The Grant Mystique: Dream Wife (1953)

Some years ago I complained that once World War II ended, Cary Grant was content to settle into inane sitcoms rather than the kind of sparkling entertainments he made during his first golden era (roughly 1937 to 1942). Whatever their virtues, films like The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer or Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House domesticated the Grant persona for a post war audience of war veterans moving to the new suburbs on the GI bill. I use the word "sitcom" with malice aforethought. Grant had become conservative with his choices. He would stretch his persona only very occasionally. One of his co-stars during this period described Grant as "the most nervous actor I ever worked with." It seems that the shadow of Archie Leach, the nobody, dogged Grant to the end of his days. The nadir of Grant's post-war artistic conservatism is Dream Wife (1953, directed by Sidney Sheldon). Sidney Sheldon is a name that should be familiar to audiences of a certain age. He is best known as the creator of the television sitcoms, The Patty Duke Show and I Dream of Jeannie. Certain elements of Dream Wife show up in I Dream of Jeannie, as it happens. Its conception of the Princess Tarji (Betta St. John) in particular is the template for Barbara Eden's Jeannie. Sheldon was very successful as screenwriter, as a television writer, and as a producer. He was even more successful later in his career as the writer of trashy romantic suspense novels with titles like Rage of Angels and The Other Side of Midnight. Sheldon had been successful working with Cary Grant before, having written the screenplay for The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer. That script won him an Oscar. Dream Wife, alas, was NOT a success for Sheldon and it nearly ended the career of its star. After the film failed to recoup its costs--a rarity for any film starring Grant during his major stardom--the actor considered retirement. He went so far as announcing his retirement in the press. He wouldn't make another film for two years. Dream Wife was a disaster for everyone involved. It's also a dreadful film.

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Stars in B-Movies Blogathon 2025: Mary Woronov and Paul Bartel and Eating Raoul

"I knew what was art and what was shit. But sometimes the shit was more interesting." -- Mary Woronov

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The first film I ever saw in which Paul Bartel and Mary Woronov both appear was Rock 'n' Roll High School, but I didn't start to associate them as collaborators until I saw Bartel's Eating Raoul on HBO in 1984. I had seen Death Race 2000 by then, too, but it didn't register for me that it was their first film together because Bartel, who directed the film, does not appear in it. They ultimately made 17 films together, sometimes playing husband and wife, sometimes with Bartel nowhere to be seen in front of the camera. Their best known collaborations were in films written and/or directed by Bartel himself (most famously in Eating Raoul in 1983), but they were a ubiquitous part of the company of actors who worked at Roger Corman's New World Pictures in the 1970s. I always loved it whenever they showed up in films together, and even when they showed up in films without the other.

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A Retro Prometheus

Lisa Frankenstein (2024, directed by Zelda Williams). I'm sure the name came first. Surely screenwriter Diablo Cody thought of the play on "Lisa Frank" and tailored a Lisa Frank-inflected Gothic to suit the name? I can't imagine it started with the story. The title is too big a cultural allusion. There are plenty of films where this was the order of operations in their creation, including at least one great one. Cody denies that this is the case. She says that this is just a coincidence, that the genesis of the film is as a distaff reworking of Weird Science. Maybe that's true. I have a suspicious nature. Cody is certainly capable of writing stories of great sophistication. Juno and Young Adult are both layered, complex character studies underneath the hipster dialogue that made their screenwriter famous. That's not this film, alas. This is a ramble-y nostalgia piece. It's so savvy about its time and influences that one can't help but be suspicious about its provenance. It has its pleasures, sure. It's just...if you're not a specific kind of viewer, one raised at the right time and in the right place, one steeped in a specific kind of culture from the late 1980s, then this film is kind of a mess.

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The Grant Mystique: Thirty-Day Princess (1934)

Thirty-Day Princess (1934, directed by Marion Gering) finds Cary Grant fading into the scenery a bit. This isn't the only case of this in his early films, but it's one of the most conspicuous. Grant was wholly unsatisfied with his part in this film and complained about it, prompting Paramount to loan him out to United Artists as punishment. Grant never forgot this. When his contract with Paramount was finished in 1937, he went freelance rather than re-up or sign with another studio. He wouldn't make another film for Paramount for a couple of decades. He held a grudge. Grant wasn't the only contributor unsatisfied with his work, either. This film credits Preston Sturges as one of its writers and, like Grant, he was unhappy with how little of his work ended up on screen. This is the only film on which Sturges and Grant both worked, so it's a missed opportunity.

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The Grant Mystique: Operation Petticoat (1959)

If you were to name Cary Grant's most influential movies, you might name films like North by Northwest, Bringing Up Baby, His Girl Friday, or The Philadelphia Story, which are all bona fide Hollywood classics. You might not get around to Operation Petticoat (1959, directed by Blake Edwards), and you would be wrong to omit it. In its way, it is among the most influential of all of Grant's films, and not just because it was Grant's biggest box-office hit (spoiler: it was). My own relationship with the film might be instructive. I originally saw the film when I was a kid. I saw it on television with my dad on a Saturday afternoon. It was very much a "dad" kind of movie: a comedy about the experiences of a military unit in the war. This was familiar territory because service comedies were a staple of the television of my youth. Hogan's Heroes, McHale's Navy, Gomer Pyle, F-Troop, M*A*S*H, all of these were everywhere back then, playing endlessly in the vampiric half-life of syndication. All of them trace a lineage to Operation Petticoat, either directly or in passing. Because, as I've said, Operation Petticoat was an absolutely gigantic hit. Hollywood follows the money. The downside of its influence is that Operation Petticoat sometimes feels like a TV sitcom. Many of its supporting actors--particularly Dick Sargent and Gavin McLeod--went on to long television careers. The film begat a TV spinoff in 1977 unto itself, which I may have seen before I saw the film proper (this happened with M*A*S*H, too). Its director, Blake Edwards, was at that time primarily known as a television writer and director, whose work on Peter Gunn was contemporary with Operation Petticoat. Operation Petticoat would launch him into the big time, and his films over the next decade would include the Pink Panther movies, Breakfast at Tiffanys, Days of Wine and Roses, and Experiment in Terror, among others. For all that, the presence of Cary Grant and, to a lesser extent, Tony Curtis removes the film from being merely an elaborate TV sitcom. The film persona of Cary Grant guarantees this. Grant was well rewarded for his service here, too. The film netted him three million 1959 dollars, which is about thirty-one million in 2023 dollars. It's not for nothing that Grant was among the wealthiest movie stars who ever lived.

The film itself? It has its pleasures.

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Carrying on the Family Business

Ghostbusters: Afterlife (2021, directed by Jason Reitman) is two thirds of a good movie. That two thirds of a film are better than any comparable running time in any other Ghostbusters film, including the original item. This should not be a surprise. Jason Reitman is a better director than his father ever was, and is a better director than Paul Feig. He's better at blocking his scenes, better at writing dialogue, and better at working with actors, particularly young actors. Since the lead characters in the film (rather than in the credits) are kids, this gets value from its director that the other films never demanded. Better still, the first two acts of Ghostbusters: Afterlife don't play like any previous film in the series, either. Part of this comes from moving the film out of New York and out into the sticks. Part of it comes from a cast of characters who are drastically different character types than what you find in the other films. It's only when the film decides that a paying audience demands what the original item provided that the film gets itself into trouble. Big trouble.

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The Grant Mystique: This is the Night

There are more films starring Cary Grant in my movie collection than films starring any other actor. No small feat given how many films I have with John Wayne, Humphrey Bogart, and Christopher Lee, respectively. I think John Wayne may have been in the lead until this Christmas, when my main Christmas gift was the Universal Vault Collection of Grant's early films, most of them from the pre-1950 Paramount library that Universal owns. They've been stingy with that library over the years. Many of the films in this set have never seen a commercial release for home video. In any event, this set has eighteen films, all made before 1937, before Grant was "Cary Grant," before he had fully developed the Grant persona (stolen from Leo McCarey on the set of The Awful Truth, if you believe McCarey on the matter). Grant's star became a supernova after 1937, when he began appearing in some of his best-loved films, including Topper and the aforementioned The Awful Truth. The films in The Vault Collection are not so well-known as a rule. Oh, it has the two films Grant made for Mae West, sure, and Blonde Venus with Marlene Dietrich and Joseph Von Sternberg, but those aren't really "Cary Grant" films, even if Mae West recognized a diamond in the rough when she saw one. West had an eye for diamonds.

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Render Unto Caesar

I don't remember the last time I had such a keen anticipation for a movie like the one  I had for the Coen brothers' latest film, Hail, Caesar! (2016). The Coens have been on a roll, after all, and the two trailers for the film were crackling with comic invention. Or, at the very least, the promise of comic invention. I probably should have taken notice of its release date. Superbowl weekend is traditionally an occasion when movie studios like to dump projects in which they find their faith is lagging. I should also have considered my own rocky relationship with the Coens' comedies. I mostly don't like them much. All of this should have set off alarm bells. And yet I still found myself getting carried along by hype.

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Race Relations

Dear White People (2014, directed by Justin Simien) is a portrait of entitlement and privilege as satire and farce. That it's set at an Ivy League school where privilege and entitlement are incubated is right and proper, because this isn't a film where the obvious oppression of economic iniquity fits in. That's a fish in a barrel, one that would lend itself more to a polemic than to a wry satire. Instead, this aims at less obvious, though no less pernicious targets, including a deconstruction of the sometimes rigid expectations of black identity.

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Welcome to the Dollhouse

I was having a conversation with a friend of mine after seeing Wes Anderson's new film, The Grand Budapest Hotel (2014), when he mentioned that he found the film's structure to be ungainly. He called it a matryoshka doll, one of those Russian dolls that nest progressively smaller dolls inside themselves. As a literal description of the film's structure, he's right. It's a narrative constructed of flashbacks within flashbacks--needlessly, my friend thought, because only one of the framing narratives has any real connection with the main thrust of the film. I think this is only a marginally useful description of the film. I prefer to think of it as a dollhouse, a comparison that has occurred to me before while watching Anderson's films: In the sequence in Moonlight Kingdom, for instance, when the house becomes a series of panels and the film turns into a kind of comics page. It's also a lot like a dollhouse that's been opened so that you can get to the rooms inside. As in that film, a lot of the humor in The Grand Budapest Hotel is predicated on dressing up its actors in elaborate costumes (no Harvey Keitel in short pants this time, unfortunately--Keitel plays a role more in keeping with his screen persona). I don't really know what it says about Anderson that he sees in film a huge dollhouse where Orson Welles saw a train set. Both directors see a vast toybox in any event.

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A Wolf in the Fold

I'm sure I'm not alone in this, but I have a short list of filmmakers whose films I try to see at the first opportunity, often the first night they open near me if circumstances allow. One of the names on my own list is Martin Scorsese and I doubt I'm alone in this. Marty is some kind of living icon of cinephilia these days, due to his work on film preservation and outreach. Even if he never made another film and confined himself to these tasks, he would be one of the most important and revered people in film.

Marty and I have been having a bit of a falling out in recent years. I hated his Oscar-winner, The Departed, and only half-liked Shutter Island, which is ridiculous but lovely. I did love Hugo, but I haven't felt the urge to watch it again. One thing that has really bothered me in recent years about Scorsese is the obnoxious way his films push women to the margins in favor of an aggressive masculinity. That's a strain of his filmmaking that really comes to the fore in The Wolf of Wall Street (2013), a film that wallows in dude-bro masculinity and its misogynistic dark side. It's a tumescent film that comes to the screen with its rampant cock pointing straight at the audience. It then proceeds to stroke it furiously for the next three hours(!) before dousing them, bukkake-like in the jizz of its own self-indulgence.

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Midwestern Gothic

"Hell, I even thought I was dead 'til I found out it was just that I was in Nebraska."--Little Bill Daggett, Unforgiven

I don't know that director Alexander Payne mocks mid-westerners in his films set in the heartland. I mean, I live in the rural mid-west and I recognize a LOT of the characters who populate Payne's films, from Tracy Flick to Woody Grant. I recognize the cultural and economic wasteland he depicts, too. His new film, Nebraska (2013), is ostensibly a comedy, but its stark black and white cinematography turns it into a mournful comedy at best (if that's not an outright oxymoron). This is a film that's laboring under a pall of disillusion and disappointment, set amid a bleak landscape spotted with vultures picking over the remnants of the American dream.

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Grave Men

It's appropriate that Burke and Hare (2010), John Landis's long-delayed return to feature filmmaking should bear the name of Ealing Studios. Ealing, after all, made its name with quirky comedies laced with gallows humor in such films as Kind Hearts and Coronets and The Ladykillers, and they produced at least one genuine masterpiece of a horror film in Dead of Night. Even at their sunniest, Ealing's films often had a whiff of Halloween about them, even if they never really went in for the kinds of shocks Hammer Studios would pioneer a decade later. Hammer's biggest star, Christopher Lee is in this film, and thus acts as a bridge between their traditions, while adding a touch of class and a smidgen of horror movie cred to a film that's a sweet-tempered black comedy at its heart.

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The Family That Plays Together...

Making a "one from column A" movie is a lot like improvisational cooking: you throw flavors into the mix in the hopes that they'll complement one another. A good cook knows that chocolate and peanut butter go together. Throwing together flavors that don't complement each other? That's a recipe for disaster. A famous example of this is Stephen Bochco's notorious TV flop, Cop Rock, which tried to fuse his Hill Street Blues/N.Y.P.D. Blue with musical numbers. Man, that didn't work at all. Most of these kinds of experiments aren't nearly so radical. The Family (2013, directed by Luc Besson), for instance, slides easily into the category of the mob comedy--itself a hybrid, but a road-tested one--and adds a dash of Twain's Innocents Abroad. It's an uneasy mix, but it's not so radical that it will put an audience off its lunch. It doesn't necessarily add up, though.

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Haves and Have-Nots

At the end of Woody Allen's new film, Blue Jasmine (2013), my moviegoing companion turned to me and said: "Wow. That was totally Streetcar." She's right, of course. Blue Jasmine is consciously updating A Streetcar Named Desire for the Great Recession, but that's not all it has on its mind. It's just the framework. This is yet another portrait of the wreckage of late capitalism, seen this time from the point of view of the mighty who have fallen. It's a steep drop from the top of the world.

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Vocal Opposition

Some years ago, I saw a performance art piece by genderqueer theorist Kate Bornstein in which she recounted her experience with vocal therapy for transsexuals. The therapist she had gone to kept urging her to raise her voice: "Like this?" "Higher!" "Like THIS?" "Higher!" "Well, I don't want to talk like that." The "like that" was what you might call the squeaky toy voice. Bornstein eventually developed a voice based on listening to Laurie Anderson albums, and that seems a more laudable and realistic a goal. Thinking of all the great female voices, I gravitate to people like Lauren Bacall, Joan Greenwood, Sally Kellerman, and Kathleen Turner. No squeaky toys. This and more was all rattling around my brain as I walked to my car after seeing In A World... (2013, directed by Lake Bell). Writer/director/star Lake Bell doesn't like the squeaky toy voice either, and her movie underlines--gently--the disturbing assumptions behind its currency in our culture. In A World...is a comedy--a good one, I think--but it's also an excursion into feminist sociology.

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From A to B

I've owned a copy of Stage Door (1937, directed by Gregory La Cava) for years. I have it as part of the old Warner Brothers Classic Comedy box, which I originally bought for cheap and for the other movies. I was also laboring under the misapprehension that I've seen Stage Door before, which turns out to be not the case (I was mistaking it for another movie entirely). It's the sort of movie that I might have watched with my mom when I was younger. She loved this kind of stuff, and she loved Katharine Hepburn. I've been reordering my DVD shelves this weekend and I decided to watch it when I was reshuffling my box sets. It was a genuine surprise.

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Pub Crawl

I had a pretty good time at The World’s End (2013), the third film in Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg’s loosely connected “Cornetto” trilogy. My long-suffering partner laughed her ass off at the film, and this soothes my conscience, given that I’ve dragged her to movies that have traumatized her in the past and given that she sat through Edgar Wright’s last film, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, in a resentful, stony silence. (Her remarks afterward: “Well, that was stupid.”). I can’t ignore this part of the filmgoing experience because having a companion who is having a visibly bad time can poison the well and having the opposite can likewise sweeten the pot. The movie itself isn’t bad, but it has its problems and even though the experience of watching it was good, that doesn’t necessarily I’m ignoring those problems. At another time, at another showing, I might have had an equally bad time. This is why you should take all film writing with a grain of salt—especially mine—because it all exists in the liminal spaces of value judgments and emotional responses. It’s all unreliable. For myself, I don’t even trust myself over time. But I digress.

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Aimless in New York

Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig's Frances Ha (2013) is a portrait of post-college/pre-rest of your life anomie. Anyone who has drifted through an aimless couple of years after college will recognize themselves in Frances Handley, though I imagine that most people who have gone through this kind of coming of age aren't the same kind of fuck-up. As quirky and occasionally sweet-tempered as this film is, it's a profoundly melancholy film, an effect compounded by its moody black and white cinematography.

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Love Among the Ruins

Like all movie fans, I have holes in my knowledge. There are plenty of classic or critically acclaimed films that for one reason or another, I've just never seen. As an example: I don't think I've ever seen all of Ben Hur or Gone With the Wind in a single sitting. I'm pretty sure that I've seen all of both of those movies, but I've seen them in fragments, so my experience of them is more as mosaics than as linear narratives. One of these days, I should rectify this. One hole in my film-going education is Billy Wilder's romantic comedy, A Foreign Affair (1948). A friend of mine gave me a copy of the film on VHS recently (it's scarce on DVD, apparently), and my partner and I sat down to watch it this week. It turns out to be a film that argues forcefully for Wilder as an auteur in the classical sense of the word. It's a film that echoes throughout Wilder's career, both before and after A Foreign Affair was made. It's everything you expect from Wilder: witty, cynical, political, subversive, emotionally brittle. More than that, though, I think it shows the director growing into the mature style that would carry him through the 1950s. It's surprisingly heartfelt, too, given that Wilder was memorably described as having a mind full of razor blades.

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