RARA-AVIS: Cary Grant as Marlowe

From: Frederick Zackel ( fzackel@wcnet.org)
Date: 17 Aug 2001


Putting in my 2 cents, even if it's late. Check out Cary Grant's early flicks, especially as the unctuous chauffeur in "She done him wrong", the one he made with Mae West (who "discovered" him) or even better his 1944 performance as Ernie Mott in "None but the lonely heart," where Ethel Barrymore is his Mom! From a novel by Richard Llewellyn. (Llewellyn went out write an early hard-boiled Brit "lad" play called "Noose." He had gotten his big break some years earlier with his novel "How Green is my Valley.") But I digress. Wow! Grant is wonderful in "None but the lonely heart" as a loser trapped and sliding down the toilet of life in a cockney-noir world. That must be where Chandler "saw" Grant as Marlowe.

Speaking of femme fatales . . .

"Her lips were red, her looks were free Her locks were yellow as gold, Her skin was white as leprosy. The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thick's man's blood with cold."

-Samuel Taylor Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

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