Becoming Cary Grant

Disappointing dreck. Lots of half baked theories backed up by little more than embarrassing film clips used in the most ludicrous metaphorical fashion. The musical score wouldn't have made it onto a B-film melodrama. Might have been nice if they identified the people we see on screen. Only Judy Balaban is introduced. Watching pictures of San Simeon probably taken by Grant. Of course they're not identified and were most likely taken a decade before he met Betsy Drake whose segment they feature in. Really useless nonsense.

Not every movie is for everybody. If you're a die hard Cary Grant fanatic and wanted it to be just documenting everything he did in life, you're gonna be disappointed. This is merely exploring his pursuit of happiness. It's fascinating hearing about the things that had happened in his past and how they shaped him to become who he was. It's also very meaningful to me to have movies like this. It's a unique perspective and it made me think and feel heavily. Which is something I really love from a movie, and if you do too then you might like it.

I hate not giving it 10 stars, but definitely as far as film making goes it's not award winning. Still great nonetheless.

The Cary Grant/Archibald Leach story is a treasure trove almost impossible to fail at. In fact it's such a compelling story that despite the failings of the director one does stay through to the end watching this tale. And personally I don't have a problem with missing bits of the story like other reviewers do or with the somber tone of the story. The somber tone, is an integral part of Cary's life, and as long as the director tells the story I think he does have the right to omit parts that don't fit into the story he wishes to tell.

On the other hand I did find his pretentiousness very annoying. Having such a wonderful source material the director Mark Kidel had to show how he entered Cary Grant's mind and deciphered his innermost secrets. So he keeps on showing us scenes from Grant's therapeutic sessions with LSD pretending he knows what Grant saw there. It's groundless, pretentious and completely unnecessary for the story itself. But it's being repeated over and over again, and I found it to be detrimental to the movie

The main selling points for this doco are clips from Cary Grant's own home movies and excerpts from his unpublished memoir. But the home movies are are unremarkable at best, dull at worst. And the memoir extracts seem more like Grant's attempts to conceal, rather than reveal himself. The documentary accepts at face value what Grant says about his various marriages, while never even addressing all the indications that Grant was gay - not the plain fact that he shared a house and his life with Randolph Scott for 12 years, nor the revelations in Orry-Kelly's unpublished memoir about Grant's gay relationships in his New York years. At the same time this film attempt to analyse Grant's screen persona through the prism of the actor's private life - incomplete and questionable though the picture they've presented is. It's all highly dubious, and does no justice to either the actor or the man.

How can you do this "documentary" without discussing the years he lived with Randolph Scott. I heard not one reference to this part of his life. I don't know if they were gay or not, and I don't really care, but I've read they had a very close relationship.

The film is incomplete without it.