arch mugging - lowering his eyebrows and pulling his head back as if something funny were going on in front of him when nothing was. Now the excess energy was pared away; his performances were simple and understated and seamlessly smooth. In "Charade," he gives an amazingly calm performance; he knows how much his presence does for him and how little he needs to do. His romantic glamour, which had reached a high peak in 1939 in "Only Angels Have Wings," wasn't lost; his glamour was now a matter of his resonances from the past, and he wore it like a mantle.
The Washington Post this morning publishes this fine article by Sarah Kaufman about Grant. The article is timely in that a week ago I mentioned in passing that Humphrey Bogart was "my favorite actor this side of Cary Grant." Kaufman, who references Pauline Kael's article in her column, attempts to get to the bottom of the same thing Kael was writing about above: how critical Grant's physical grace was to his success.
It's always there, in every role, in the way he walks, the way he slips a hand into his pocket, the way he stands, with his shoulders melting just a bit toward the co-star his character is invariably secretly in love with.
Kaufman also reference's David Thompson's quote about Grant being "the best and most important film actor in the history of the cinema." Yes. She also calls His Girl Friday "one of filmdom's most perfect creations", and I couldn't agree more. Grant's portrayal of the Walter Burns character in the movie is perhaps the finest comic performance in the history of the movies. Watch the first six minutes of this video to get a taste:
Finally, here are a couple of clips from later period, once Grant had transformed himself into the suave, sophisticated icon, the man every other man wanted to be, the man every woman wanted. The first is the famous kiss scene with Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, the second Grant's conversation with Eva Marie Saint in North by Northwest, two of the sexiest scenes in movie history:
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