Mae West asked if he was carrying a gun in his pocket or if he was just glad to see her, and a star was born. Audiences have been glad to see him ever since. I’m speaking of course of Cary Grant, whose entire screen career can be traced through the magic of DVD.

The iconic star had been noticed on screen before in throwaway parts in Merrily We Go to Hell and Blonde Venus, and all but stole Hot Saturday from Nancy Carroll, but didn’t have a starring role until the not-on-DVD Madame Butterfly opposite Sylvia Sidney. It was however his two starring roles opposite Mae West that launched him as a major star.

The bawdy She Done Him Wrong was the film version of Mae’s Broadway smash Diamond Lili. Together with the other 1933 Mae-Grant hit I’m No Angel, it literally saved Paramount from bankruptcy. It was such a sensation that theatres had to add midnight showings to accommodate the crowds. Authentically set in the Gay Nineties, its laugh-a-minute scenario was interrupted only by Mae’s warbling of such great songs as “Frankie and Johnny” and the notorious “Easy Rider”. It went on to win an Oscar nomination for Best Picture and entered the National Film Registry in 1996. The equally funny I’m No Angel was advertised with the tag line, “come up and see me sometime – any time” but the line itself is from She Done Him Wrong. At 66 and 87 minutes, respectively, the two should be seen back-to-back, especially if you’ve never experienced either one.

From Mae on, it was nothing but starring roles for Grant, though it was another pair of comedies that made him a superstar four years later.

Grant and Constance Bennett are ghosts haunting banker Roland Young in the uproarious Topper. While Young and Billie Burke as his befuddled wife have all the best lines, the film works because of the delightful interplaying of all four stars. Young’s performance earned him a much-deserved Oscar nomination and the film spawned several sequels, though none of them with Grant. It later became a highly successful TV series in the 1950s.

An even bigger hit was The Awful Truth, which was nominated for six Oscars including Best Picture and won one for director Leo McCarey. The film, which entered the National Film Registry in 1996, was also nominated for the wonderful acting of Irene Dunne and Ralph Bellamy, but alas, not for Grant’s performance, his finest to date, and arguably the finest of his entire career.

The film, which is about a couple who meet, marry and divorce after a brief time together only to find they really love one another, had been previously made as a silent film and would be officially remade several years later as well as unofficially too many times to count, but this is the definitive version with the added bonus of being steeped in screwball comedy. Its most memorable scene is probably the one in which Grant and Asta, the dog from The Thin Man, play footsy with a hat. Not too many actors could steal a scene from a dog, especially one as cute as Asta, but Grant could, and did.

The following year Grant appeared in two comedies opposite Katharine Hepburn that were box office flops in their day but have long since been revered as masterpieces.

Critics of the day were split and audiences were indifferent to Hepburn’s first and only venture into screwball comedy. Howard Hawks’ Bringing Up Baby starred Grant as a bespectacled professor and Kate as a loopy heiress. The “baby” of the title was a leopard. May Robson, Charlie Ruggles and Barry Fitzgerald were in it, too. It’s marvelous from start to finish and features Grant’s immortal line, “I’m turning gay” when asked by Robson what he was doing dressed in women’s clothes. The film was inducted into the National Film Registry in 1990 in only its second year of existence.

The other 1938 film was George Cukor’s Holiday, a remake of Philip Barry’s sentimental comedy-drama about a man, played by Grant, who espouses to live a leisurely life while he’s young and work when he’s old. Hepburn and Lew Ayres as the sister and brother of his fiancé are perfectly cast, as is Grant, of course. Jean Dixon and Edward Everett Horton as Grant’s friends who bond with Hepburn and Ayres are equally fine. The film’s splendid art direction accounted for its only Oscar nomination.

The box office failure of those two films caused Hepburn to be labeled “box-office poison” and sent her scurrying back to Broadway where her triumph in The Philadelphia Story would lead to one of the quickest and greatest comebacks in show business history. Grant, in the meantime, was unaffected, though he did step away from comedies for a while.

Grant’s two best remembered films of 1939, often cited as Hollywood’s greatest year, were George Stevens’ adventure epic Gunga Din and Hawks’ aviation epic Only Angels Have Wings.

Though Gunga Din was only nominated for one Oscar (Best Cinematography), the 1999 entrant into the National Film Registry was the first of the Best Films of Films’ Best Year films to be shown in the current New York screenings of the Academy. Taken from Rudyard Kiplings’s then already 47-year-old poem, Grant, Douglas Fairbannks Jr. and Victor McLaglen are the British soldier-adventurers and Sam Jaffe is the Indian water boy who proves to be a better man than any of them.

Nominated for two Oscars, Only Angels Have Wings remains one of the best films about the men who risk their lives flying airplanes, in this case commercial planes in a South American Banaa Republic. In addition to Grant, Jean Arthur, Thomas Mitchell, Richard Barthelmess and Rita Hayworth all turn in memorable performances. Mitchell, had he not won his Oscar that year for Stagecoach, would almost have certainly won for this. His death scene is one of the most heart-rending in screen history.

1940 saw a return to comedy for Grant. He was the editor in Hawks’ remake of The Front Page, a 1993 entrant into the National Film Registry, now called His Girl Friday. Grant more than meets his match in Rosalind Russell as the star reporter in this rare remake that is even better than the original.

He was Irene Dunne’s husband once again in My Favorite Wife in which he remarries just as Dunne returns from the dead, or actually a desert island where she had been holed up with Randolph Scott for seven years. The film was nominated for three Oscars including Best Original Story.

Best of all, he was Katharine Hepburn’s ex-husband vying for her affections with Jimmy Stewart and John Howard in the screen version of The Philadelphia Story. The film was nominated for six Oscars, including Best Picture, Director (George Cukor), Actress (Hepburn) and Supporting Actress (Ruth Hussey), winning two for Best Actor (Jimmy, not Grant) and Best Screenplay. Hepburn, cementing her glorious comeback, won the New York Film Critics award for Best Actress and the film itself entered the National Film Registry in 1995.

Finally it was Grant’s turn at being nominated for an Oscar, albeit not for his best performance in 1941. That would have been as Joan Fontaine’s childlike, menacing husband in Alfred Hitchcock’s Suspicion, not as Irene Dunne’s newspaperman husband in Penny Serenade, though that performance, too, is good. Suspicion was nominated for three Oscars including Best Picture and won one for Best Actress (Fontaine). Grant’s nomination was the only one accorded Penny Serenade even though Dunne’s performance is superior.

Nominated for seven Oscars including Best Picture, 1942’s The Talk of the Town did not yield any for its director George Stevens or any of its players including the film’s three dynamic stars, Grant, Jean Arthur and Ronald Colman. Colman was nominated for Random Harvest that year instead.

Grant’s second and last flirtation with Oscar came for 1944’s None But the Lonely Heart in which he was nominated for playing against type as a drifter in the poverty-stricken Cockney area of London. Though he’s good, he is easily outclassed by the great Ethel Barrymore who deservedly won the Best Supporting Actress award as his dying, cancer-stricken mother.

He was actually better in the same year’s Arsenic and Old Lace. Filmed in 1941, the Frank Capra film could not be released until the stage version ended its highly successful run on Broadway. In it, he plays the nephew of two delightful old ladies who just happen to have murdered a few elderly men whose bodies keep popping up at the most inopportune time.

Grant’s second film for Hitchcock, 1946’s Notorious is a near-perfect movie, arguably Hitch’s best output of the 1940s. Ingrid Bergman is absolutely luminous as the daughter of an executed German spy who is recruited by American agent Grant to pose as a Nazi sympathizer to her father’s friends in Argentina, even going so far as to marry one of them. Hitch’s killing suspense would have made this good no matter who played in it, but Bergman, Grant and Claude Rains as Ingrid’s pathetic husband send it into the stratosphere. Leopoldine Konstantin, billed as Madame Konstantin, is also terrific as Claude’s bitter, unyielding mother. Rains and Ben Hecht’s screenplay were nominated for Oscars and the film itself entered the National Film Registry in 2006.

Grant thereafter alternated between comedies and serious dramas, but it was the comedies that most often proved more popular at the box-office.

Shirley Temple was after Grant in 1947’s The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer, an Oscar winner for Sidney Sheldon’ screenplay, but Grant was more interested in Temple’s older sister, played by Myrna Loy.

Grant and Loy were together again in 1948’s Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, the archetypical comedy of its type. Melvyn Douglas was the other man, ready to rescue Loy every time something went wrong with the remodeling of their home.

Wonderful Ann Sheridan was a WAC whose French-born husband, Grant, she petitions to bring to the States in Howard Hawks’ 1949 film, I Was a Male War Bride. As usual the combination of Hawks, Grant and a strong female lead proved potent and the film was a huge success.

A brave film to be made at the height of the McCarthy era, Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1951 romantic comedy-drama People Will Talk cast Grant as an English professor who falls in love with Jeanne Crain, a student left pregnant by her killed-in-combat soldier boyfriend. Walter Slezak and Finlay Currie are fine as Grant’s supporters and Hume Cronyn is at his most hissable as the film’s holier-than-thou finger pointer.

Grant reunited with Howard Hawks for their first screwball comedy together since Bringing Up Baby. Extremely popular, but requiring more than a little suspension of disbelief, 1952’s Monkey Business is about a research chemist who invents a fountain of youth pill that turns back the years of those who take it a bit too far. Ginger Rogers, as Grant’s wife, won a Golden Globe nomination. Charles Coburn and an up-and-coming Marilyn Monroe co-star.

Grant’s former co-star Irene Dunne had one of her greatest successes opposite Charles Boyer in Leo McCarey’s 1939 shipboard romance, Love Affair. When McCarey decided to remake it in 1957 he cast Deborah Kerr in Dunne’s role and Grant in Boyer’s. Re-named An Affair to Remember, the remake proved even more successful than the original, winning four Oscar nominations as opposed to the original’s six. Although none of the actors were nominated, Kerr might have been had she not been nominated for Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison instead. McCarey won a DGA nomination for Best Director.

Reuniting with Alfred Hitchcock one more time for 1959’s North by Northwest, the directing and acting icons had their biggest hit together. Playing the typical Hitchcock hero of the innocent man mistaken for someone else, he’s a New York advertising executive chased across the country by spies who think he’s a government agent. The film’s unforgettable set pieces include the U.N., a Kansas corn field, Mount Rushmore and a train that enters a tunnel at precisely the right moment. The seemingly effortless performances of Grant and Eva Marie Saint keep it light even as they face dastardly villain James Mason and his henchmen including Martin Landau. Leo G. Carroll and Jessie Royce Landis also have prominent roles, the latter playing Grant’s mother though she was only five years his senior.

North by Northwest was nominated for three Oscars including one for Ernest Lehman’s screenplay. Hitchcock was DGA nominated for Best Director and the film itself entered the National Film Registry in 1995.

After North by Northwest, Grant could do no wrong at the box office although his films were not always of the quality of his past work. Only Stanley Donen’s 1963 comedy-mystery Charade is worthy of a mention along with that of his earlier work.

Charade won an Oscar nomination for the lovely Henry Mancini-Johnny Mercer title tune. Both Grant and Audrey Hepburn won Golden Globe nominations for their performances.Reviews of the film had been ecstatic with one influential critic famously opining that when Audrey is playing little old lady supporting roles the ageless Grant will still be playing romantic leads.

Alas, that wasn’t to be. Grant only made two more movies, the pleasant, if forgettable World War II comedy FFather Goose opposite Leslie Caron and the ill-advised remake of The More the Merrier re-named Walk, Don’t Run.

With the locale changed from wartime Washington, D.C. to the Tokyo of the 1964 Olympics, the 1966 film had the potential of being something fresh and exciting, but seems as tired as Grant in his one and only geezer role, playing the merry old matchmaker role that won Charles Coburn an Oscar in the earlier film. Samantha Eggar and Jim Hutton co-star.

Grant, long snubbed by Oscar, finally won an honorary one at the 1969 ceremonies for “his unique mastery of the art of screen acting with the respect and affection of his colleagues.” One of Oscar’s greatest moments, we won’t see its likes again now that the Academy has decided to remove special awards from the Oscar telecast.

-Peter J. Patrick (June 30, 2009)