THE MAN FROM DREAM CITY
By Pauline Kael Originally published in the New Yorker magazine, July 14th, 1975
[...]
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. If he had looked at her with desire, everything else about the movie might have been forgiven. Cary Grant would not have failed; yearning for an idealized love was not beyond his resources. It may even be part of his essence: in the sleekly confected "The Philadelphia Story," he brought conviction to the dim role of the blue blood standing by Katharine Hepburn and waiting on the sidelines. He expressed the very sort of desperate constancy that Redford failed to express. Grant's marital farces with Irene Dunne probably wouldn't have been as effective as they were if he hadn't suggested a bedeviled constancy in the midst of the confusion. The heroine who chases him knows that deep down he wants to be caught only by her. He draws women to him by making them feel he needs them, yet the last thing he'd do would be to come right out and say it. In "Only Angels Have Wings," Jean Arthur half falls apart waiting for him to make a move; in "His Girl Friday," he's unabashed about everything in the world except why he doesn't want Rosalind Russell to go off with Ralph Bellamy. He isn't weak, yet something in him makes him hold back--and that something (a slight uncertainty? the fear of a commitment? a mixture of ardor and idealism?) makes him more exciting.
[...]
full: http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/database/grant_c.html
Of course, if you consider movies like "The Philadelphia Story" trash, then this kind of writing serves no useful purpose.
--
Colin Brace
Amsterdam