Tuesday with Cary Grant

None But the Lonely Heart

See this grim motion picture to understand who was Cary Grant. It’s not an especially good, let alone great, film. It is melodramatic, pedantic and overacted. The audience is never fully invested in the characters. Direction by playwright Clifford Odets suffocates the drama. But this interesting mother-son picture with leftist ideals contains compelling scenes.

You can do worse than watching an overlong movie with Jane Wyatt—the warm mother in TV’s Father Knows Best—Ethel Barrymore and Cary Grant. The simple story of a son gone wrong (Mr. Grant) doing right by his cancer-stricken mother (Barrymore) gets mired in subplots, superfluous scenes and self-conscious production. The film’s poverty-themed class struggle in black-and-white with brick buildings by street lamps emitting glows of cinematic lighting is skewed. London’s east end is too staged. You know it’s bound to be bleak by the way Mother looks at her son’s dog.

Peace, that’s what I’m looking for. I want peace. With happy hearts and straight bones without dirt and distress. Surprises you, don’t it? Peace—that’s what us millions want, without having to snatch it from the smaller dogs. Peace—to be not a hound and not a hare. But peace—with pride to have a decent human life, with all the trimmings.”

This is from Cary Grant’s big speech. It’s not bad as character motivation. Whatever its digs against capitalism—and Ginger Rogers’s mother, Lela, was on the right track in telling a congressional committee in 1947 that the film’s blatantly anti-capitalist—None But the Lonely Heart tries hard (too hard) to be sympathetic. In certain scenes, such as a bird that’s living in one moment and dead in the next, it’s easy to empathize.

But events feel artificial, not true to life. When Cary Grant utters such lines as “you’re not going to get me to work ‘ere and squeeze pennies out of little people poorer than I am,” it comes off as rehearsed, not organic. According to Graham McCann, (Cary Grant: A Class Apart, Columbia University Press, 1996), Cary Grant became personally invested—probably over-invested—in None But the Lonely Heart:

[Cary Grant] gave careful instructions to the set designers, ensuring that the dimensions and decor matched those of the sitting rooms and bedrooms he had once inhabited in Bristol,” McCann writes. “He wanted low dark ceilings to emphasize the claustrophobic atmosphere of life in the old east end, with narrow cobblestone streets and cramped semi-attached houses. He had firsthand knowledge of what it was like to be poor, to want to break free, to find a better life, and he wanted that knowledge to be utilized.”

Playwright Odets used a race-against-time theme with timepieces, such as London’s Big Ben—as a suspense builder. Using time as a leitmotif is not uncommon in pictures, from 2008’s excellent The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to the recent PBS adaptation of Around the World in 80 Days, Atlas Shrugged and High Noon—but too many visual, character and plot devices are laid on too thick. A climactic scene with an ex-husband’s threat is the most honest in terms of writing, acting and theme.

As young Archie Leach, according to David Thomson in his New Biographical Dictionary of Film, Cary Grant’s mother had a mental breakdown when he was 12. Archie “found his education at the Bristol Hippodrome with a troupe of acrobats.” He came to America as a tumbler in 1920.

None But the Lonely Heart, based on the novel by Richard Llewellyn (who wrote How Green Was My Valley) and released in the fall of 1944, did not launch him into the dramatic acting career Cary Grant is supposed to have sought. It’s too maudlin. But it is essentially too self-conscious and scattered in the storytelling. The horror that comes with poverty—born of socialism, not capitalism, as a matter of fact—echoes from the movie’s title tune, taken from Russian composer Tchaikovsky’s music of the same name and sampled by the Jane Wyatt character on a cello.

“It’s up to the young to make a better world,” someone says in this downcast but serious and watchable mother-themed film, “one fit for a human life.” If only None But the Lonely Heart had had been able to dramatize its convictions with confidence.