None But the Lonely Heart

Another Cary Grant film resurrected by Turner Classic Movies in their monthlong festival of Oscar winners, this was especially interesting for its rarity and the fact that Archie/Cary was said to have identified with this part more than any other in his career. Indeed he initiated the project by convincing his friend Clifford Odets to adapt the script from a Richard Llewellyn novel, and direct for the first time. Odets lays on his trademark gutter poetry a bit thick, as the actors do the Cockney accents, and the atmosphere is murky (whether it’s the London fog, the unrestored age of the film, or inadequate digital transmission by satellite or DVR), plus the story is overloaded with some suggestion that our jaunty but beset interwar hero will become the unknown soldier of WWII, but nonetheless I found this gripping to watch throughout. Unlike The Talk of the Town, for example, here Cary Grant negotiates the tragicomic to perfection. His Ernie Mott is both funny and moving, an inveterate drifter who settles with his mother in the East End when he finds out she is dying. Ethel Barrymore is superb as the mother, and won an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. June Duprez is the odd but affecting, proto-noir femme fatale, and Jane Wyatt the bright-eyed but too-good-to-be-true neighborhood girl. Even Barry Fitzgerald is believable as the the older-but-wiser friend. It’s all very theatrical, but with an undercurrent of reality and surprise. (1944, TCM/T, n.) *7-*