The late movie star Cary Grant has famously noted: “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant. Even I want to be Cary Grant.”
The most iconic leading man from Hollywood’s Golden Age, Cary Grant himself struggled to live up to his on-screen persona, on which he worked hard for decades.
Talented and versatile, Grant and his suave charm excelled in romantic films, suspenseful thrillers, and screwball comedies.
To celebrate the release of Archie, here are six of Grant’s best movies.
Four of Cary Grant Best Movies
Bringing Up Baby (1938)
Nobody mastered madcap comedy quite like Cary Grant, the former vaudeville performer.
He plays a bespectacled paleontologist near the completion of a brontosaurus skeleton. But to find the remaining bone—the intercostal clavicle!—he must team up with a whirlwind socialite (Hepburn). Naturally, mishaps galore befall them both during their adventure.
This film marked the first of Grant’s 5 films with director Howard Hawks and the second with Hepburn (after 1936’s Sylvia Scarlett). They’d reunite again in 1938’s Holiday.
Arsenic and Old Lace (1944)
Frank Capra-directed surreal comedy as one of her favorites.
Based on the long-running play (and a precursor to The Munsters and The Addams Family), it features Grant as the straight man dealing with the chaos around him. His Mortimer Brewster is trying to wed his fiancée (Priscilla Lane) when he learns that his two seemingly eccentric aunts are actually serial killers who serve arsenic-laced elderberry wine to put lonely old bachelors out of their misery.
And just when things can’t get nuttier, a look-alike of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein monster shows up.
North by Northwest (1959)
The fourth and final collaboration between Grant and Hitchcock is also their most gripping and entertaining–also their most commercial picture!
Grant stars as an ordinary white-collar ad executive who’s mistaken for a secret agent named “George Kaplan.” He’s shortly kidnapped, taken to a Long Island estate, interrogated about being a spy and then left for dead via a fake drunk-driving accident. He ends up on a tense cross-country journey that includes a chase atop Mount Rushmore. And the menacing crop-duster plane swooping over him in a cornfield remains an indelible American cinema moment.
To Catch a Thief (1955)
Grant’s John Robie, a retired cat burglar known for snatching precious jewels, discovers that someone is impersonating him. His only way out of the mess is to catch the imposter in the act. The No. 1 suspect? A rich American widower (Jessie Royce Landis) and her gorgeous daughter, Frances (Grace Kelly). A cat-and-mouse game ensues even as the attraction between John and Frances intensifies.
