Thirty Day Princess (Marion Gering, 1934)

Cast: Sylvia Sidney, Cary Grant, Edward Arnold, Henry Stephenson, Vince Barnett, Edgar Norton, Ray Walker, Lucien Littlefield, Robert McWade, George Baxter, Marguerite Namara. Screenplay: Preston Sturges, Frank Partos, Sam Hellman, Edwin Justus Mayer, based on a story by Clarence Budington Kelland. Cinematography: Leon Shamroy. Art direction: Hans Dreier, Wiard Ihnen. Film editing: Jane Loring. Music: Howard Jackson, John Leipold. 

Crisis (Richard Brooks, 1950)

Ramon Novarro, Cary Grant, Paula Raymond, and Leon Ames in Crisis

Cast: Cary Grant, José Ferrer, Paula Raymond, Signe Hasso, Ramon Novarro, Gilbert Roland, Leon Ames. Screenplay: Richard Brooks, George Tabori. Cinematography: Ray June. Art direction: E. Preston Ames, Cedric Gibbons. Film editing: Robert Kern. Music: Miklós Rózsa. 

In Crisis, Cary Grant plays a brain surgeon, which led one critic to snark that he looked like he should be holding a martini glass instead of a scalpel. That only points up the problem of movie star image: We expect Grant to be suave and wisecracking and not hung up on the dilemma of whether to perform an operation on a cruel dictator (José Ferrer) who is trying to fend off a revolution. Naturally, Grant's Dr. Ferguson sticks by the Hippocratic Oath and goes through with the operation. Meantime, unbeknownst to Dr. Ferguson, his wife (Paula Raymond) has been kidnapped and the revolutionaries are threatening to kill her if the dictator lives. Ferguson is unaware of this because the dictator's wife (Signe Hasso) has intercepted the message from the revolutionaries and destroyed it. It's a pretty good thriller premise, but writer-director Richard Brooks doesn't know how to build the suspense it needs. This was Brooks's first feature film as director, so we may want to cut him some slack. After all, he does a few things well, including a demonstration of brain surgery techniques that adds a little documentary realism to the film. To my eyes, Grant's performance is perfectly fine, and Ferrer and Hasso know how to play villains. Raymond is a little bland as the wife, but there are solid supporting performances from Ramon Novarro as a colonel backing up the dictator, Gilbert Roland as a leader of the revolutionaries, and Leon Ames as an oil company executive trying to remain neutral in the political conflict in this unnamed Latin American country so he can build a pipeline. It's the film's own neutrality -- dictators are bad, but revolutionaries can be, too -- that saps a good deal out of the drama. 

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (H.C. Potter, 1948)

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House (H.C. Potter, 1948)

Cast: Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, Melvyn Douglas, Reginald Denny, Sharyn Moffett, Connie Marshall, Louise Beavers, Ian Wolfe, Harry Shannon, Tito Vuolo, Nestor Paiva, Jason Robards Sr., Lurene Tuttle, Lex Barker, Emory Parnell. Screenplay: Norman Panama, Melvin Frank, based on a novel by Eric Hodgins. Cinematography: James Wong Howe. Art direction: Carroll Clark, Albert S. D'Agostino. Film editing: Harry Marker. Music: Leigh Harline.

Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House was made during the boom in house construction that followed World War II, so it had a ready audience in young couples with dreams of lovely homes. That audience tends to regenerate, so it's no surprise that the original film was loosely remade in 1986 as The Money Pit (Richard Benjamin) and even more loosely in 2007 as Are We Done Yet? (Steve Carr). The original is the best, of course, thanks largely to its trio of stars: Cary Grant, Myrna Loy, and Melvyn Douglas bring their immense charm and comedy skills to what is essentially a routine domestic sitcom. The pitfall in such a story is predictability: We know that every plan the Blandingses make will go awry, and usually in ways we can see coming a mile away. And the film has a smug racism characteristic of its era: A "faithful retainer" played by Louise Beavers, who seems to have no life of her own outside of serving the Blandingses; she follows them from Manhattan to Connecticut dutifully, and when she saves Blandings's job by coming up with an advertising slogan for his client, his response is to tell Mrs. Blandings to give her a $10 raise. We even see her in a newspaper advertisement as a kind of Aunt Jemima figure, grinning over a ham and her slogan.

In Name Only (John Cromwell, 1939)

In Name Only (John Cromwell, 1939)

Cast: Cary Grant, Carole Lombard, Kay Francis, Charles Coburn, Helen Vinson, Katharine Alexander, Jonathan Hale, Nella Walker, Alan Baxter, Maurice Moscovitch, Peggy Ann Garner, Spencer Charters. Screenplay: Richard Sherman, based on a novel by Bessie Breuer. Cinematography: J. Roy Hunt. Art direction: Van Nest Polglase, Perry Ferguson. Film editing: William Hamilton. Music: Roy Webb.

You have to feel a little sorry for Kay Francis in In Name Only, stuck there as the villain opposite two witty luminaries, Cary Grant and Carole Lombard. Their background as comic actors make Grant and Lombard even more appealing in this mostly serious drama about frustrated love. We see the potential for happiness in their characters even as Lombard's is suffering and Grant's almost dies, mostly because we've seen the actors be giddy and funny before. Poor Francis is stuck in full grim glower as her character, Maida Walker, tries to hold on to her husband, Alec (Grant), and it doesn't help that we have seen Francis be funny before, in Ernst Lubitsch's Trouble in Paradise (1932), though even there she was the other woman to Miriam Hopkins. Maida's motives are impure, of course: She married Alec for his money, even though she was in love with another, less affluent man. Their marriage has long since gone sour, so when Alec finds himself falling for the pretty widow Julie Eden (Lombard), Maida has to pull out all stops to put a kibosh on their affair. In Name Only is one of the more cynical movies about marriage to come out of Hollywood under the Production Code, which while it didn't prohibit the treatment of married couples falling out of love with each other and even getting divorced to marry their true loves, tried, under the Catholic leadership of Joseph Breen, to discourage it -- or at least to make sure that it was as painful for the participants as possible. So Maida has to be as cunningly deceitful as possible in her attempts to hold on to her man, and other marriages in the movie are just as unhappy: Maida's friend Suzanne (Helen Vinson) is married to a lush, so she plays the field, making a stab at Alec, and Julie has an embittered sister, Laura (Katharine Alexander), who divorced her philandering husband and now distrusts all men. Naturally, in the end Maida gets her comeuppance and agrees to divorce Alec so he can marry Julie, but it's a long time coming. Alec even has to be on the brink of death before this can happen, which provides one of the weaker moments in the film: Grant is so typically full of life that it's almost beyond his considerable acting skills to seem to be seriously ill. In Name Only is no great film, but you probably can't even care about its defects when Grant and Lombard are on the screen -- they're that good.

Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941)

Penny Serenade (George Stevens, 1941)

Cast: Irene Dunne, Cary Grant, Beulah Bondi, Edgar Buchanan, Ann Doran, Eva Lee Kuney, Leonard Willey, Wallis Clark, Walter Soderling, Jane Biffey. Screenplay: Morrie Ryskind, based on a story by Martha Cheavens. Cinematography: Joseph Walker. Art direction: Lionel Banks. Film editing: Otto Meyer. Music: W. Franke Harling.

Penny Serenade was released in April 1941, which explains the cozy, rosy japonaiserie of the scenes set in the country that would be vilified by Americans after Pearl Harbor, only eight months later. The idyllic sojourn of the Adamses in Japan would be brief, however, cut short by an earthquake that brings on Julie Adams's miscarriage, complications of which leave her unable to bear the children she so longs for. But that's only the beginning of their misfortunes, which left many moviegoers holding soggy handkerchiefs. The phrase "they don't make 'em like this anymore" comes to mind, except that they do: Millions of people tune in every week to follow the fortunes of the Pearson family on This Is Us. It's easy to dismiss this kind of cathartic cinema and its TV descendants, but it serves a need that shouldn't be dismissed cynically. We may prefer the Irene Dunne and Cary Grant of The Awful Truth (Leo McCarey, 1937) and My Favorite Wife (Garson Kanin, 1940), but their starry presence helps lift Penny Serenade out of the vale of tears. Grant earned one of his two Oscar nominations -- the other was for None But the Lonely Heart (Clifford Odets, 1944) -- for this film. The Academy always prefers acting that shows over acting that naturally arises out of a performer's established persona, and while his performance is by no means one of Grant's best -- there are dozens more that could be cited as essential for their Cary-Grantness -- it does make Penny Serenade more watchable than it might be today. Dunne is less challenged by her role: Noble suffering was her forte in most of her films; comic giddiness was the exception. But she doesn't overdo it here. Everything else, however, is overdone: the chubby moppets who play the Adamses' adopted daughter at different ages; the motherly rule-bending adoption agency head played by Beulah Bondi; the gruff but tender chum known as Applejack and played by Edgar Buchanan; the sentimental old songs that key each flashback. It comes as a shock to learn that so much of this tearjerking was done by screenwriter Morrie Ryskind, who got his start writing gags for the Marx Brothers and was the screenwriter for Gregory La Cava on the screwball My Man Godfrey (1936) and the acerbic Stage Door (1937).