Cary Grant as Geoff Carter and Jean Arthur as Bonnie Lee City Lights Film Series curator Ruby Berin introduces Howard Hawks’s classic and explores the way its authenticity emphasizes the core themes shared throughout the film. For a film to be considered authentic, it reflects real-life experiences and establishes a connection with the audience. It… Read more »
Poster for His Girl Friday Jesse Pasternack explains what makes Cary Grant’s work so dazzling in the indelible rom-com His Girl Friday. His Girl Friday (1940) is full of great performances. There’s the iconic and hilarious one given by Rosalind Russell, the sweet and subtly funny one given by Ralph Bellamy, as well as a… Read more »
Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief Michaela Owens defines what makes Hollywood icon Cary Grant such a fascinating and endlessly watchable star. Seeing Cary Grant’s face is a religious experience. With his impossibly deep tan, expressive chocolate-brown eyes, glistening black hair, and famously dimpled chin (who else can say they have an instantly recognizable… Read more »
Still from Rio Bravo Chris Forrester details how Rio Bravo exemplifies the term of “the hangout film” with its affable characters, softened masculinity, atypical genre tropes, and more. The films of Howard Hawks offer a sampling of many of the cinema’s great genre pleasures — film noirs, musicals, westerns, dramas, comedies, romances, war films. Were… Read more »
It is an inescapable fact that we don’t deserve Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant. Separately, together, it doesn’t matter. They were just too beautiful, too miraculous, too good. By the time I laid eyes on their second collaboration, Bringing Up Baby, in high school, I was already head over heels for Kate and Cary, but… Read more »
Though I regard Howard Hawks as one of the greatest American filmmakers and have written about the use of amorality or nihilism as a fundamental structuring principle in his comedies, the Hawks film that I might regard as his absolute greatest (on certain days, it’s my favorite) remains a very neglected title: his sublime and… Read more »