Saturday, January 18, 2014

Happy Cary Grant Day!

Today is Cary Grant's birthday. And TCM is offering us a chance to celebrate with The Philadelphia Story at 3:15 pm Central time, followed by The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer at 5:15.


Those are two very different roles, with the first the irresistible, maddening, aristocratic C. K. Dexter Haven, the first husband of Katharine Hepburn's Tracy Lord, the heiress staging the wedding of the century in Philadelphia, and the second a sly playboy of a bachelor who finds himself the object of a teen crush from Shirley Temple, while Shirley's big sis Myrna Loy, a judge, looks on unamused. You can see Myrna looking on unamused right there in the Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer poster image above.

The roles are different, but they share Cary Grant, which means both have all the charm and wit anyone could want. I'm not going to waste your time with more plot details or analyses of Mr. Grant's particular brand of movie star appeal. He was one of a kind. He was perfect. That's it.

So go watch The Philadelphia Story and The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, or if you prefer, you can substitute or add on Holiday, The Awful Truth, Notorious, Charade and North by Northwest. Some of those movies are included in a handy Cary Grant DVD collection, while others only come as singletons. But I invite you to find what you can, cue up a movie or two or three, and wallow in Cary Grant all day.

And here's a lovely picture of Cary as the devilish Devlin, cozying up to Ingrid Bergman in Notorious, just to inspire your Cary Celebration. I think it says everything you need to know about why he was who he was.

Cary Grant, Perfection

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