BEFORE: I saw something brilliant in a promo for the Encore Channel, which is running James Bond films this month, and having some kind of web-based poll to determine the best Bond film. To promote this, they took footage from one Bond film, where Pierce Brosnan was chasing an enemy down a ski slope, and edited it together with footage from another Bond film, where Roger Moore's Bond was being chased BY and enemy down a ski slope. The end result was a "Bond vs. Bond" sequence, ending with Bond escaping from Bond by jumping off a cliff and parachuting away. Another promo had two Bonds chasing each other on speedboats, and I love this idea. Make a feature-length film cutting together footage from 5 different Bonds, and I'd watch that. Anyway, I've already determined through my unscientific process that the best Bond films are "Die Another Day", "Casino Royale" (the more recent one) and "Skyfall" in a 3-way tie.
Now back to the (M)Archie Madness tournament to discover the best Cary Grant film - it's Grant vs. Grant, aka Cary Nation, aka Archie Rivals. It's day 9, but I still have another two weeks to go.
THE PLOT: A high school girl falls for a playboy artist with screwball results.
AFTER: I suppose you could do the same thing with Cary Grant romantic comedies, at least the ones that are in black and white - edit together footage from several films of Grant romancing different women to make a completely new plotline. This is possible because so many of the films hit the same notes, with love triangles and deceptions and blind infatuation. The teen girl here being enamored with Grant's character seems to fall along the same lines as Betsy Drake's salesgirl being enamored with Grant's pediatrician in "Every Girl Should Be Married".
It's one step forward and two steps back for feminism tonight, as an older woman plays a judge, but her younger sister is so infatuated with older men that her own career choices are determined by whatever man she happens to be falling for at the time, who happen to be the men who lecture at her school. One day she wants to be an environmental scientist, the next an interior designer, and when she falls for an artist, who she literally envisions as her knight in shining armor, she can't think of a higher calling than being an artist's model and muse. She comes from a family of judges and court officials, so of course they want her to practice law.
Meanwhile, the older sister who's a judge tried the very same artist in court earlier the SAME DAY (what are the odds?) after his flirting with several women in a nightclub led to fisticuffs. A dust-up. A donnybrook. You know, a real brouhaha. It seems he's had several women posing for him, and they all find him hard to forget - must be his brushstroke technique, if you know what I mean. So the older sister knows what he's all about, but when she realizes her younger sister has fallen for him, she realizes that discouraging their romance will only throw them together, and putting him in jail would only make him a martyr, so instead her family enlists him to date the high-school girl for real, figuring that once she gets what she wants, she'll tire of him within a few days and move on to something else.
Most of the time you'd imagine that a teenage girl's family would discourage an older man from dating her, so I'm not sure I follow the logic, but hey, at least it's sort of a new approach. In the meantime the much older Cary Grant has to do teen things like watch basketball games and go to picnics, where he takes part in sack races and three-legged races (remember them?) against the district attorney, who's sort of dating the judge - it seems like that would be a massive conflict of interest, doesn't it? It seems like he's doing all this to impress the teen sister, but really he's competing for the attention of the older sister, because even though she's a professional career-oriented woman, she also eventually sees him as the knight in shining armor. Umm, hurray for women?
It's true in geometry as well as romance films - a love rectangle is really just two love triangles put together. That may be how they start, but it's not how they tend to finish. There's a succession of love rivals all meeting up in a nightclub here, which I was sure would also end with a fight and another trial (disappointingly, it didn't) - that would have made perfect sense and created some symmetry with the earlier trial. Instead there's an attempt by the D.A. to arrest the artist, and he ends up fleeing town, with a sort of a romantic resolution, but not really. A lot of loose ends here, which seems rather sloppy.
Also starring Myrna Loy (also Cary-ing over from "Mr. Blanding Builds His Dream House"), Shirley Temple, Rudy Vallee (last seen in "How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying"), Ray Collins, Harry Davenport (last seen in "Foreign Correspondent"), Johnny Sands.
RATING: 4 out of 10 birthday cakes
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