On This Day... That Touch Of Mink (1962)

 Released today back in 1962, That Touch of Mink was Cary Grant's 69th full length feature film.

Summary:

Cathy Timberlake (Doris Day) is an old-fashioned country girl who meets the man of her dreams, Philip Shayne (Cary Grant), after his Rolls Royce splashes her with mud on her way to a job interview. Philip is a romantic businessman who is taken by Cathy's honest heart. There's one problem, he's not interested in marriage while Cathy has never thought of anything else.

Cast:

Cary Grant..Philip Shayne

Doris Day...Cathy Timberlake

Gig Young...Roger

Audrey Meadows...Connie Emerson

John Astin...Mr. Everett Beasley

Dick Sargent...Young Man (Harry Clark) (as Richard Sargent)

Joey Faye...Short Man

Laurie Mitchell...Showgirl

John Fiedler...Mr. Smith

Willard Sage...Tom Hodges

Jack Livesey...Doctor Richardson

Did You Know?

When Cary Grant noticed an ad for a raincoat that he thought would be appropriate for Doris Day to wear in the picture, he called the owner of the company who made it. After explaining who he was and what he wanted the coat for, he was given the brush-off by the manufacturer, Norman Zeiler, who later recalled that he didn't believe it was Grant. "So I told him if he wanted to see our collection, he'd have to come up himself. And he did." The much-imitated Grant, who usually made all his own calls and answered his home phone himself, often had that problem. People just couldn't believe it was really Cary Grant they were talking to.

Doris Day was 39 when this film was made, although her character was supposed to be in her twenties.

Rock Hudson had expected to be cast as Philip, but director Delbert Mann wanted Cary Grant.

In her autobiography, Doris Day wrote: "Of all the people I performed with, I got to know Cary Grant least of all. He is a completely private person, totally reserved, and there is no way into him. Our relationship on That Touch of Mink (1962) was amicable but devoid of give-and-take...Not that he wasn't friendly and polite - he certainly was. But distant. Very distant. But very professional - maybe the most professional, exacting actor I ever worked with. In the scenes we played, he concerned himself with every little detail: clothes, sets, production values, the works. Cary even got involved in helping to choose the kind of mink I was slated to wear in the film."

Cary Grant involved himself in many details of the production. For a scene that took place in his character's library, he arrived to work with boxes of items from the library in his own house and placed them about the set. According to Doris Day, this served not only to make the set more attractive but also made him feel more relaxed and at home, giving his performance "that peculiarly natural, suave quality that is the hallmark of his pictures."

The movie was filmed on location in New York. Some sources claim it was also shot in Bermuda, but others state that the scenes of the Bermuda resort were actually shot at the Fairmont Miramar Hotel in Santa Monica.

Cary Grant was a huge fan of the New York Yankees, which likely made it easier for the producers to get Yogi Berra, Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris to appear in the film.

Quotes:

Cathy Timberlake: [very drunk] Do you like the way I walk?

Philip Shayne: Poetry in motion.

Cathy Timberlake: I learned when I was a baby, been walking for years.

Philip Shayne: The Four Horsemen now have a riding companion. There's War, Famine, Death, Pestilence, and Miss Timberlake!

Cathy Timberlake: Look, he doesn't love me. He just feels sorry for me.

Roger: Doesn't love you? He's compared you to the plague!

Cathy Timberlake: How would you feel? Here I am, he practically runs me down and then drives right away! And doesn't have the decency to apologise himself. Furthermore I have a job interview and have to go like this. He doesn't care.

On set.

Roger: Ohhh...

Cathy Timberlake: You know what I'd like to do?

Roger: Throw the money in his face?

Cathy Timberlake: Exactly! I'd like to throw that money right in his face.

Roger: Would you?

Cathy Timberlake: Yes, I would.

Roger: I've waited seven years for this moment. You come with me!

Philip Shayne: That's it, Roger. Now you have plenty of friends. Find her a husband. A simple, dull, unimaginative man who'll smile tolerantly when he comes home from work and learns she's misplaced the children.

Cathy Timberlake: [Cathy is rushing off to meet Philip, over Connie's objections] Connie, this is terribly important to me. I've got to *prove* to him that I'm a woman!

Connie Emerson: [calls after her] Well, there are easier ways to do it. Send him your birth certificate!

Cathy Timberlake: And I'm unstable. What kind of mother would I make for our children?

Philip Shayne: Well we'll try three or four if that doesn't work out, we'll breed poodles.

Lobby Cards:

Directed by Delbert Mann

Distributed by Universal-International

Produced by Granley Company-Arwin Productions.

Running time: 99 minutes. 

Artwork by Rebekah Hawley at Studio36.

On This Day... North By Northwest (1959)

North by Northwest was Cary Grant's 66th full length feature film and was released this day in 1959.  

Summary:

Madison Avenue advertising man, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant), finds himself thrust into a world of espionage when mistaken for another man. When Thornhill tries to make sense of the case, he is framed for murder. On the run from the police, he boards the 20th Century Limited train bound for Chicago where he meets a beautiful blonde, Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint), who helps him to evade the authorities....but is Eve the innocent bystander he thought she was? 

Cast:

Cary Grant...Roger Thornhill

Eva Marie Saint...Eve Kendall

James Mason...Phillip Vandamm

Jessie Royce Landis...Clara Thornhill

Leo G. Carroll ...The Professor

Josephine Hutchinson...Mrs. Townsend

Philip Ober...Lester Townsend

Martin Landau...Leonard

Adam Williams...Valerian

Edward Platt...Victor Larrabee

Robert Ellenstein...Licht

Les Tremayne...Auctioneer

Philip Coolidge...Dr. Cross

Patrick McVey...Sergeant Flamm

Edward Binns...Captain Junket

Ken Lynch...Charley

Did You Know?

While filming Vertigo (1958), Sir Alfred Hitchcock described some of the plot of this project to frequent Hitchcock leading man and "Vertigo" star James Stewart, who naturally assumed that Hitchcock meant to cast him in the Roger Thornhill role, and was eager to play it. Actually, Hitchcock wanted Cary Grant to play the role. By the time Hitchcock realized the misunderstanding, Stewart was so anxious to play Thornhill that rejecting him would have caused a great deal of disappointment. So Hitchcock delayed production on this movie until Stewart was already safely committed to filming Otto Preminger's "Anatomy of a Murder (1959)" before "officially" offering him the role in this movie. Stewart had no choice but to turn down the offer, allowing Hitchcock to cast Grant, the actor he had wanted all along.

Vandamm remarks in the Rapid City, South Dakota house scene that the plane taking them out of the country should touch down in "ten minutes". It is exactly ten minutes in real-time when they see the plane landing on the landing strip.

Cary Grant found the screenplay baffling, and midway through filming told Sir Alfred Hitchcock, "It's a terrible script. We've already done a third of the picture and I still can't make head nor tail of it!" Hitchcock knew this confusion would only help the movie; after all, Grant's character had no idea what was going on either. Grant thought the movie would be a flop right up until its premiere, where it was rapturously received.

Sir Alfred Hitchcock filmed Cary Grant's entrance into the United Nations building from across the street with a hidden camera. When he gets to the top of the stairs, a man about to walk down does a double take upon seeing the movie star.

The scene where the crop duster is chasing and shooting at Thornhill was filmed with a real airplane while the shot where the plane crashes into the fuel truck was done using large models of both truck and plane.

It was journalist Otis L. Guernsey, Jr. who suggested to Sir Alfred Hitchcock the premise of a man mistaken for a nonexistent secret agent. He was inspired, he said, by a real-life case during World War II, known as Operation Mincemeat, in which British intelligence hoped to lure Italian and German forces away from Sicily, a planned invasion site. A cadaver was selected and given an identity and phony papers referring to invasions of Sardinia and Greece. The Man Who Never Was (1956) recounted the operation.

In a Turner Classic Movies interview, according to screenwriter Ernest Lehman (who worked in close collaboration with Sir Alfred Hitchcock), the working title was "In A Northwesterly Direction". The head of the story department at MGM said "Why don't you call it 'North by Northwest'?" Lehman says that he and Hitchcock adopted that as the new working title, always assuming that they'd come up with something better. Hitchcock also jokingly wanted to call it "The Man in Lincoln's Nose", but claimed the idea was vetoed by the Park Commissioner. Other working titles included "Breathless", "In a North West Direction", and "The C.I.A. Story". So the creators thought the title was a meaningless placeholder. However, in fact Thornhill flew north from Chicago to South Dakota on Northwest Airlines, or "north by Northwest."

The footage of Park Avenue in Manhattan, which appears as a reflection in the facade of an office building under Saul Bass' opening credits, is an approximately 12-seconds-long "loop" which plays four times. The "splice" in the loop is covered by a 2-second lap dissolve each time.

If the fictional Thornhill had plans, as he stated, to attend the Winter Garden Theatre when the movie opened in the U.S. in July of 1959 (when he was kidnapped from the Oak Room), his tickets would have been for "West Side Story."

Thornhill orders a Gibson on the train. This is composed of gin and dry vermouth, as in a traditional martini, but with cocktail onions instead of olives.

Originally cast and crew were staying at the Palms Motel in McFarland, CA for the crop dusting scene. However, the first night staying there they realized the bar closed at 10:30pm each evening. So they moved their accommodations for the remaining stay of the crop dusting scene to Bakersfield, CA.

In 2006, a panel of GQ Magazine fashion experts said the gray suit worn by Cary Grant throughout almost the entire movie was the best suit in movie history. It was also the most influential on men's style, stating that it has since been copied for Tom Cruise's character in Collateral (2004) and Ben Affleck's character in Paycheck (2003). This sentiment has been echoed by writer Todd McEwen, who called it "gorgeous", and wrote a short story "Cary Grant's Suit", which recounted this movie's plot from the viewpoint of the suit.

(See blog: Well He's A Well Tailored One )

Quotes:

[Thornhill is wearing sunglasses to hide his identity]

Ticket Seller: Something wrong with your eyes?

Roger Thornhill: Yes, they're sensitive to questions.

Roger Thornhill: Now you listen to me, I'm an advertising man, not a red herring. I've got a job, a secretary, a mother, two ex-wives and several bartenders that depend upon me, and I don't intend to disappoint them all by getting myself "slightly" killed.

Roger Thornhill: No. No, Mother, I have not been drinking. No. No. These two men, they poured a whole bottle of bourbon into me. No, they didn't give me a chaser.

Eve Kendall: Roger O. Thornhill. What does the O stand for?

Roger Thornhill: Nothing.

Man at Prairie Crossing: That's funny, that plane's dustin' crops where there ain't no crops.

Eve Kendall: [Hanging by their fingers from Mount Rushmore] What happened with your first two marriages?

Roger Thornhill: My wives divorced me.

Eve Kendall: Why?

Roger Thornhill: They said I led too dull a life.

Roger Thornhill: You're police, aren't you? Or is it FBI?

The Professor: FBI, CIA, ONI... we're all in the same alphabet soup.

Posters and Lobby Cards:

Directed by Alfred Hitchcock.

Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer.

Running time: 136 minutes.

Artwork by Rebekah Hawley at Studio 36.

On This Day... Topper (1937)

 On today's date back in 1937, Cary Grant's 27th full length feature film, Topper, was released. 

Summary: 

The fun-loving Kerbys, stockholders in the bank of which henpecked, stuffy Cosmo Topper is president, drive recklessly once too often and find that they died and are now ghosts. In limbo because they've never done either good or bad deeds, they decide to try a good one now: rehabilitating Topper.

Cast:

Constance Bennett...Marion Kerby

Cary Grant...George Kerby

Roland Young...Mr. Cosmo Topper

Billie Burke...Mrs. Clara Topper

Alan Mowbray...Wilkins

Eugene Pallette...Casey

Arthur Lake...Elevator Boy

Hedda Hopper...Mrs. Grace Stuyvesant

Virginia Sale...Miss Johnson

Theodore von Eltz...Hotel Manager

J. Farrell MacDonald...Policeman (as J. Farrell McDonald)

Elaine Shepard...Secretary

Doodles Weaver...Rustic

Si Jenks...Rustic

Three Hits and a Miss...Three Hits and a Miss

Did You Know?

The easiest parts of the shoot for Cary Grant and Constance Bennett were the many special effects scenes, which only required them to record their lines while special effects artists made the various items they moved, from fountain pens to a pair of frilly lace panties, appear to move on their own.

Hal Roach immediately wanted Cary Grant to play George Kerby, but he had difficulty getting the actor to agree to play the part, since Grant was concerned about the supernatural aspects of the story. Assurance from Roach that the screwball aspects of the story would be played up - plus a fee of $50,000 - were sufficient to convince Grant to do the film.

This was the first black & white film to be "colorized" in 1985.

This was the second film appearance of Lana Turner; she was uncredited and had no lines.

Producer Hal Roach wanted W.C. Fields and Jean Harlow to star as, respectively, Cosmo Topper and Marion Kerby, but neither was available at the time.

This same material was later adapted into a 1953 sitcom which ran for two seasons. Anne Jeffreys played Marion, Robert Sterling was George and Leo G.Carroll played the title role of Topper.

One of Mrs. Topper's society matron friends is played by Hedda Hopper, who later "retired from acting" to become one of Hollywood's most influential gossip columnists, with a daily column syndicated in hundreds of newspapers.

Quotes:

Cosmo Topper: My wife objects to drinking.

George Kerby: Then she shouldn't drink.

Cosmo Topper: She doesn't.

George Kerby: What's her objection?

Marion Kerby: Oh, George, I can see right through you.

George Kerby: Say, that's funny. I can see through you, too.

Marion Kerby: [seeing her body lying next to George's beside the car, which has just crashed] George, look. You know something George? I think we're dead.

George Kerby: I think you're right. Funny; I don't *feel* any different.

[Topper reading annual report of his bank]

Cosmo Topper: Bullion abroad and in transit, thirteen million, two hundred and two thousand, eight hundred and fifty-four dollars and no cents.

George Kerby: No sense.

Cosmo Topper: I just said that, Mr. Kerby.

George Kerby: So did I.

George Kerby: My pet, resting's the sort of thing you've got to work up to gradually... very dangerous to rest all of a sudden.

Marion Kerby: Hey, George, is this 10:30 in the morning?

George Kerby: No, this is Topper's bank.

Marion Kerby: I'll be out before you can say Jack Robinson - only don't say it for a few minutes.

Posters and Lobby Cards:

Directed by Norman Z. McLeod

Distributed by Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer

Produced by Hal Roach

Running time: 98 minutes

Artwork by Rebekah Hawley at Studio36.

On This Day... Walk, Don't Run (1966)

 Cary Grant's 72nd film, and his last, was Walk, Don't Run, released on today's date back in 1966. 

Summary: 

During the housing shortage of the Summer Olympic Games in 1964, two men and a woman share a small apartment in Tokyo, and the older man soon starts playing Cupid to the younger pair.

Cast:

Cary Grant...Sir William Rutland

Samantha Eggar...Christine Easton

Jim Hutton...Steve Davis

John Standing...Julius D. Haversack

Miiko Taka...Aiko Kurawa

Ted Hartley...Yuri Andreyovitch

Ben Astar...Dimitri

George Takei...Police Captain

Teru Shimada...Mr. Kurawa

Lois Kiuchi...Mrs. Kurawa

Did You Know?

Cary Grant (Sir William Rutland) retired from acting after this movie because, at sixty-one, he had become too old to play the romantic lead. Grant, furthermore, did not think his fans would want to see him playing supporting roles.

When Haversack is recounting his life story to Sir William in the hotel, two Victorian photographs can be seen on the desk. The portraits are of Elias and Elsie Leach who were Cary Grant's parents.

The film's three leading roles were originally intended for Spencer Tracy, Julie Andrews and Jack Lemmon.

In some scenes, Cary Grant whistles the theme music from Charade (1963) and An Affair to Remember (1957), two of his previous movies.

At the race, Julius says the fastest time for the 50 km race-walk is "four hours and fifty-three minutes." At the time of the 1964 Olympics, the men's 50 km race-walk world record was actually 4:00:50. (At the time of the film's release, the record was 3:55:36.)

Quotes:

Christine Easton: After 7:45, you can have the bathroom all day if you'd like.

Sir William Rutland: I wouldn't know what to do in the bathroom all day!

Aiko Kurawa: [Referring to bedlam at police headquarters] You say all you have to do is place an advertisement on the bulletin board?

Christine Easton: Uh-huh.

Christine Easton: I don't know why you wanted a room, you spend all of your time outside!

Posters:

Directed by Charles Walters.

Distributed by Columbia Picture.

Produced by Granley Company (Set up by Cary Grant)

Running time: 114 minutes.

Artwork by Rebekah Hawley at Studio36.