20th birthday gift idea

New DVDs a gift for Grant's 100th birthday

Cary Grant -- eternally handsome, wry and charming on film -- was born just more than 100 years ago, on Jan. 18 in Bristol, England.

He's remembered for his bright, mocking eyes, his bivalve chin and his grace of movement, which he displayed not just in the way he lit a cigarette but in the way he took a tumble: The pratfalls he learned during his early career in British music halls -- put to use in such films as "The Awful Truth" -- appear effortless.

Grant was comic yet seductive, polished yet robust, boyish yet dangerous. What could he have been but a movie star? His very presence transforms any scene -- no matter how artfully or even "realistically" constructed to suspend our disbelief -- into something immediately recognizable as that middle ground between the playground and Mount Olympus, a movie set.

Even people who haven't seen many Cary Grant movies are familiar with the actor's voice.

The clipped cadence of Grant's delivery was so distinctive that once he established his screen persona, he never even tried to alter his odd, almost winkingly parodistic accent.

Producers were so enamored of the idea of Cary Grant that they didn't care if he was logically appropriate for a part.

Viewers who dive into the Howard Hawks postwar comedy classic "I Was a Male War Bride" are likely to be shocked when they realize, several minutes into the film, that Grant -- his voice as British as ever -- is playing a Frenchman, Capt. Henri Rochard. The absurdity of the casting proves irrelevant; who but Grant could match Ann Sheridan's wary WAC lieutenant quip for quip and prank for prank? As Sheridan comments so early in the movie that we know the "sex antagonism" between the WAC and the army captain is a sham: "He's a lot of fun to fight with."

"I Was a Male War Bride" (1949) -- which ends with Grant in perhaps the ugliest drag costume in movie history -- is one of four titles just released to DVD by 20th Century Fox Home Entertainment in recognition of Grant's centennial. The other films in "The Cary Grant Collection" include "Born To Be Bad" (1934); Joseph L. Mankiewicz's follow-up to "All About Eve," "People Will Talk" (1951), and the only wide-screen Technicolor film of the bunch, Stanley Donen's sailors- on-leave comedy, "Kiss Them for Me" (1957), co-starring Jayne Mansfield and a raft of future TV stars, including Ray Walston (Uncle Martin in "My Favorite Martian"), Nancy Kulp (Jane Hathaway in "The Beverly Hillbillies"), Richard Deacon (Mel Cooley in "The Dick Van Dyke Show") and Werner Klemperer (Col. Klink in "Hogan's Heroes").

"Kiss" is pretty standard 1950s fluff, while "People" is an odd film that comments obliquely on blacklisting and the hunt for Communists by telling the story of a beloved but unorthodox physician (Grant) who faces disgrace when his past is questioned by a jealous colleague (Hume Cronyn). The movie most worth seeking out in addition to "War Bride" is "Born To Be Bad," produced by Darryl F. Zanuck and directed by the talented Lowell Sherman ("She Done Him Wrong" with Mae West, "Morning Glory" with Katharine Hepburn), who died of natural causes the year the film was released. He was 49.

Like many movies produced in the early 1930s by studios trying to circumvent the censorious demands of the recently established Hollywood Production Code, "Born To Be Bad" is fascinating for the way it uneasily mixes frank subject matter and sassy, sometimes risque lingo with unabashed sentiment, unlikely melodrama and unconvincing moralizing.

Scripps Howard News Service