Time catches up with all of us, even Cary Grant

 

Cary Grant could still move pretty well for a guy his age in 1964.

He was 60 when he made Father Goose, this past weekend’s feature for Mannion Family Movie Night, and while the movie doesn’t require him to outrun strafing biplanes and hang from the cliffs of Mt Rushmore or climb drainpipes and creep across rooftops while eluding the gendarmes, as he was doing for Hitchcock a decade before when he could still move pretty well for a man in his 50s, he does have to dive for cover from strafing fighter planes, vault fallen trees, and catch a fish with his bare hands.

It’s not much, but because he could do it gracefully, fluidly, and with some agility and alacrity, and because he was in excellent shape, he gives the impression that he could do a lot more and if the script had called for it he wouldn’t have looked too ridiculous fighting it out hand to hand with a squad of Japanese soldiers.

He doesn’t look as though he’d have won with his flying fists and karate skills.  Just as though he wouldn’t have won by causing the soldiers to die of laughter.

One thing he can’t do is carry a gun.  In the several scenes in which he has to carry a rifle he holds it as if it’s an oversized rolled up newspaper he’s about to use to swat a very large fly, one-handed, at waist level, with no sign of its having any heft or that he expects any kickback if he has to fire it, which he’ll to do without aiming.

But then Grant never got much practice carrying a gun, or wielding any weapons, over the course of his long movie career.  He probably has the lowest body count of any leading man in Hollywood history, if you don’t count ships he sunk in Destination Toyko, and he didn’t use a gun in that one, he did it with torpedoes.

Otherwise, he moves and acts like a younger and more active man, and you can almost believe he’s in his mid to late forties, instead of five years from collecting Social Security, which is helpful to enjoying the movie because his love interest’s played by Leslie Caron, who was nearly thirty years younger than he was.

Grant plays Walter Eckland, an expatriate ex-history professor hiding out from responsibility, civilization, and any demands on his time or sympathies in the South Pacific at the outbreak of World War II.  Eckland is coerced into helping the war effort by an old friend, an officer in the British Navy, played by Trevor Howard, who puts him to work as a frontline spotter reporting back to headquarters on the movement of Japanese ships and planes.

Eckland’s job is to sit alone on an otherwise deserted island with a radio and a pair of binoculars and watch the skies and the ocean horizon and hope the Japanese don’t figure out he’s there.

The job would seem to suit him.  Eckland is misanthropic, anti-social, and totally self-centered.  At the start of the movie he seems to believe he can ignore the war entirely and that the war will ignore him.  He’s also grown lazy and sloppy since he's left teaching and spending days on end in solitude with nothing to he has to do, nowhere he has to be, and nobody he has to impress should be a dream come true for him.

But, minimal as it is, it’s still a responsibility and it’s still a connection to a society he has rejected.  Worse, it requires him to stay sober for longer stretches of time than he’s used to or can tolerate.

He has no choice, though, but to make the best of it.  Which he does, grumpily and under protest, until his island’s invaded….

By Leslie Caron and a company of schoolgirls.

Caron, as Catherine Freneau, a teacher and daughter of a French diplomat, and her charges have been stranded along the way trying to escape the Japanese advance.  Eckland comes to their rescue, reluctantly.  Plot complications in the form of the war prevent the Navy from rescuing Eckland from those he’s rescued and he’s stuck with their care and feeding.

He resents the intrusion, he resents the responsibility, and he resents Catherine’s insistence that he act as a respectable father figure for the girls.

Catherine is as prim and proper, neat and tidy, and respectable and responsible as Eckland is none of those.  Naturally, they fall in love.

After a period of hating each other during which Eckland, under the influence of Catherine’s example and the girls’ surprising affection for him, unconsciously grows back into someone more like his former self, responsible, caring, considerate, and sober.

Father Goose is a fun film and Grant and Caron make a plausible pair of potential lovers, as long as you accept that she’s playing a few years older than her real age so that she’s closer to forty than thirty and he’s playing a guy in his late forties, somewhat weathered by the tropical sun and rusting from the inside out thanks to his heavy drinking. 

And you can accept this because, as I said, Grant moves so well.

But then Eckland shaves.

Removing Eckland’s beard was probably meant as a signifier that he had completely reformed.  Cary Grant with two week’s worth of stubble is a drunken bum.  Cary Grant clean-shaven is…Cary Grant.

At least, that’s how it was supposed to come across.

It’s not how it came across to me the other night.

Cary Grant unshaven looked like a character named Walter Eckland.  Walter Eckland beardless looked like an old man who used to be Cary Grant.

I can’t swear to it but I’m pretty sure Father Goose was the first Cary Grant movie I ever saw.  I don’t know exactly how old I was.  I have a habit of thinking that everything important that happened to me as a kid happened when I was nine.  And I might actually have been nine.  Safe to say I was somewhere around nine but no younger than seven and no older than twelve.  What I remember clearly is loving the movie.  It was one of my favorites for a long time afterwards.

What I don’t remember is thinking of Cary Grant as old.

At whatever age I saw it I would have been looking at a Cary Grant who was right around the age of both my grandfathers but I sure didn’t think of Walter Eckland, or Cary Grant, as grandfatherly.

I don’t think it was the case that I was less of an ageist when I was nine…or ten or eleven or however old I was.  I definitely thought of my grandfathers as looking grandfatherly.

I think it was partly that I just was more willing to accept whatever a movie required me to accept in order to enjoy it.  If the movie required me to believe that Cary Grant could take on Japanese soldiers and sweep a woman young enough to be his daughter off her feet than that’s what I believed.

But it was also that Cary Grant was Cary Grant and even as young as I was I understood that Cary Grant was different.

Time and he had an understanding.

If Father Goose was the first Cary Grant movie I saw, Operation Petticoat was the second.  I got to know Cary Grant as a somewhat gruff middle-aged (but not grandfatherly) man.  Seeing him as a young man, seeing him as what he was for most of his career, which had to wait until I was in high school and college when our family got cable and then I was able to see his movies on a big screen at second run houses and college film festivals was a revelation. 

And now, having seen all those movies, I can sort out his career chronologically in my memory, and understand that one of the great things about Grant was how gracefully he aged.

I don’t mean that he kept his looks and his hair and his figure longer and better than most normally mortal human beings are lucky enough to do.  I mean that if you watch him get older from Gunga Din and Only Angels Have Wings, through Notorious and His Girl Friday, and on through It Takes a Thief and North By Northwest, and then on up to Charade and Father Goose, you can see the way he altered his acting style, his habits of speech, his whole screen persona to work in the fact that he was getting older.

He was careful about choosing his movies.  There’s no Spirit of St Louis or Man Who Shot Liberty Valance in his filmography.  But it’s not just that he never tried to play any characters ridiculously younger than himself.  I see Eckland as in his late forties but the part could have been played as if he’s the same age as Catherine, and the reason I see him as older, although not as old as Grant was, is that Grant didn’t let himself try to make Eckland younger.  Eckland comes off as ten or fifteen years younger than Grant because Grant could move as if he was ten or fifteen years younger.  But he never slips up with an expression, a look, a phrasing of a line, or a gesture that reminds us of the truly young Cary Grant.

Other leading men and women have managed this, the ones who were good actors.  I just can’t think of any others who did it as well or who made the transitions as seamlessly.  Think of any of your favorites and odds are there’s a five or even ten year period when they were playing “young”---that is they were still playing parts as if they were still the hot young romantic leads they’d been---when they should have already moved on.

Jeff Bridges!

That’s one.

There’s nothing that does more to make actors look old than trying to play young when they’re not and this includes having their characters do things that the actors themselves are clearly too old and stiff to really do, so please, Mr Ford, Mr Speilberg, no more Indiana Jones movies!

Walter Eckland is in his late forties because he was played by Cary Grant but Grant himself did nothing to make Eckland that young.  Grant just was that much younger than his real age.

Which I guess is why it came as such a shock to see him without the beard and realize that as slowly as it was coming upon him old age was coming.

Now of course I know that Cary Grant got old.  Very old.  He lived another twenty-two years and I saw him in his dignified, white-haired dotage on the Oscars and talk shows.  But that was the real Cary Grant.

Cary Grant, the screen presence, aged but he did not get old.

Grant did Father Goose for the fun of playing against his image.  He was looking for a part that would teach audiences to see him in a very different way so that he could start playing the kinds of character parts that formerly leading actors take on when they are closing out their careers.  But then he made only one more movie after Father Goose, Walk Don’t Run, the one and only film in which he played a fatherly version of his former self.

A different thing from playing a father, by the way.

And he never played grandfatherly versions of his former self, as Clint Eastwood has been doing.

He never went on to play judges, generals, crime bosses, old college professors, or, well, fathers and grandfathers.

He aged gracefully and beautifully but he did not get old on screen.

As I said there are no embarrassments in his career like The Spirit of St Louis.  But there’s no Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, no Road to Perdition, no On Golden Pond.  Nothing like The Shootist or True Grit.  Nothing like Atlantic City or Local Hero.

There’s only those few moments in Father Goose like the one on the beach just before the climactic Japanese attack when he looks over his arm at Leslie Caron and you can see it, around his eyes, along his jaw.

The fact that time catches up with all of us, even Cary Grant.

Comments

[Linkmeister]

Fun fact: Cary Grant set Rosalind Russell up with the man who became her (only) husband, Freddie Brisson. Grant was best man at their wedding.

I learned this by reading Russell's wonderful autobiography, "Life is a Banquet," recommended by the Siren. It's a wonderful breezy memoir.

[El Jefe]

Been awfully busy of late but had to come back from the cold for this one. "Father Goose" and "Petticoat" (which Ted Turner used to love showing on New Year's Eve back in the early to mid Eighties, when I was just old enough to stay up without surreptition but not old enough to make any proper use of the holiday) were formative movies for me too. "Married? Goodie Two-Shoes and the Filthy Beast?!?!?" is perhaps my father's favorite line in the cinema, ever, along with one or two things said by Jack Elam in the course of the "Support ..." movies. There's a little master class in the supporting role in there from that rouguish old pothead Trevor Howard as well, rather more over the hill than Grant (what, fifteen years out from "Brief Encounter" at that point I think?) Time does catch up with all of us, but as I watched those scenes again recently, I came to the slightly different conclusion that it helps an awful lot to be Cary Grant, or rather to have the certain timelessness of soul he does, which had by that point aged only in the way good liquor does, solely by experience. (For nearly all her performing life, I would put the entirely magnificent Lena Horne in the same sort of category.) In one of my two favorite movies -- as opposed to "films" -- Charade, it could be even creepier pairing young-enough-to-be-his-daughter Hepburn with Grant but the two of them do it with style. (It helps that Stanley Donen made that into a master class in how to make a movie aided by his own script, Henry Mancini, and the whole damn cast right down to the unobtrusive little boy and the magnificent old Frenchman who gives him his stamps back.) Hepburn's best line -- "You know what's wrong with you? Nothing." is my own favorite line in the movies and could only be delivered with such conviction to Grant. Not to Peter O'Toole (though "How To Steal a Million" is another favorite), nor Robert Mitchum, nor the likes of Stewart or Fonda, nor any of the Brits of the era, nor Louis Jourdan, etc., etc. Only to Grant.

Some long while ago you mentioned asking for films that you thought could be remade, or that should have been left alone rather than gone over again. "Petticoat" just can't be touched, partly because the sexual politics have changed so much, partly because it would have to be set back then. But if you set it back then, it might be possible to do "Father Goose." I'd put in Audrey Tatou for the Caron role, change things up a bit with Paul Bettany in Trevor Howard's part because he fits the real-world age of Howard's officer (pushing forty and given up on being a high-flyer in the service, rather than an old man out to pasture.) As for Grant's role, well that would have to be a man who, until the last five to six years I pegged as the Rod Taylor of his generation, especially since Taylor's the only other actor I could see playing Walter Eckland with conviction besides Grant: George Clooney.

Great post, Lance. Memory lane here too.

PS: Russell's memoir must be grand. Thanks for the title, Link.

[Kevin Wolf]

That there's no Atlantic City maybe exposes a hole in Grant's career plan. That there's no On Golden Pond perhaps refutes that.

Fun fact that Pauline Kael pointed out: The woman playing Cary Grant's mother in North By Northwest was younger than he.

[Linkmeister]

El Jefe, I've learned that if you want good movie bios/auto-bios, you can't go wrong with the Siren's recommendations. I also read Myrna Loy's autobiography at her suggestion. Loy was an activist after her film career, mostly for UNICEF/UNESCO. I had no idea.

Russell was also an advocate for childhood disease research and later for arthritis sufferers, once she was diagnosed with the rheumatoid version and learned nobody knew much of anything about it.

[susana]

I'm thinking it's not that you were less ageist, it's that people, even men (or maybe especially men, because there was less shame in it for them), used to show age much faster. Not that long ago, either.
Thanks for a great post (well, many great posts, really), and the reminder to watch more Cary Grant.

[muddy]

It always seemed to me that being Cary Grant was the role of a lifetime for Cary Grant and that he attended to the details of that role constantly and carefully. That physical stuff is such part of him from his acrobat days in his youth, he was always so completely in charge of his body, of his littlest movements, it was a joy to watch, it was like a ballet. The false accent likewise, he must have had to mind it all the time. Even while drinking! The utter concentration of playing himself while playing someone else always impressed me.

[shaun]

"Father Goose" is a movie that barely succeeded because of Grant and to a lesser extent Caron.

Which brings me in a roundabout way to "Pirate Radio," which you wrote about a while back prior to either of us seeing it. Well, I did over the weekend and can report that it barely barely succeeded because of the wonderful period music and to a lesser extent because of Bill Nighy. Plot spoiler: I kept waiting for the movie to sink but it never quite did. The ship did.

[lingin]

My favorite Cary Grant quip:

After receiving a telegram with the question, "How old Cary Grant?" Grant responded (also via telegram), "Old Cary Grant fine."

And I seem to remember reading somewhere that he had once said something to the effect that even Cary Grant wasn't really Cary Grant. He always knew that the public persona was a carefully crafted image (thanks, muddy) and he, at heart, was always Archie Leach.

[Lance]

Kevin Wolf: That there's no Atlantic City maybe exposes a hole in Grant's career plan. That there's no On Golden Pond perhaps refutes that.

Good one, KW!

El Jefe: ...the certain timelessness of soul...

Excellent phrase to describe both Grant and Lena Horne. Btw, Charade is coming up on the schedule for family movie night.

susana: I'm thinking it's not that you were less ageist, it's that people, even men (or maybe especially men, because there was less shame in it for them), used to show age much faster

I tend to agree and think it has something to do with nutrition and something to do with people cutting out smoking. Then I look in a mirror...

[Lawrence Fechtenberger]

For what it's worth, Grant did express an interest in appearing in two 1980s films, THE VERDICT and GORKY PARK. In the former he wanted to play the lead, which of course ultimately went to Paul Newman; in the latter he considered playing the American businessman, the role ultimately played by Lee Marvin.

It is very, very weird to think of Cary Grant and Lee Marvin being up for the same role.

[Lawrence Fechtenberger]

Oh, and one other bit of Cary Grant casting trivia: The Hammer Films version of PHANTOM OF THE OPERA was actually conceived as a vehicle for him. Almost certainly the only time Grant and Herbert Lom were up for the same role.