Sat 10 Apr 2021
David Vineyard Reviews Two CARY GRANT Films from 1936.
Posted by Steve under Films: Drama/Romance , Mystery movies , Reviews[11] Comments
â— WEDDING PRESENT. Paramount Pictures, 1936. Cary Grant, Joan Bennett, George Bancroft, Conrad Nagel, William Demarest, Gene Lockhart, Edward Brophy. Screenplay: Joseph Anthony, based on a story by Paul Gallico. Directed by Richard Wallace.
◠BIG BROWN EYES. Paramount Pictures, 1936. Cary Grant, Joan Bennett, Walter Pidgeon, Lloyd Nolan, Alan Baxter, Marjorie Gateson, Isabel Jewel, Douglas Fowley, Henry Brandon, Joe Sawyer. Screenplay by Raoul Walsh, Bert Hanlon, based on the stories “Big Brown Eyes†and “Hahsit Babe†by James Edward Grant. Directed by Raoul Walsh.
These two early Cary Grant starring vehicles are both bright genre films mixing screwball comedy, crime, and adventure and both co-starring Joan Bennett still a blonde, just before dying her hair dark in Tay Garnett’s Trade Winds would change her career forever.
Wedding Present is a screwball comedy about Chicago reporters Charlie Mason and Monica “Rusty†Fleming who as the film opens are flirting with marriage, but cold feet on both their parts as well as an addiction to elaborate practical jokes are the bane of their long suffering City Editor George Bancroft, who would fire them if they weren’t such good reporters.
Which they prove in short order by angling an interview with a visiting Archduke (Gene Lockhart), taking him on a monumental toot where they end up at the lake house of aviator George Meeker. Not only do they get an exclusive interview with the Archduke, they rescue New York gangster Smiley Benson from drowning earning his eternal gratitude, and learning a ship is lost in a storm on the lake hijack Meeker and his plane managing to find the missing ship and get a double headline before the noon edition.
When Bancroft can no longer put up with either of them he retires and Grant finds himself promoted to City Editor which infuriates Bennett when she comes back from a vacation. She heads off to New York where she meets obnoxiously obvious self-help author Roger Dodacker (Conrad Nagel) and gets engaged to him so Grant quits and heads to New York to win her back with the help of Smiley and a bit of kidnapping, false fire alarms, and a renewed sense of insanity.
Appropriately the films ends as they are carried away on top of a firetruck headed for Hillview Sanitarium.
It’s almost, but not quite a prequel to His Girl Friday as you can easily see Charlie and Rusty maturing to become Walter and Hildy.
Crime is central rather than incidental to Big Brown Eyes.
In this one Bennett is Eve Fallon, a manicurist who becomes a hot shot reporter and teams with her cop boyfriend Danny Barr (Grant) to solve the murder of a child after their bickering gets her fired from her job as a manicurist.
Walter Pidgeon is Richard Morey a slick lawyer who gets Lloyd Nolan’s gangster Russ Cortig off when a stray shot results in the death of a woman’s baby (Marjorie Gateson). The bickering Eve and Danny reunite when a disgusted Danny quits the force to get Nolan and crooked lawyer Pidgeon and the result is a fast moving, fast talking, surprisingly tough little film in a minor hard-boiled key — the kind of thing George Harmon Coxe, Dwight Babcock, and Richard Sale used to write — with Grant surprisingly good as a tough smart cop operating mostly like a private eye.
Raoul Walsh was one of the most capable action directors of all time and no mean hand at comedy, so this one moves hardly pausing for a breath as the action gallops by. Maybe it wouldn’t make the pages of Black Mask, but I can imagine it in Dime Detective or Detective Fiction Weekly.
The interest here is in seeing two major stars both on the cusp of breaking big in a pair of fast acting genre films and backed with first rate co-stars in the kind of thing the studios used to turn out seemingly effortlessly.
Wedding Present recently showed up streaming on Classic Reels and Big Brown Eyes can still be found on DVD from its 2014 release. Neither movie is a classic by any means, but both stars are well represented in these films that are fast, funny, and smart full of bright dialogue, wit, and movement.
April 10th, 2021 at 4:19 pm
I see Paul Gallico mentioned above. It’s hard to ‘fathom’, but decades later he was the hard-working writer who gave us ‘Poseidon Adventure’. Unless I’m completely mistaken on the name…
April 10th, 2021 at 4:38 pm
Sports writer, novelist, Pulitzer Prize winner, and celebrity Paul Gallico wrote both bestsellers and genre fiction. Among his classics, TOO MANY GHOSTS, DAUGHTER OF THE MIND, MRS.’ARRIS GOES TO PARIS, THE THREE LIVES OF THOMASIA, THE BOY WITH THE BUBBLE GUN, ASSIGNMENT PARIS, THE ARISTOCRATS, the award winning novella THE SNOW GOOSE, and of course THE POESIDON ADVENTURE.
His series character, who was also the boss of his charwoman Mrs. ‘Arris (played by Angela Lansbury), was Alexander Hero, a ghostbuster sleuth appearing in TOO MANY GHOSTS and DAUGHTER OF THE MIND (filmed for television with Don Murray and Ray Milland), and a series of mostly humorous short adventures that inspired a short lived television series.
April 10th, 2021 at 4:44 pm
I first encountered Gallico’s name in the credits for the TV show THE ADVENTURES OF HIRAM HOLLIDAY (with Wally Cox), which was based on several stories he wrote about the character.
“Wedding Present” first appeared in The Saturday Evening Post, September 7, 1935.
He has a long entry on Wikipeda:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Gallico
April 10th, 2021 at 5:07 pm
Sorry, I confused the Hiram Holliday stories with the Hero ones, of course the series is the one Steve mentions.
April 10th, 2021 at 5:24 pm
Do you know, I never read any of the stories, and while I always thought they were comical too, Wikipedia desribed them this way:
“In the book, Holliday was rewarded with time off and a cash reward which he used to go to Europe. In Europe he fights spies and Nazis, finds his true love (and has affairs with several other women), achieves some fame as a foreign correspondent with his newspaper back in New York, and becomes the man of action he aspired to be. The book has the major themes of the protagonist coming to grips with his own character and destiny, how individuals act when confronted by great evil, and the overarching question of would war come to Europe. The book encapsulates Gallico’s views and insights at the time of writing, without the hindsight of later events – some of which turned out to be wrong and others were quite accurate.”
They may have been comical, but in essence deeper than that, or so it seems.
Of course, we are now a long way from the Cary Grant movies we might also be discussing!
April 10th, 2021 at 5:41 pm
Taking my own advice, sort of:
Joan Bennett changing the color of her hair was a career-changer, all right!
April 10th, 2021 at 6:08 pm
If you have seen TRADE WINDS the startling thing about her change of hair color is you actually see the effect it has on her character in the film. She becomes smarter, more interesting, and certainly more sexual as soon as the new look is revealed. It is a striking transformation since up to then she had been little more than an ingenue in most films.
For anyone who has missed it TRADE WINDS is a globe trotting murder mystery with famed ladies man PI Frederic March on the trail of fugitive Bennett framed for the crime by Sidney Blackmer while March’s secretary Ann Sothern and dumb cop Ralph Bellamy tag along with wisecracks popping. Director Tay Garnett had filmed his own experiences in the Pacific and used that footage in the film.
It’s a hard-boiled, romantic comedy, murder mystery, adventure, travelogue, but somehow all that works.
Re Cary Grant it is remarkable how assured he is on screen even at this point. He’s not far from his breakthrough in HOLIDAY, but these are still minor A films at most and his star is no where near as ascendant as it soon would be. He had done a lot of romantic drama up to this point and you can see how he soars in comedy.
Both films are good examples of how important those character actors are. Faces and names like Bancroft, Lockhart, Demarest, Brophy, Fowley, and Sawyer fill in the nature of the characters with just a glance or a word.
It’s a tribute to those faces that even today we can pick up on their nature with visual shorthand so the director and writers hardly have to do more than sketch them in.
April 11th, 2021 at 11:08 am
I have been trying to track down a copy of TRADE WINDS to watch, but so far without much success. I do remember seeing it on TV a long while ago, but at the moment all I’ve found are collector-to-collector copies on DVD offered for sale by people I don’t know.
Anyone with better luck, please let us know.
April 11th, 2021 at 6:34 pm
Grant did two other films that same year. Not atypical for him, or for his peers. Production cranked out the work in them days. Four, five of even six releases was commonplace for any big star, every year. What a powerhouse.
April 11th, 2021 at 7:28 pm
TRADE WINDS can be watched on Classic Reels, a streaming service for older films that runs under $5 a month available on Roku. It was available on YouTube and has shown up on TCM a few times in decent prints, I haven’t looked to see if it is available on HBOMAX TCM connection.
April 13th, 2021 at 9:48 am
Sai Shankar has found an excellent copy online at
https://ok.ru/video/1625203280621
(I haven’t quite figured out what Roku offers or does. Sometimes some websites simply stump me.)