THE RELEVANCE of certain classic Hollywood films for emerging nations outside the USA is a development not based on simultaneous meaning for both Americans and foreign film audiences. In other words, many Hollywood films belonging to genres like Screwball Comedies, Westerns, and Film Noirs made between the 1930s and 60s, and which were all shown in British Guiana and early Independent Guyanese cinemas during those decades, were ahead of their time for a majority of citizens of the society. It was only an Anglo-literate segment of the society — made up of both whites and non-whites, who were well educated civil servants, administrators, professionals, and a merchant class — who probably perceived the full relevance of these films to the future of their society.
No doubt, their personal appreciation and adsorption of these films heightened their own cultural and social sensitivity as exemplary individuals whose influence was exercised on mass society. However, there comes a time when the dormant relevance of these classic films in these categories becomes applicable on a mass scale socially, because, as mentioned earlier, it is only now that the personal and social development issues which certain Screwball comedies, Westerns, and Film Noirs reflected for  metropolitan societies, have emerged on an increasing scale in developing nations like contemporary Guyana, where, if deprived of intelligent stimulating cultural items like these Screwball comedy films which cushion the shock of traditional female roles beginning to evolve, social coherence and tolerance between the sexes locally can tend to descend into incomprehension and even tragic violence ( this exists alarmingly in Guyana today) towards an upsurge of female independence and personal freedom.

Grant & Director Hawks
Cary Grant, it is safe to say, would never have made some of his most attractive and memorable films, or become one of the screen’s most interesting leading men, had he not worked with a director like Howard Hawks. Grant’s teamwork as an actor, along with director Hawks in the late 30s, 40s, and early 50s, and actresses like Katherine Hepburn, Jean Arthur, Rosalind Russell, Ginger Rogers and Marilyn Monroe produced quality a films that were great crowd pleasers, and Hawks was respected as a highly individualistic film director freelancing to film studios like RKO, Columbia, and MGM.
Grant, in selecting to work with scripts developed by Hawks, would project a utopian style of acting he was developing. Hawks’ creative interests coincided with Grant’s emphasis on the bare human qualities of a man: His behaviour, his mental disposition, his ability to get along with others, his interest in his personal appearance, his interest and commitment to his work, his tolerance and pleasantness towards women as free individuals, his lack of interest in political or sociological definitions of people as a class.
This is typical Howard Hawks film territory, where a vision of people as individual identities rather than rich or poor members of a ‘class’ defined their actions and drives the story. We see this in ‘ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS’ of 1939, Hawks’ unique adaption of the famous novel, ‘Vol de Nuit’, or ‘Night Flight’ by Antoine de Saint Exupery, one of France’s best 20th Century novelists and a famous pilot. Grant, as one of the 1930s airmen who pioneered the delivery of mail through adverse conditions between overseas and South America, showed us another side of his functional, practical yet debonair personality; this time in khakis, on tropical wharves, among stevedores and tramp steamers loading ground provisions, in workers taverns, etc.

Jean Arthur & Rosalind Russell
Here he is pursued by a typical Hawks female played by the down-to-earth Jean Arthur, who knows his commitment to his work denies her need for attention, yet she will not act ignored or mistreated, but backs him up in silent understanding. Obviously the masses in South America liked this film.
‘ONLY ANGELS HAVE WINGS’ remains a type of socially egalitarian film classic rarely made today. In Hawks’ ‘HIS GIRL FRIDAY’ of 1940, Grant is simply amazing as the energetic, tricky and hilarious newspaper editor who uses every trick to convince his favourite zesty female reporter (and secret love), Rosalind Russell, at her witty, independent best, from retiring into marriage and bourgeois family life with a man who does not really know her true personality that well.
‘HIS GIRL FRIDAY’ is a masterpiece of acting and directing. Grant, in the 40s, would move on to new profound work with British director Alfred Hitchcock, but Hawks caught up with him again in 1952 for ‘MONKEY BUSINESS’, perhaps the last and one of the best Screwball Comedies, where Grant, as the obsessed lab technician looking for a youth-enhancing elixir, accidentally drinks a formula mixed randomly, but correctly, by a monkey in his lab and becomes a skirt-chasing bohemian adolescent.
‘MONKEY BUSINESS’ is one of the most enjoyable films of Grant’s movie utopianism, which is not a future political state of fantasy, but the dedication of men and women to everyday work, pleasure, and satisfaction, right now, in the present.