| DVD Roundup February 2007
Cary and Hugh Grant: Romantic
Icons for Different Eras
 Each era has its own love story.
Casablanca for the 1940s. From Here to Eternity for the ’50s. For the
1960s, The Graduate. For the ’70s, Annie Hall. When Harry Met Sally
for the ’80s.
But since the 1990s, something has changed. Romance movies
today are aimed at a niche audience, younger women, and that demographic is sliced even
thinner for marketing. Studio publicity seeks out younger women’s blogs and preferred
websites to promote the movies intended for them. Film critic David Denby lamented this
sort of thing in the January 8, 2007, issue of the New Yorker: "In the past,
commercially successful artists like Alfred Hitchcock, Preston Sturges, George Cukor, John
Ford, and Billy Wilder would have been astonished if anyone had told them that they could
succeed with only slivers of the audience. They thought they were working for
everybody."
Most studios have given up that notion, and the romantic
comedy, known now as the "rom com," is a good index of the change. Today’s
movies about romantic love are "date movies" that a man tolerates to show a
woman that he’s a sensitive guy. But what’s changed, exactly? What is the
difference, let’s say, between the rom com of today and the screwball comedy of
60 or 70 years ago?
He’s begun to show wear, but ever since his 1994 hit, Four
Weddings and a Funeral, the reigning male lead in the rom com has been Hugh Grant.
"The Cary Grant of the ’90s," they call him. On that cue, I decided to put
both Grants’ DVDs side by side to see why Cary’s films are "for
everybody" and why Hugh’s are "chick flicks."
Both actors have long filmographies, and all their films
are available on DVD. To my surprise, Cary Grant’s handsome face was smiling off the
shelves all over my local Blockbuster -- I easily found his early black-and-whites,
reissued by Warner Home Video, 20th Century Fox, Turner Home Entertainment, Sony, you name
it. Everybody wants a piece of Cary Grant.
It must have been Cary Grant who established that norm of
masculine beauty, "tall, dark, and handsome." It counters almost exactly the
masculinity of Hugh Grant, who’d be better described as tall, pale, and pretty. As a
leading man, Cary Grant was elegant, self-possessed, and urbane, while Hugh Grant is
rumpled, self-effacing, and naïve. Cary Grant’s movements were graceful and
deliberate. In The Philadelphia Story (1940), as the wealthy playboy, he moves
smoothly from room to room, one hand in the pocket of his perfectly tailored suit, a
casual cigarette in the other. Hugh Grant moves stiffly, his shoulders hunched, arms
crooked out at the elbows. His gestures are nervous: He pushes back his hair and covers
his mouth. As an early 19th-century cleric in Sense and Sensibility (1995), his
neck seems arthritic under his cravat, and his breeches look silly.
How could romantic leads this different both be so
successful? The differences, of course, reflect broader cultural changes. In the 45 years
between I Was a Male War Bride (1949) and Four Weddings and a Funeral, the
most relevant change has been in the status of women. Women are now at every level in the
workforce. Women have money; therefore, women are a market, and one of the products
pitched to them is romance. Of the billion valentines sent each February, 85% are sent by
women. "Romance novels make up 46 percent of all paperbacks sold," said Carol
Stacey, editor of Romance Times. One out of every two women reading books reads
romance novels.
Romance novels and, likewise, today’s romantic film
scripts unapologetically aim to fulfill fantasy. As fantasies for their time, screwball
comedies were produced during the Depression as lighthearted relief from anxiety and
defeat. The wealthy, sophisticated, powerful men played by Cary Grant appealed to men and
women alike. A frequent theme in the screwball comedy is recovering what has been lost,
often in the reunion of estranged couples. Cary Grant wins back Katharine Hepburn after
their divorce in The Philadelphia Story, and along the way teaches her how cold her
heart is. In His Girl Friday (1940), he wins back his ex-wife, Rosalind
Russell, and along the way empowers her to resume her career as a journalist. Yet in the
rapid-fire banter of the screwball comedy, the woman always keeps up and often gets ahead.
He’s devilishly handsome, but plays against his looks with plenty of pratfalls.
"A slapstick Prince Charming," Pauline Kael called him. Yet he is the engineer
who drives the plot to its happy outcome.
Hugh Grant is today’s heartthrob. He’s so
harmless, so vulnerable, so boyish -- the seduced, not the seducer. In Notting Hill
(1999), Julia Roberts plays an American film star who wanders into Grant's humble
London bookshop and soon after kisses him, just like that. It’s the old Cinderella
fantasy with the genders reversed. Even as the cad in Bridget Jones’s Diary
(2001), Hugh Grant is weak, not evil. In these underwritten Richard Curtis scripts
that have given him his screen personality, the dialogue is thin, leaving Grant to develop
his character with the stutters and blinks women seem to find endearing. A more mature
Hugh Grant plays the Prime Minister in Love, Actually (2003). Even then, when he
falls for his young secretary, he groans over his awkwardness whenever she leaves his
office. This is a kind of masculinity toward which few men would aspire. But young women,
threatened daily by media full of male treachery and random violence, find it beguiling --
as the studios have discovered.
Who can guess how movie masculinity or the rom com will
evolve in the next half century? Who will be the Hugh Grant of the 2050s? One safe bet is
that whoever tries to compare the two Grants in 50 years won’t be renting DVDs from
Blockbuster. All the so-called video formats that are becoming available -- iPods,
on-demand Internet access, Blu-ray, HD DVD -- will further segment the audience. The
question might instead be "Whose Hugh Grant of the 2050s?"
...Charlotte Meyer
charlottem@hometheatersound.com |
