Stanley Donen’s best film by far, the scintillating mystery-comedy-thriller-romance Charade, has often been described as “the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock didn’t direct.” Not so—not by a long shot. A stylish, purely superficial entertainment that is not really about anything, Charade is dwarfed by the achievement of North by Northwest (1959), the “Hitchcock movie” with […]
Tag Archives: Cary Grant
From a treacly story by Martha Cheavens, which Morrie Ryskind turned into a script, Penny Serenade chronicles a couple as they lose their baby, adopt, eventually lose their adopted child, and seem to lose the thread of their marriage—all directed by George Stevens, in his future Shane-ful fashion, to achieve the pace of a sloth. […]
Married financial analyst Philip Adams, who works for NATO, and stage actress Anna Kalman, who is single and still looking for Mr. Right, are having an affair in Anna’s London hotel suite. “I love hard currency,” Anna tells him, in an example of the double entendres she dispenses. Both are middle-aged, and Philip, fastidious and […]
Howard Hawks’s punishment by RKO for the financial failure of Bringing Up Baby (1938) starring Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant, which today is cherished as one of the funniest comedies ever, is that the studio snatched away from Hawks the project he coveted that had been promised him: Gunga Din. Although this rousing adventure film […]
Although not quite so wonderful as the Disney-produced 1951 animated version directed by Clyde Geronimi, Wilfred Jackson and Hamilton Luske, Norman Z. McLeod’s Alice in Wonderland, which is populated by heavily made-up actors, is a gem. It is quaint, richly Victorian although much simpler than the two books upon which it is based, Alice’s Adventures […]
Dennis Grunes 