(Credit: Wikimedia)
Cary Grant made everything look effortless. Rapid-fire banter, acrobatics, and the art of seduction never looked so elegant and breezy as they did when he performed them on-screen. He was the consummate Hollywood leading man and the yardstick for all leading men who came after, even when they defined themselves in opposition to him.
Throughout his decades in the industry, Grant starred in a dizzying array of classic movies, including His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, North by Northwest, and Charade. It’s safe to assume that it wasn’t a coincidence. Without the actor in the lead roles, many of these films probably wouldn’t have endured as long as they have. Sure, they benefited from clever scripts and charismatic co-stars, but not many actors could rise to the occasion of Howard Hawks’s head-spinningly quick-witted His Girl Friday or held his own opposite Audrey Hepburn in Stanley Donen’s European caper, Charade.
However, there was one film that even Grant could not elevate. Early in his career, when he was just finding his footing in Hollywood, he had even less input on the roles he was given than usual within the studio system. Paramount thought that he was the perfect candidate to play serious young men, and forced him into a string of mediocre films in which he had zero personality.
The worst of these, according to Grant, came in 1934. “Born to Be Bad, which I made on loan to Fox, was sheer awfulness,” he said in an interview with James Bawden. “I was a pig farmer and Loretta Young a hard-boiled single mother. Jean Harlow just refused to do it.” It was not, he concluded, something that could be called “a Cary Grant film.”
Directed by Lowell Sherman and Jack Conway, Born to Be Bad was indeed awful. It was part of a trend of Hollywood movies at the time about ‘fallen women’ just before the Hays Code made such topics as unwed mothers, teenage pregnancy, and sex work off-limits.
Mae West was the undisputed poster child of the period, rattling off filthy double entendres that are saucy even by today’s standards. One of her most famous quips was levelled at Grant in 1933’s She Done Him Wrong. Giving him a sultry once-over, she drawls, “Why don’t you come up sometime and see me?”
Jean Harlow was the other pre-Code temptress, often cast in slightly more vulnerable roles. It’s hardly surprising that she turned down the role of Letty, a former teenage runaway who fell pregnant at 15 and tries to swindle Grant’s character out of his fortune. The film is a second-rate melodrama with too many twists and unearned emotional epiphanies to make much sense, and Grant is utterly wasted as a blackmail victim.
It was a mere stepping stone for him, fortunately. Within two short years, he landed his breakout role in the George Cukor film Sylvia Scarlett, his first pairing with Katharine Hepburn that would lead to one of his most enduring collaborations. “George Cukor said he saw something behind my smoothness,” Grant reflected, adding, “I loved the part and George helped me unwind… I wasn’t just a nice young man with good teeth any longer.”
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