BEHIND Grant’s roles in his final unforgettable films of the 50s and 60s, there exists this interesting question: Of what use are films (apart from being a commercial production) if not to bring the human condition closer to an individual and social experience of understanding and love?
In 1957, Grant reunited with director Leo McCarey for one of his most emotionally memorable films, ‘AN AFFAIR TO REMEMBER’. The title says it all, both for the main characters played by Grant and Deborah Kerr, and a supposedly sensitive audience. McCarey, of course, is the director who gave Grant his first hit movie: ‘THE AWFUL TRUTH’ in 1937. McCarey was a director who started off making his name with ‘Screwball comedies’; his close rival who shared his love of gags and social comedy was Frank Capra; but whereas Capra developed into a champion of classless individualism, McCarey developed into a non-ideological friend simply of people; an observer and recorder of their often contradictory or ambiguous circumstances.
McCarey’s cinematic strongpoint was sharply effective moments which leapt right off the screen into our functional real lives. This was right up Grant’s alley in 1957, when his Utopian theme was no longer his alone, but combined with small circles of characters, each of whom would contribute their own style of human magnanimity to each film.

‘An Affair to Remember’
The beauty and power of ‘An Affair to Remember’, in which Grant is an aspiring painter, single, rests on the film’s poignant rendering of three characters: Grant, an elderly cultured lady who is an old friend, and Deborah Kerr, with whom Grant meets on an ocean liner commuting between New York and Europe and falls in love. When they separate, they carry within themselves feelings of attachment and love despite the distance between themselves and their locations.
Grant’s movie reputation as a ladies man soared higher after ‘An Affair to Remember’, not because of any scenes of steamy passion, but because of Grant’s graceful subjection to both women’s feminine and human qualities. We, the audience, are left exposed to a high exemplary civilized form of human sentiment and compassionate behaviour. This is the precious gift of   Cary Grant’s Utopian acting, and the films which delivered it. Their influence is their art, nothing else.

‘Houseboat’
Grant was definitely not a studio-defined academic actor, and ‘HOUSEBOAT’ of 1958 hints at the use, not the first time in his career, of his real life experiences. ‘Houseboat’ is one of the most unusual and unique films in Grant’s entire career, and this is supported by the fact that obscure director Melville Shavelson’s film, with its unusual subject and characterization nevertheless interested Grant.
‘Houseboat’ is a brilliant example of balanced civilized standards combining discipline and permissiveness, where a free-spirited Italian girl — Sophia Loren in one of her characteristic zesty roles —  evokes preserved rustic pride and wisdom, where Grant as the urbane intellectual,  a flexible nomadic single widowed father of three children, adjusts to Loren’s unconventional foreign values, and where an old wooden houseboat on a backwoods river becomes the basis of a surprisingly enjoyable life often stereotyped as bohemian unconventionality.

B.G. rumour
How much did Grant’s real-life experiences attract him to Shavelson’s ‘Houseboat’? There is evidence that in the 1950s, before he made ‘Houseboat’, Grant had suffered from  career fatigue in Europe, and was sent on a long transatlantic voyage by ocean liner back to North America via the South American north coast and Panama canal. That passenger ship would have docked at many coastal ports, and one important Anglo one was Georgetown,  British Guiana’s seaport capital at the mouth of the Demerara River.
There are accounts among old Georgetown cinema buffs of Grant walking down Georgetown riverside streets like Lombard and Water Streets, alongside which his ship would have docked for a day at least. Grant had apparently donned khakis and a felt hat, with his hands in his pockets, and his usual gregarious self. Furthermore, Grant was a visiting friend to director Stanley Kramer’s Hollywood home, whose live-in housekeeper was a Guyanese lady.
But when we look at ‘Houseboat’, it paradigmatically hints at several rustic qualities which are evident in Guyanese life. The film itself was quite popular among middle-class and young bohemian Georgetown film fans for years, when it was constantly rerun at various cinemas.

Last classics
1958 also saw Grant unite again with Ingrid Bergman under Stan Donen’s direction of ‘INDISCREET’, and in 1963 with Audrey Hepburn in ‘CHARADE’. Both films made him more loved as a guide towards  individual feelings of self-worth, tolerance, intellectual and cultural values, diplomatic simplicity, elegance, and cool charm. But it was his rematch with Hitchcock for ‘NORTH BY NORTHWEST’ of 1959 which brought Grant’s career to a stunning climax, where, as an innocent gentleman used as a pawn in political espionage, he is untangled by the beautiful Eva Marie Saint in one of the screen’s most  memorable chic and sensually sophisticated moments on a train.
Cary Grant, the actor who made himself one of the greatest cinematic stars against much odds, receiving in 1970 a lifetime achievement Academy Award, became more than a photogenic matinee idol: He became a bearer of Utopian values on an individual and social level.
When he turned a father at 62, with an actress less than half his age, his young-at-heart status beyond the generation gap was confirmed.
On Facebook today, we see young new directors, actresses, actors, photographers, struggling to develop and achieve the same distinct individual look and presentation of classic stars like John Garfield, James Dean, Montgomery Clift, Katherine Hepburn, Joan Crawford, Ava Gardner, Elizabeth Taylor, etc.
The desperate commercial seeking of weird outrageous character roles of little real-life contribution is quite stale by now. Newness, freshness, seems preserved in cinematic achievements largely hidden away in classic vaults.
The brightest, most seriously talented of the young cinematic artists are beginning to feel the attraction of cinema’s undying Utopian quest once pursued by actors like Cary Grant… Is anyone listening?