cary grant Tagged Articles at Cinematical

By now, you've had your fill of ghosts, goblins, and things that go bump in the night. You've cleaned up pumpkin guts, peeled off your skin along with your spirit gum prosthetics, hoping OxyClean gets fake blood stains out of your carpet. You need a movie with class, wit, and Cary Grant. You need Howard Hawks' classic His Girl Friday, which is playing right now on SlashControl.

There's nothing I can say about this movie that hasn't already been said. Rosalind Russell's Hildegard "Hildy" Johnson remains one of the gutsiest heroines to ever grace the silver screen, and the fact that Cary Grant's Walter Burns loves her for her byline makes him one of the sexiest men of all time. The romance, the scheming, and the race to the presses will still leave you dizzy and laughing. Oh, and let's not forget the clothes. Oh, to spend a day looking as impeccable and sharp as Johnson ... ! I fully intended this to be an anti-Halloween selection, but I imagine it could inspire my fellow females to look for pinstripes and fedoras for next year's festivities.

This movie is especially poignant to watch now in the waning days of the newspaper industry. It's very sad to think of movies like Friday and State of Play being period pieces beyond clothing, hairstyles, and politics. While I have confidence that journalism will find its fast talking feet again, there will always be something romantic about the presses. At least they've been preserved in the background of so many movies as good as His Girl Friday.

Watch His Girl Friday on SlashControl right now!

Over the course of earning a degree in Cinema Studies, I'll be honest with you; I hardly ever got to watch the kind of movies that I liked. Call me lowbrow if you must, but remember, I'm talking about my university years, and getting up at eight AM to watch Berlin: Symphony of a Great City wasn't the best way to nurse a hangover. Don't get me wrong, I learned plenty and I was happy for the chance to see intellectually challenging films -- I just didn't always have that much fun. That is until I signed up for Classic Hollywood Cinema, and finally I got my chance to watch movies like Leo McCarey's The Awful Truth and pretend I was studying.

The great Jean Renoir once said, "[Leo] McCarey understands people - perhaps better than anyone else in Hollywood.", and Truth is a great example of McCarey's way with a character. The screwball romance centered on two 'gay divorcees' by the names of Jerry and Lucy Warriner (played by Cary Grant and Irene Dunne) who only realize how much they mean to each other after they have gotten divorced. McCarey strikes the right balance of farce and humanity with Jerry and Lucy, and even manages to make some keen observations about marital trust. But it is a comedy after all, and there is plenty of funny to go around thanks to stellar performances from Ralph Bellamy as a millionaire hick, and Cecil Cunningham as the wisecracking Aunt Patty.

In spite of all the pratfalls and slamming doors, you really do care about the Warriners, and McCarey even manages to make their reunion pretty sexy for a screwball comedy. Grant and Dunne would go on to star in several other films together, including the hilarious My Favorite Wife (which was also written and produced by McCarey). But, Truth was a little more about people than wild and wacky circumstances, and maybe that's why it will remain their best.

After the jump; Cary Grant meets his muttering comic match in Irene Dunne...

Okay, really this should be more of a top 100 list, so these seven are more "off the top of my head" than any kind of definitive selection. There are several kinds of Oscar snubs. There are talented actors, artists and filmmakers who have never been nominated, and others who have been nominated many times and never won. There are great films that received one or two nominations in minor categories (Vertigo, Singin' in the Rain) and great films that received none at all. The ones I've chosen here are the ones that, especially in retrospect, seem like the most obvious omissions.

1. Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive (2001)
Watts did receive a nomination two years later for 21 Grams, though that was clearly a case of making up for this mistake. In 2001, no one gave a slyer or more canny performance, in any film, in any category. Watts not only plumbed the depths of her soul for material, but also stretched to two opposite extremes of the character's personality, making up the two parts of this great, enigmatic film. It was historically important that Halle Berry won the Oscar that year, but considering the other nominees: Renee Zellweger (Bridget Jones's Diary), Sissy Spacek (In the Bedroom), Judi Dench (Iris) and Nicole Kidman (Moulin Rouge), Watts' snub is a real head-scratcher.

When the 1932 Olympics hit LA, it began a long history of synergy between the games and the movie business. That synergy led to Zhang Yimou, China's answer to William Wyler, who gave the recent opening ceremony all due pageantry. Over the years, the Olympics contributed to the movies, foaling movie stars by the ton. The games were a casting call whenever one needed someone as chunky as a wrestler or as slender as a swimmer, or Tarzan, who I guess is a combo of swimmer and wrestler. My favorite will always be Harold "Oddjob" Sakata, silver medalist in the light-heavyweight weight-lifting competition at the 1948 Olympiad. Defamer.com has the more tragic roster of Olympians who pursued cinematic careers like those of Mitch Gaylord and Bruce Jenner. The games have foaled classic documentaries, too, the most well known example is Leni Riefenstahl's 1938 Olympia. Yet there have been these lesser known pictures about this world-wide fest:

You're probably thinking you don't need another documentary about the Iraq War. But you're wrong, because Alex Gibney's Taxi to the Dark Side is finally being released, and the film is one of three necessary docs dealing with Iraq. The triad, which would make a great box set if only the same company distributed all three films, also includes Charles Ferguson's very highly acclaimed Sundance jury-award-winner No End in Sight (on which Gibney was a producer) and Patricia Foulkrod's under-appreciated 2006 work The Ground Truth: After the Killing Ends.

What do they have in common? Well, if you put them together and watch them all, you'll feel like an expert on three important aspects of the war and its most significant repercussions. They may not tell you everything there is to know about the Iraq War, but they're more thorough and informative than most. No End in Sight is the most directly involved with the actual conflict, from its causes to its effects (read Kim's review here). The Ground Truth more specifically deals with the American soldiers, but in an all-encompassing, training-to-homecoming portrait of modern combat and its consequences (see my review here). Taxi to the Dark Side is sort of like a flip side to that film, though it doesn't necessarily focus on the enemy combatants. Instead it deals with suspected enemies, soldiers or otherwise, who are held and oftentimes tortured in prisons such as Iraq's Abu Ghraib.

Taxi to the Dark Side somewhat falls outside the box (set), though, in that it really isn't about Iraq. In fact, Gibney insists that his documentary is not an 'Iraq film.' Yes, it does feature a lot of details about, and footage of, Iraq's Abu Ghraib, which is probably the best-known prison of its kind, but it also prominently features Bagram, in Afghanistan, and Guantanamo Bay, the two other facilities used in the detention and interrogation of individuals presumed to be involved with Al-Qaeda, the Iraqi insurgency or any other enemy of the U.S. in its "War on Terror."

When you ask people to name their favorite holiday movies, the same answers crop up everywhere: It's a Wonderful Life, A Christmas Story, Miracle on 34th Street, and perhaps some version of A Christmas Carol (Muppet Christmas Carol and Scrooged seem most popular these days). A few people might try to be different and name Die Hard or Bad Santa, and a few traditionalists might reminisce about Meet Me in St. Louis. And of course there's the Silent Night, Deadly Night crowd. Personally, I would have to bring up Auntie Mame.

But the movies I'm about to mention have only a few fans these days. Most are widely available on DVD, and are not shown very often during the holiday season. Some are forgotten treasures, some date badly. One is a well-known Oscar winner that may be too depressing for some New Year's Eve viewers. But if you are tired of watching Jimmy Stewart and Donna Reed, or have had enough of the leg lamp and the Red Ryder BB gun, consider some of these films for your holiday viewing ... if you can find them.

There have been countless debates about which James Bond is best, and as we saw from Kevin's post last November, the fans are all in disagreement. But those who side with Sean Connery can now celebrate a scientifically conclusive victory over the others, since a computer has apparently proved that the first Bond was the true Bond. Two U.K. psychologists -- one based in Scotland and one based in England, in case you think there's regional bias -- produced a composite image using a prototyping technique on a computer, and of all the Bond actors the image most resembles Connery.

The funny thing is, according to their procedure, the psychologists' proof is incorrect. Maybe they should have stressed that Connery is the closest thing to a real Bond ever portrayed in an official 007 film, because the real movie Bond would have to be David Niven, who plays the character in the parodic adaptation Casino Royale (the 1967 one). See, the composite image was made by feeding the computer pictures of other actors who Bond author Ian Fleming had said in 1961 had a facial structure similar to what he imagined for the character. Those actors were Stewart Granger, Richard Burton, Patrick McGoohan, James Mason, Rex Harrison, Cary Grant and, yes, David Niven. Considering the fact that McGoohan is still alive, there is still time for a tie, but I'll go ahead and crown Niven with the honor despite what a computer tells me. Either way, though, one important thing the composite seemed to indicate is that Daniel Craig is the furthest of all from being the true Bond.

You know I'll use any possible excuse to look for images of Cary Grant. And since today is his birthday -- he was born in 1904 -- a photo was inevitable. I selected this particular photo over some very nice images from His Girl Friday and Bringing Up Baby that I'll have to find a reason to post later. I figured that most of us remember what Grant looked like in late 1930s and 1940s films, but it's easy to forget the films from the early 1930s, before the iconic Grant we knew started to take root, back when he was a pretty boy playing the love interest for Mae West or Marlene Dietrich.

The above photo is from She Done Him Wrong, a Mae West vehicle from 1933, adapted from her hit Broadway play Diamond Lil. West was a playwright as well as a performer. The plots of her movies are never as memorable as the dialogue, although I enjoyed I'm No Angel, a West film released a year later that also includes Grant. She Done Him Wrong is the film in which West first said "Why don't you come up sometime and see me," which she reused in I'm No Angel, changing it to the now-legendary line, "Why don't you come up and see me sometime?" She Done Him Wrong was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar, but lost to Cavalcade, an adaptation of a Noel Coward play.

Grant isn't onscreen in the two West films often enough to suit me, and it's rumored that he didn't like working with West. By the end of the decade, the Production Code of film self-censorship essentially hobbled West's career, but Grant was just warming up into the onscreen personality we associate with the actor.

I am one of the world's worst gift wrappers. People look at the presents I give them, and ask if I let my niece or nephew wrap the gift for me. I admit I can't be bothered to spend a lot of time getting the ribbons to curl just so, and to make sure that the wrapping paper fits the present size before I start cutting it out. Over the years, I've learned to rely a lot on gift bags, which are reusable (good for the environment) and look very smart with some tissue paper and perhaps a little raffia used to attach the gift tag. The gift bags were also good for quick last-minute wrapping during the years when I used to take the plane to my parents' house for the holidays, because wrapped gifts aren't allowed on flights.

A big reason why my gift wrapping isn't fabulous, however, is that I don't pay much attention. I'm very fond of putting on a movie in the background while I'm wrapping presents. The idea is that the movie should be something I've seen before, so I am not tempted to put down the scissors and ribbons and watch closely. It's also nice to watch a movie with a holiday theme, to get me in the right spirit for all that gift wrapping.

Therefore, I've put together a list of seven movies that are my favorites for background watching while wrapping presents during the holiday season. Many of them are on TV during the holiday season, so if you're stuck in the back bedroom of someone else's house on Christmas Eve, frantically wrapping before anyone comes in to see what you're giving them, you might be able to find one of these movies on cable (Turner Classic Movies especially).