#117
Post
by bottlesofsmoke » Wed Mar 03, 2021 11:53 am
Starting this, I’ve seen 41 Grant movies, roughly fifteen of which would for sure make my list.
That Touch of Mink
This one left almost no impression on me, it’s about as run-of-the-mill a Doris Day 60s comedy as you’ll find, with all the modest strengths and weaknesses you’d might expect. I’ve seen most, (if not all?) of her other comedies from this era and while this isn’t the worst, it’s far from the best either. It’s clearly trying to replicate the success of her pairings with Rock Hudson, with Grant as the Hudson playboy, Doris still the world’s oldest virgin, and Gig Young as the Tony Randall comic relief. I’m not a very big fan of Doris Day, especially outside of musicals, but I really like her three movies with Hudson and Randall, mostly because of them rather than her. The attempts to fit Grant (who seems bored) and Young (who seems superfluous) into those roles doesn’t really work for me. I didn’t feel like their was much chemistry - either romantic or comedic - between Grant and Day, while the Gig Young side plot felt like something out of another movie and really served no purpose but to fill up runtime and provide a few questionable laughs.
Ladies Should Listen
Watching Grant was the most interesting part of this for me, though there were a few funny jokes outside of the sub-vaudevillian attempts at wordplay. This sort of seemed like Grant in transition, with a few moments that presaged his prime, but overall not quite there. He still seemed stiff at times, lacking the the spontaneity of his later performances. For example when Suzy falls on him early in the film, he just stands there. Prime Grant, even if he didn’t say anything, would have had some sort of a physical reaction, however slight, that would have made the whole scene funnier.
He also hasn’t quite learned to slow down his words and reactions or draw them out yet, the timing is off. If you compare him to Edward Everett Horton, who had already mastered milking every second, you can see the big difference. Perhaps it isn’t surpassing that it took an old school comedy director like Leo McCarey to help Grant really find his footing. It’s also interesting to see him in moments when his character is a little colder, he doesn’t quite have the even-if-I’m-insulting-you-I’m-charming-charm yet.
Big Brown Eyes
I liked this one in spite of (or perhaps because of) it being so all over the place in genre and tone. It really runs the gamut of typically thirties films, with romantic comedy, snappy dialogue, fast-edited interludes, gangsters, newspaper reporters, and dizzy society dames. The ability of Bennett’s charter to easily go from job to job was also funny in the context of the depression. Even more bizarre are the jumps from jokes to dead babies and romantic mixups to murder. After seeing so many of these thirties crime-comedies, just having something different, even if it’s weird and doesn’t always work, at least kept me engaged.
With Walsh, I think you can see when he’s interested or not, and it seemed he was invested in the crime more than the romantic comedy, with the killing of Lloyd Nolan’s character especially well done, with a cold, noir-esque underplaying and lack of emotion on the part of the killers. Nolan talks about flowers and percentages while the killers just blankly listen, eventually one shifts and then shoots from of screen (the shooter, I realized, is Henry Brandon, who’d play Scar in The Searchers) In an era when action scenes were often lacking in originality, this and some other things that come afterward, like the flowers on the body, stand out. Of course, it’s possible that these scenes were edited together this way to cover up a mistake or missing shots, but whether through inspiration or necessity, it worked for me, even if it just added to the overall strange tone of the movie.
I thought that Grant and Bennett were well paired, though I’d have liked for them to share more time on screen working the case together. Too often their time on screen together was a repetition of the same lines jealousy and denial, while most of their crime solving happened separately.
Grant as wise-cracking tough guy always reminds me of how Raymond Chandler said Grant was the ideal actor to play Philip Marlowe, though part of that might say more about anglophile Chandler and his identification with Marlowe than anything else. I do wonder what a hypothetical film with him as noir detective might be like. I’m not sure how well he’d do as as such terse character who internalizes his emotions, but it would certainly be interesting to see.