Matinee idol

Off to the National Film Theatre for Cary Grant in Howard Hawks' 1948 film I Was a Male War Bride.

All-American star Cary Grant (actually Englishman Archibald Leach) was immensely tall, extraordinarily suave, and always, always played himself. It was a class act.

In this film he is, nominally, Captain Rochard, a French Army economics expert.

He and his US Army driver, Ann Sheridan's Lt Gates, bicker like an old married couple and seem to hate each other when, of course, they are, as we know, destined to fall in love and live happily ever after.

But first they have to get there, and despite being immensely funny this is really a bleak, dark film about how the bureaucracy of the state grinds down every man, no matter how noble and decent, into a cog in the bureaucratic machine.

As the film progresses we see Grant's powerful, independent man forced into ever more cramped and physically unsuitable spaces (from an absurdly tiny motorcycle sidecar to uncomfortable wooden chairs and to bathtubs which must serve as beds):

This makes it sound too worthy. It is, above all, a delirious (and late-flowering) screwball comedy, and Grant's enforced female impersonation is one of the highlights of cinema:

He is not, by any means, a pretty woman, so his act stands in sharp contrast to what Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis would achieve a decade later in Some Like it Hot.

Cary Grant: he was some kind of a man.