Everyone Wants to be Cary Grant, even I want to be Cary Grant

Stadtkino, Basel, Klostergasse 5, Kunsthallengarten.

Films featuring Cary Grant. Otherwise known as Alexander Archibald Leach, the English actor arrived in the American film world in 1930 adopting the artistic name of Cary Grant. Next to his image as a self-made man of the world he also acquired a secretive ambivalent aura.

Hollywood loved him as he acted before the camera with divas such as Marlene Dietrich, Ingrid Bergman, Katherine Hepburn,  Audrey Hepburn. Also alongside great film director’s such as Howard Hawks , Frank Capra and Alfred Hitchcock who clearly supported his great talent.

Look out for those great classics such as Bringing up Baby, Dir, Howard Hawks, 1938. The true ‘screwball’ comedy about an eccentric heiress whose dog steals a bone from an absent-minded paleontologist, the last bone needed to complete the reconstruction of a dinosaur. The professor follows the heiress to her Connecticut farmstead in search of the relic and runs into the people that are the donors to his natural history museum and a leopard, called ‘Baby’ who enjoys the song ‘I can’t give you anything but love’.

Blonde Venus, directed by Josef von Sternberg, 1932. This is the very classic film where Dietrich appears with her top hat, white tie and tails, singing ‘You little so and so’.

Charade, Dir Stanley Donen, 1963. The big romance with Audrey Hepburn set in Paris. Notorious, Dir. Alfred Hitchcock 1946. Thriller, spy movie offering romance, suspense international intrigue surrounding Grant and Bergman’s unforgettable performances as American agent and jetset playgirl. It’s about the attempt to uncover a Nazi plot and the creation of Hitchcock’s ‘McGuffins’ the title of the film alludes to the fact that it’s all about precious Uranium. 

Then there’s The Philadelphia Story, dir., George Cuckor, 1940, North by North West, another Hitchcock, 1959. Topper dir., Norman Z. McCloud, 1940, is the story of George and Marion, young, wealthy couple whose main interest is to have a good time. One night while driving home they hit a tree and are killed. Their spirits walk out of the wreck but are upset to learn they’re not in  heaven but are still on Earth. They decide that they will probably be trapped on Earth forever unless they make amends for their frivolous lifestyle by doing something of value.

His Girl Friday directed by Howard Hawks, 1940 is the perfect comedy set in a news room and is probably one of the fastest comedies on record. It’s basically a remake of The Front Page. The film moves with lightening speed as the director asked the actors to talk more than 130 words per minute and to walk twice as fast as normal so as to convey the urgency of the news world of the times.