None But the Lonely Heart

Ernie Mott (Cary Grant) is an irresponsible vagrant roaming the streets of London. His father had died in the Great War. His mother (Ethel Barrymore) runs a small shop by herself. He plays the piano, fools around with a gangster's ex Ada Brantline (June Duprez), and has a friendship with nice neighborhood girl Aggie Hunter (Jane Wyatt). After learning about her mother's cancer, he stays to run the shop despite their combative past.

Ernie is not really an appealing character and that's tough to do for Cary Grant. I'm also annoyed by his relationship with Ada. I want more time with Aggie and have more love triangle action. The character would be appealing as an exuberant youth struggling to find his way in the world. Cary Grant was 40 by then. I can see this as a lower class melodrama like a Mike Leigh movie but Cary Grant doesn't really fit the role. It's interesting nevertheless.

I found this movie to be very painful to watch. It is not your typical Hollywood, let's glamorise everything, everyone has money, let's make it look pretty. These people are grindingly poor, the mother is dying of cancer, and our boy is trying to be his own man, without money or position. Tuning pianos seems like a difficult way to earn a living, but makes use of the only talent he really has, which is perfect pitch. For those who don't know, it is the ability to name any tone or note that you hear. This movie has a great supporting cast, Barry Fitzgerald and Jane Wyatt, just to mention two. Grant's mother is one of my favorite actresses, Ethel Barrymore. She really has too much class for the part she plays. And the sets make you glad you don't have to live there. Still memorable, though, in spite of being so depressing.

Cary Grant wanted to do something different than being a comedic or romantic leading man. He'd have liked to do more serious things like None But the Lonely Heart a good deal more frequently.

In point of fact Grant understood the character of Ernie Mott far better than any of his other more upper class characters. Ernie Mott was the kind of fellow Cary would have run into back in the days when he was Archie Leach. Grant came from a hardscrabble background growing up in London. In many ways Cary Grant was the greatest role he ever played.

Grant had played cockneys before on the screen, but in a more comic vein in Sylvia Scarlett and Gunga Din. However what we've got in None But the Lonely Heart is far more serious.

It's an original screenplay by Clifford Odets and adapted from a novel by Richard Llewellyn who also wrote How Green Was My Valley. Odets was at that time a sensation on Broadway with a whole string of dramas of social significance from the Thirties. The grinding effects of poverty are just about the same whether it's the Lower East Side of New York or the cockney slums of London. Odets also directed this film, one of only two times he did that.

Grant understood that very well and he turned in one bravura performance as Ernie Mott who wants desperately to get ahead and makes a few bad choices in trying to do so. The only one who understands him is his mother played by Ethel Barrymore who returned to the screen for the first time in a decade.

It was a great performance for Cary Grant and it lost a fortune for RKO Studios as the public as Sam Goldwyn said, stayed away in droves. They would not accept Grant in a dramatic part. Cary got his second and last nomination for Best Actor, but lost the Academy Award to Bing Crosby in Going My Way.

Ethel Barrymore won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar that year for this film. It led to a permanent break from the stage and she spent the rest of her life in Hollywood in a variety of films. Unlike brother Lionel she wasn't tied down to a long term contract to one studio and she picked and chose wisely in roles when she stayed in Hollywood.

George Coulouris is the best from the rest of the cast as a small time racketeer in the neighborhood who Grant gets mixed up with. Coulouris always exudes menace, one of the best in doing that.

What happened to Cary Grant is the same thing that happened to Tyrone Power when he appeared in Nightmare Alley, great critical reviews and the public wouldn't buy it. Both of those guys were limited by type casting their entire careers. Power did manage to do Witness for the Prosecution at the premature end of his career, the closest Grant did to a dramatic part after this was Crisis which also was a commercial flop.

Cary Grant reinvented himself as a Hollywood film star with an American accent, but before he did that, his real name was Archie Leach, from Bristol, and as English as they come. In this film, he returns to his roots and very successfully plays an Englishman. The film is a very moving and effective story about a young man reluctantly coming to terms with what it means to be responsible and sensible, and giving up a rather wild and unconstrained existence which was leading nowhere. It is superbly directed by the playwright Clifford Odets, who also wrote the screenplay, which is based upon a novel by the Welshman Richard Llewellyn, who is more famous for his novel HOW GREEN WAS MY VALLEY (filmed in 1941). This was one of only two films directed by Odets, the other being fifteen years later, THE STORY ON PAGE ONE (1959, which is such a bad film I did not bother to review it). However, this earlier directorial achievement by Odets was really one to be proud of, and totally works. The film takes its title from the famous song by Pyotr Tchaikovsky, a tune played by the character Aggie Hunter in the film, who is sensitively played by Jane Wyatt. Wyatt plays the cello herself on screen. The same theme tune is also played on the piano by Cary Grant, also really playing the instrument himself. Another excellent pianist/actor appears in the film, Dan Duryea, but he only has a small part and does not play any music. This film is remarkable for the stunning performance by Helen Duprez as a steamy and passionate gal who falls for Cary Grant. Helen Duprez is so amazing in this film that she equals Gloria Grahame for effortlessly conveying intense sensuality on the screen, just by the way she talks, looks, and moves. It is one of the great tragedies of the cinema that Helen Duprez's career misfired (see the account in her bio on IMDb), for she was truly in a class of her own. Anyone interested in the history of screen passion without bedroom scenes needs to study this performance, and see how it is done. Clifford Odets obviously knew how to get Duprez's magic out of her, by gaining her confidence and giving her the necessary encouragement. Although it was Ethel Barrymore, who played Cary Grant's mother, who got the Oscar for her performance in this film, that Oscar should really have gone to Helen Duprez. That is not to say that Ethel Barrymore's performance is not marvellous, for it is. She shows extreme subtlety in a part which a lesser actress would have played with broad strokes and would have hammed it up. This is a wonderfully successful film which deserves to be more widely known.

Thanks to American Movie Classics for bringing us this fine old film. With script and direction by Clifford Odets, success is almost guaranteed going in, and it is ensured in the event by the fine performances of Ethel Barrymore and Cary Grant, who in Ernie Mott plays one of his most substantial roles. Set in the underbelly of between-wars London, this multifaceted story has engrossing characters and a story that draws us in. The inconclusive ending puts it more or less in the category of 'slice-of-life' drama, but what a slice. Worth watching.