GOLDEN AGE ACTOR

ISAAC RECREATES HOLLYWOOD GOLDEN BOY FOR BETTER OR WORSE

By PETER THOMAS BUSCH

Cary Grant and Dyan Cannon star in the four-part British television series Archie (2023).

That’s just how good Jason Isaac and Laura Aikman are as the biographical Hollywood actors.

Isaac plays Grant in his twilight years on stage as part of a swan song personal appearance tour. Grant is doing a stream of consciousness performance with the audience asking him questions that lead him to anecdotes and a bit of deadpan humor about him having sex with women, plural.

This format allows Grant free moments to reflect.

Director Paul Andrew Williams then takes everyone back to Grant’s childhood living in poverty in Bristol, England.

Grant’s father was a bit of a shit, so the young boy began earning his own money in a vaudeville act that eventually led him out of the neighbourhood and across the ocean to near Broadway in New York City.

The first episode spends a lot of time on these formative years and how Grant changed his name from Archie Leach on his way to becoming a big star with a five year Hollywood film contract.

Grant became one of the greatest screen actors during the Golden Age of Hollywood because producers were taken by his good looks. But the rising star could also act, clown around a bit and bring in the audience with the development of a genuine heart felt screen character.

Several film scripts capitalize on this appeal by trapping the character in compromising positions and making him an early suspect of moral wrongdoing.

Isaac recreates the screen character with that iconic speech and often whimsical smile that compliments some gentle body language and hand gestures.

Williams runs the past in the flashbacks against the present on stage until the past catches up to the present. The director even ever so briefly magically splits time and space with the young vaudeville actor running toward the screen star on the same set in the same scene sequence.

The dramatization of home movies is used as scene transitions and narrative twists that often require a second look to verify whether the character captured on the home movie camera is Isaac or Grant.

The script offers a good balance between telling of an acting career and a personal life until Grant seemingly decides to start again at his Hollywood Hills mansion with Dyan Cannon.

The humor that made Grant so endearing as a screen icon is ever present until the relationship with Cannon shows how difficult Grant was to live with after a third divorce and an established icon being set in his ways wanting things a certain way.

Grant is very much Cannon’s senior with Cannon as a result not being all that overwhelmed by the connection initially. But Grant falls in love at first sight and incrementally wins her love over until quickly falling through a 4^th divorce over petty differences and just a selfish spoiled need to do everything exactly the way he wanted it done.

Cannon, though, seems to save Grant’s life by having a daughter with him. Being a father gives Grant a greater sense of belonging and accomplishment in the world than his Hollywood career gave him at the end of the day.

Williams uses the natural colors and beautiful architectural settings in Hollywood to tell the story with a bit of glamorous realism that one might expect from universal acting icons.

The scenes are kept moving with the natural beauty of the environment and the character studies that just kind of draw in the camera as if needing to look for the real actor portraying Cary Grant. This introspection by the camera is also effected by the portrayal of other Hollywood celebrities, such as Ian McNeice as Alfred Hitchcock, Lily Travers as Grace Kelly and Stella Stocker as Audrey Hepburn.

The story is not so much about the complicated world outside than about just how complicated the charming and endearing actor was who created the film character with very similar qualities.

Archie is streaming on BritBox.