Flawed film pursues enigma of actor Cary Grant.
Cary Grant was one of the best-known celebrities of the 20th century — to everyone, it seems, but himself.
The former Archie Leach invented a persona from the raw materials of charm, talent, ambition and good looks but spent much of his life searching for peace of mind, he wrote in an unpublished memoir.
The film icon is the subject of the informative but not very well-made documentary “Becoming Cary Grant,” directed by Mark Kidel and airing Friday on Showtime.
Archie was 11 when his mother suddenly disappeared from his life in Bristol, England, with no explanation from his father other than that she had gone to the seashore. In fact, Elias Leach had his wife, Elsie, committed to an asylum, where she was diagnosed with “mania” and said by her husband to believe there were several women concealed in their home. Soon after, Elias decamped to Southampton where he started a second family and left Archie to be raised by his grandmother.
Kidel frames the film with Grant’s welldocumented LSD therapy sessions when he was in his early 50s, during which he connected with his childhood, concluded that his inability to trust women was his way of punishing his mother for abandoning him and eventually came to feel empathy for both his parents.
The film includes commentary from his daughter Jennifer Grant, his last wife, Barbara (Harris) Jaynes, longtime friend Judy Balaban and authors David Thomson and Mark Glancy.
Jonathan Pryce provides Grant’s voice, reading passages of the memoir.
Kidel makes good use of clips from several Grant films at times, but at other times, Kidel goes terribly off the rails. On the plus side, a clip from “None But the Lonely Heart” shows Grant playing the Cockney he could have become had he not reinvented himself. The scene includes a photo of Grant’s father, placed at the actor’s request, on the wall of the set.
On the minus side, we get the far too obvious use of the scene in Howard Hawks’ “Bringing Up Baby,” when Grant’s character is wearing a frilly negligee and proclaims, “I just went gay all of a sudden” as we are hearing from Thomson that Grant may have questioned his sexuality at times in his life. That clip segues into David Huxley (Grant) telling Susan Vance (Katharine Hepburn) of the importance of finding “my bone! My intercostal clavicle!”
Elsewhere, as we are hearing about Grant’s mistrust of women, we get a scene from “Blonde Venus” showing Marlene Dietrich emerging from a gorilla costume.
Other ham-fisted filmmaking touches include extinguishing a candle flame when we hear that Elias Leach has died in 1935 and, unrelentingly, waves breaking on a sandy beach over and over again throughout the film for dramatic effect that becomes ludicrous.
The film is informative, though, and is graced by home movie footage shot by Grant himself. We don’t always know who is in the footage, but it gives us a good sense of the times while contrasting, appropriately, with the inner restlessness expressed in Grant’s memoir.
“There was a void in my life, a sadness of spirit that affected everything I did,” he wrote, but after the LSD sessions, states, “At last I was close to happiness.”
The documentary adds to the mountain of information about Grant and brings us somewhat closer to understanding who he really was. But it’s likely aspects of both Archie Leach and Cary Grant will remain an enigma forever.