Room For One More (1952)

   "...witty, debonair but always real."

With Oliver Blake and Frank Ferguson.

Room For One More - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"Room For One More is a delightful domestic comedy, stunningly produced by Henry Blanke, and warmly directed by Norman Taurog.  

As the father, Cary Grant offers a sock performance, witty, debonair but always real.  Betsy Drake is superb as the young matron; pretty, serious and with a heart that never falters."

 - Hollywood Reporter

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His Girl Friday (1940)

   "...one of those fast-moving and idyllic comedies in which the lovers behave like villains to each other..."

With Ralph Bellamy and Rosalind Russell.

His Girl Friday- Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"His Girl Friday" from a play by Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur" is a remake of The Front Page, the movie success of 1931 and stage hit of 1928.  The original has been changed this time into one of those fast-moving and idyllic comedies in which the lovers behave like villains to each other - sophisticated is the usual word for the genre.  Hildy Johnson has become a woman for this purpose.  She has been married to the fanatical editor and divorced from him because there was never time for love.  Coming to tell him she is going to marry a simple insurance man from Albany, she soon finds herself, against her will, back on her former job as reporter.  There follows the plot of The Front Page, with managing editor playing his tricks partly on the insurance man.  By the change the accent is shifted to the lovers' quarrel, and the original story loses much of its sense and punch.  Yet Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant give such entertaining performances that nobody in the roaring audience seems to notice the tastelessness, to say the least, of playing hide-and-seek with a man condemned to death.  The tragic elements of the original story are misused for boy-meets-girl nonsense.  Charles Lederer has written the new version with great skill and Howard Hawks has directed it with liveliness but with too great a concern for the deaf."  

- Franz Hoellering, The Nation

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Enter Madame! (1935)

    "There's music, music everywhere..."

With Elissa Landi

Enter Madame!  - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"Music's "in" for celluloid since the smash of Night of Love, so prepare for a deluge of temperamental opera singers on the screen as well as on Stage 2.  

Elissa Landi is about the most beautiful warbler you've seen (Mary Garden, please forgive me), and she sings magnificently, thanks to the smart dubbing of the Nina Koshetz voice.  Lovely 'Lissa is improving as an actress by leaps, and if sometimes she lands out-of-bounds in vivaciousness, I don't mind much.  

Gilda Varesi, author, starred in the play and though Miss Varesi collabed on the screen play, the yarn's tempo has been shifted from comedy drama to farce.  There's music, music everywhere, plus plenty of entertainment if you happen to be tone-deaf.  

Delia Robbia at twenty-five is a diva of world rep.  She surrounds herself with a mad, Sangercircus world which is shared by an entourage including a chef, maid and physician, all with ariaistic tendencies.  During a performance of "Tosca" in Italy, the soprano's train contacts a candle flame and tall-darknhandsome Cary Grant saves the lady from being scorched, though he himself is pretty well hotchacharred by love.  

Elissa and Cary marry and soon the guy finds himself spinning on a roundabout of concerts and tantrums.  Hubby wants to go to America, wifie promises to accompany him but signs for a tour at the last sec, so Cary goes home alone.  Elissa signs contract after contract, for she finds fame headier than marriage.  Cary threatens divorce, the songbird flies to America.  You guess the finale.  

Richard Bonelli sings Scarpia authoritatively.  Lynne Overman as the weary, pungent manager again proves his deft comedy talents.  He should draw longer assignments, for in a certain groove he's unsurpassed.  

Fast direction by Elliot Nugent is marred at times by overemphasis.  Camera work by Theodore Sparkuhl and William Mellor is distinguished.     

- Herb Sterne, Script

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The Grass is Greener (1960)

   "...a handsome production in Technicolor with lovely shots of England... "

The Grass is Greener - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"The best thing about The Grass is Greener is its title, which fits so well an inexplicable set of circumstances.  The worst thing about the picture is that producer-director Stanley Donen forgot he was making a movie, and in spite of all its glitter and glamorous cast, this film is awfully static and talky - and no fresher and greener than those comedies that used to turn up on our stages regularly in the thirties.  

The script that Hugh and Margaret Williams wrote from their popular London stage comedy is only so-so funny, but Donen has given his picture a handsome production in Technicolor with lovely shots of England and the interior and exterior of Grant's elegant mansion.  Brighter than the dialogue is the musical score stemming from Noel Coward's songs.  It's too bad Coward couldn't have written the wisecracks too."

- Philip T. Hartung, The Commonweal

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Once Upon a Honeymoon (1942)

  "...some of the elements of a fairy-tale.  But... ...terribly realistic. "

With Ginger Rogers.

Once Upon a Honeymoon - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"As the title indicates, Once Upon a Honeymoon has some of the elements of a fairy-tale.  But its background of human misery in a world going to pieces under the Nazis is terribly realistic.  The story is quite often gay and funny, but it is also quite often grim.  With deft touches, director-producer McCarey splashes laughter, suspense, romance and tragedy onto his canvas."

- Scholastic Magazine

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Suspicion (1941)

  "...the film is the equivalent of the book you can't put down."

With Joan Fontaine.

Suspicion - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"Two thirds of Hitchcock's Suspicion is very good, and that is enough to make a thriller.  During that time Hitchcock used all his smoothness and his sharp eye for detail to build up a situation in which a loving wife (Joan Fontaine) is in danger of being poisoned by an equally loving but less trustworthy husband (Cary Grant).  A best friend (Nigel Bruce, as a chubby ass) has already, mysteriously, fallen by the way.  The fact that Hitchcock throws in a happy end during the last five minutes, like a conjurer explaining his tricks, seems to me a pity; but it spoils the film only in retrospect, and we have already had our thrills.  A steep cliff, a letter from an insurance company, a glass of milk at the bedside - on such details and on the equivocal looks that foreshadow murder, Hitchcock fixes a fascinated gaze.  So long as the magic lasts (there's a slow beginning, by the way) the film is the equivalent of the book you can't put down.

-  William Whitebait, The New Statesman and Nation

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The Bishop's Wife (1947)

 "...it is Cary Grant’s playing that rescues the role of the angel named Dudley from the ultimate peril..."

With Loretta Young.

The Bishop's Wife - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"Robert Nathan’s early novel (1928), The Bishop’s Wife, has been revived by Samuel Goldwyn (with help on the script from Robert Sherwood and Leonardo Bercovici) to honor the current boom in cinema angels.  Unlike the majority of his predecessors, however, Mr. Nathan’s angel is not beyond descending to diabolical methods to achieve his heavenly purposes, and the gleam in his eye is scarcely seraphic. 

If the angel is considerably less tedious than most, it is, first of all, because the miracles he is called upon to perform are onerous neither to him nor to his audience.  A flick of the hand and a bottle of brandy refills perpetually; a smile and every woman within its range feels divinely beautiful.  Certain other of his feats, conceived with a heavier hand, are retrieved from disaster by the direction of Henry Koster who wisely refrains from bearing down full weight on the script.  But it is Cary Grant’s playing that rescues the role of the angel named Dudley from the ultimate peril of coyness.  With nothing more than a beaming countenance and an air of relaxation that is certainly not of this world, he achieves a celestial manner without so much of a hint of wings on his dark blue suit.  An expert cast is on hand to show by reflection what Cary Grant has refrained from making irksomely explicit.  David Niven’s prelate is a wistful and absent-minded character who is scarcely a match for Dudley.  As the Bishops’ wife, Loretta Young is sufficiently lovely to make even an angel fall; and in lesser roles Monty Woolley, James Gleason and Elsa Lanchester react to Dudley’s miraculous passage with characteristic gaiety.

The Bishop had prayed to God for guidance in how to separate Mrs. Hamilton, a rich parishioner, from sufficient money to build a cathedral.  God sent him Dudley and Dudley had soon resolved his dilemma by threatening Mrs. Hamilton with the name of her long-lost lover.  Now, Dudley convinces both her and the Bishop that God could better be served by abandoning the cathedral project in favor of helping the needy.  This is a refreshingly practical notion and comes with the lure of novelty from a screen which has heretofore thrown its weight – in the manner of The Bells of St. Mary’s – in favor of building churches.  For this reason alone The Bishop’s Wife should commend itself to the public." 

- Hermine Rich Isaacs, Theatre Arts Magazine

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The Last Outpost (1935)

 "...a curious mixture.  Half of it is remarkably good and half of it quite abysmally bad."

With Gertrude Michael.

The Last Outpost - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"The Last Outpost, which will be shown shortly at the Plaza, is a curious mixture.  Half of it is remarkably good and half of it quite abysmally bad.  One can even put one's finger on the joins, and it will be well worth a visit if only because it indicates what might be made of the short story form on the screen.  It consists of two stories unrelated except for the coincidence of characters. The first, which lasts for about half-an-hour, is a very well-directed and well-acted War story of a British secret service agent and his success in warning a defenseless tribe against a Kurd attack and inducing them to move with their flocks over a flooded river and across a snow-bound range of mountains to safe pastures.  It is one of those stories of dogged physical endeavor that the film does so well.  It belongs in the order of Grass and The Covered Wagon.  Mr. Claude Rains as the secret service agent in Turkish uniform and  Mr. Cary Grant as the incurably light-minded and rather stupid British officer whom he rescues from the Kurds both act extremely well.  Mr. Rains's low husky voice, his power of investing even commonplace dialogue with smouldering conviction, is remarkable.  He never rants, but one is always aware of what a superb ranter he could be in a part which did not call for modern restraint but only for superb diction.  I should like to see him as Almanzor or Aurengzebe, for he could catch, as no one else could, the bitter distrust of the world, religious in its intensity, which lies behind the heroic drama.  

The Last Outpost, if it had stopped on the mountain pass above the pastures with the officer on the way down to hospital and the comforts of Cairo and the secret agent turning back towards the enemy, would have been a memorable short film.  Mr. Charles Barton, the director, has obviously used old documentaries: the crossing of the flooded river is not a California reconstruction, and all through this first section the camera is used with fine vigor to present a subject which could not have been presented on the stage.  

I cannot see why we should not have serious films of this length as well as farces, short stories as well as novels on the screen.  The essential speed and concision would be an admirable discipline for most directors, who are still, after seven years of talkies, tied to stage methods, and we might be saved from seeing such a good film as this padded out to full length by the addition of a more than usually stupid triangular melodrama of jealousy and last-minute rescue in the Sahara where needless to say Mr. Rains sacrifices his life at the end, for his wife's love, so that it all may end in the fixed, almost Oriental, short-hand of military melodrama, "It is better so," clasped fingers and topees off and fading bugle calls."  

- Graham Greene, The Spectator

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Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)

 "...a superb blend of horror and comedy..."

With Raymond Massey and Peter Lorre.

Arsenic and Old Lace - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"My favorite scene is the one from the picture Arsenic and Old Lace which begins with Cary Grant making the spine-chilling discovery that his two dear old maiden aunts are poisoners who have murdered some dozen men.  

The old ladies' sweetly matter-of-fact attitude toward their gruesome hobby is a superb blend of horror and comedy, and the scene develops uproariously.  

I was helpless with laughter as I watched Cary change from a normal young man to a decidedly dizzy one, talking to himself, staring into the window seat from which bodies mysteriously appeared and disappeared, and making various wild attempts to cope with the situation."

- Ida Lupino, Saturday Evening Post

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None But The Lonely Heart (1944)

   "...plays its ...hero so attentively and sympathetically..."

With Konstantin Shayne.

None But The Lonely Heart - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"None But The Lonely Heart, a story about the education of a young man in London's pre-war slums, is an unusually sincere, almost-good film and was made under unusually unexpected auspices.  Its star, Cary Grant, asked that it be made, and plays its far from Cary Grantish hero so attentively and sympathetically that I all but overlooked the fact that he is not well constituted for the role.  Its most notable player, Ethel Barrymore, seemed miscast too, but I was so soft as to be far more than satisfied by her beauty and authority.  Its director, Clifford Odets, who also turned Richard Llewellyn's novel into the screen play, is still liable to write - or preserve from the book - excessive lines like "dreaming the better man"; he suggests his stage background as well as his talent by packaging his bits too neatly; and his feeling for light, shade, sound, perspective, and business is too luscious for my taste.  But I believe that even if he doesn't get rid of such faults he will become a good director.  I base my confidence in him chiefly on  the genuine things about his faith in and love for people, which are as urgent and evident here as his sentimentalities; on two very pretty moments in the film, one of two drunken men playing with their echoes under an arch, the other of two little girls all but suffocated by their shy adoration of the hero; and on the curiously rich, pitiful, fascinating person, blended of Cockney and the Bronx, whom he makes of a London girl, with the sensitive help of June Duprez.  I suppose I should be equally impressed by the fact that the picture all but comes right out and says that it is a bad world which can permit poor people to be poor; but I was impressed rather because Odets was more interested in filling his people with life and grace than in explaining them, arguing over them, or using them as boxing gloves." 

- James Agee, The Nation

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Blonde Venus (1932)

   "...Grant is worthy of a much better role..."

With Marlene Dietrich.

Blonde Venus - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"Marlene Dietrich's latest film, Blonde Venus, over which B. P. Schulberg, until recently head of Paramount's Hollywood studio, and Josef von Sternberg, the director, clashed last spring, is a muddled, unimaginative and generally hapless piece of work, relieved somewhat by the talent and charm of the German actress and Herbert Marshall's valiant work in a thankless role.

It wanders from Germany to many places in America, over to France and then back to New York, but nary a whit of drama is there in it.  There is good photography, and for those who are partial to scenes in a theatre, there are some over which                Mr. von Sternberg has taken no little care.  But the pain of it is the dismal and suspenseless tale of a woman who sinks to selling her favors and finally ends by returning to her husband.  

There is scarcely any simpathy evoked for the characters, except for a little boy.  Most of the scenes are unedifying, without possessing any strength or a common sense idea of  psychology.  It is regrettable that Miss Dietrich, Mr. Marshall and others should have been called on to appear in such a vehicle.  

When there is any attempt at levity it is silly, and one lengthy episode might better have been left to the imagination, for it never for a moment is anything but dreary and dull.  

There are good portraits of Miss Dietrich, who sings two or three songs.  Mr. Marshall does as well as his lines and the situations permit.  Cary Grant is worthy of a much better role than that of Townsend, and little Dickie Moore gives a suggestion of brightness to the unhealthy scenes in which he is sometimes beheld."

- Mordaunt Hall, The NewYork Times

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Monkey Business (1952)

    "Grant has never been better..."

With Marilyn Monroe.

Monkey Business - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

" Grant has never been better than in his part as the absent-minded professor in search of the elixir of youth.
His extraordinary agile and amusing performance is matched to the hilt by that of Ginger Rogers as his long-suffering wife. And those who recall that Miss Rogers was once a famous dancing star, will find that she excels in that department. She obviously delights in her part, which is a demanding one.
Throughout, director Hawks has seen to it that Monkey Business doesn't become static. Grant's wild car ride with Marilyn Monroe is pure farce in the great tradition of the screen and some other climactic sequences come across with the same explosive effect." 

- Motion Picture Herald

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People Will Talk (1951)

   "...turns in one of the most intelligent performances of his nineteen-year Hollywood career."

With Walter Slezak.

People Will Talk - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"And once again, Hollywood's ranking "genius" - the only man to win four Academy Awards in two years - has something to say and says it frankly and funnily.  

The film, which has a three-way plot, concentrates on one of the strangest and most adult love affairs ever to emerge from Hollywood.   The wedding between                  Dr. Praetorius and Deborah Higgins takes place when the doctor knows she is more than a month pregnant, although he is not responsible - a situation handled in perfect taste, and resulting in an exceptionally happy union.  

These heterogeneous plot strands are welded together by Grant, who turns in one of the most intelligent performances of his nineteen-year Hollywood career.  And       Miss Crain proves, as she did in Pinky, that she is ready to graduate from her usual pigtail roles.  Much of the credit for an impressive film goes to the very adult and literate writing of Mankiewicz."

- Newsweek

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I Was A Male War-Bride (1949)

   "...a past master at playing the handsome      he-man thrown for a loss by a difficult dame..."

I Was A Male War-Bride - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"A temperamental French army captain and a strong-minded WAC lieutenant stationed in Occupied Germany spend the first half of this comedy hating each other and the second half trying to find a way for the captain to emigrate to the United States.  There is a short intermission between halves in which the two sparring partners get married.  

The film is poorly paced.  By the time Captain Rochard and Lieutenant Gates get to the altar, it seems as if we've had our money's worth.  But, no - complications are barely beginning.  It appears that the only provision under which Rochard may accompany his wife back to the States is the law regulating the immigration of war brides.  It is with this embarrassing predicament that the film finally gets down to the business announced in the title.  

The comedy has its share of bright and breezy moments.  Cary Grant is a past master at playing the handsome he-man thrown for a loss by a difficult dame or an undignified situation.  But none of the boy-girl situations in this opus is original enough to stand being spun out for two hours."   

- Scholastic Magazine

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The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer (1947)

   "...poor Mr. Grant finds himself doing many things that hardly fit his age."

With Shirley Temple.

The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"Without taxing or insulting your intelligence, some new comedies are providing some hearty laughs and a good excuse for timely escape into air-cooled cinema palaces.  The plot of The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer won't solve any major problems about the younger generation, but its lines are amusing and the members of its handsome cast are bubbling with anxiety to entertain.  Cary Grant is pleasantly coy as the artist-playboy who finds himself squiring a love-sick seventeen-year-old in order to avoid a more trying sentence.  Because Shirley Temple is such an attractive young actress, the task should be considerably lightened for him; but high-school girls these days have extraordinary ideas about how their knights in shining armor should behave and poor Mr. Grant finds himself doing many things that hardly fit his age.  He's a good sport about the whole thing (even during the obstacle race at the picnic) until he realizes how much he prefers Shirley's older sister, played by Myrna Loy, who looks lovely but acts like a cold tomato because she's a female judge who takes herself very seriously indeed.  Rudy Vallee, in another of his clever portraits of a stuffed shirt, is more to her liking - until she too sees Cary lustrous in armor.  Irving Reis has directed his cast for laughs and succeeds in getting them.  Ray Collins, as a court psychiatrist, tries to inject a serious note on the behavior of adolescents who have crushes; but even he succumbs to the spirit of this playful comedy."

- Philip T. Hartung, The Commonweal

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The Talk of the Town (1942)

   "George Stevens has adroitly directed the three principals and the fine supporting cast..."

With Ronald Colman and Jean Arthur.

The Talk of the Town - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"My gripe with The Talk of the Town is the same complaint that I had against similar serio-comedies: Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, Meet John Doe.  It is only by a sudden fluke in the finale and a quick action on the part of one of the characters that a dreadful miscarriage of justice in this democracy is averted.  Along with our debates on the practical vs. the theoretical aspects of law and justice, we are served some witty repartee and some very funny situations.  George Stevens has adroitly directed the three principals and the fine supporting cast, including Edgar Buchanan, Glenda Farrell, Rex Ingram.  If any one performance stands out, it is that of Mr. Colman.  But still, when all the humor and wit are done, there remains the fact that but for Colman's last-minute rescue, Grant would have died at the hands of lynchers; and a mob, even in the cultured state of Massachusetts, is an army of blood thirsty beasts.  Just because it is an American mob makes its crime no more serious than a mob of Nazis.  If Mr. Stevens could have ended his film before the lynching scene (the whole is much too long anyway), he would have had a first-rate serio-comedy.  As it is we have to take the film's warm and human glow with a grain of salt while we lament our own lynching problem in a world that is crying for law and adjustment." 

- Philip T Hartung, The Commonweal

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In Name Only (1939)

  "No surprises are the easy ad-libbish styles of Stars Grant and Lombard..."

With Carole Lombard.

In Name Only - Review is taken from 'The Films of Cary Grant' by Donald Deschner (1973):

"In Name Only will puzzle cinemagoers who thought they knew just what high jinks to expect when Screwball Cary Grant falls in love with Screwball Carole Lombard.  Far from high jinks is the somber situation of rich young Alec Walker when he falls in love with Julie Eden, a widowed commercial artist who has taken a summer cottage near his stately county seat.  For, as rarely happens in a screwball comedy but is very likely to happen in life, Alec has a tenacious wife with an undeveloped sense of humor, parents who also thought infidelity no joke.  Before Lovers Grant and Lombard fight through to the clear, they have traded more punches than puns, emerged with the realization that matrimony is more than the off-screen ending to a Grant-Lombard movie.  

A mature, meaty picture, based on the novel Memory of Love, by veteran bucolic Bessie Brewer (wife of muralist Henry Varnum Poor), In Name Only has its many knowing touches deftly underscored by Director John Cromwell, brought out by a smoothly functioning cast.  No surprises are the easy ad-libbish styles of Stars Grant and Lombard, the enameled professional finish of oldtime Actor Charles Coburn as Alec's conventional father.  Surprising to many cinemaddicts, however, will be the effectively venomous performance, as Alec's mercenary wife, of Cinemactress Kay Francis.  Having worked out a long-term contract with Warner Bros. which kept her in the top money (over $5,000 a week) but buried her as the suffering woman in a string of B pictures, sleek Cinemactress Francis in her first free-lance job shows that she still belongs in the A's, that, properly encouraged, she can pronounce the letter r without wobbling."

- Time

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