It makes him glamorousβand, since he is not as available as other men, far more desirable. Cary Grant is the male love object. Men want to be as lucky and enviable as he isβthey want to be like him. And women imagine landing him. If he had looked at her with desire, everything else about the movie might have been forgiven. Cary Grant would not have failed; yearning for an idealized love was not beyond his resources. He expressed the very sort of desperate constancy that Redford failed to express.
The heroine who chases him knows that deep down he wants to be caught only by her. With Gable, sex is inevitable: What is there but sex? Basically, he thinks women are good for only one thing. Grant is interested in the qualities of a particular womanβher sappy expression, her non sequiturs, the way her voice bobbles. With Grant, the social, urban man, there are infinite possibilities for mutual entertainment. They might dance the night away or stroll or go to a carnivalβand nothing sexual would happen unless she wanted it to.
The game, however, is an artful dodge. He gets the blithe, funny girl by maneuvering her into going after him. Many men must have wanted to be Clark Gable and look straight at a woman with a faint smirk and lifted, questioning eyebrows. And at that deluxe level men want to be Cary Grant. Men as far apart as John F. Kennedy and Lucky Luciano thought that he should star in their life story.
Who but Cary Grant could be a fantasy self-image for a President and a gangster chief? Cary Grant has said that even he wanted to be Cary Grant.
Sitting out there in Los Angeles, the expatriate New York writers projected onto him their fantasies of Eastern connoisseurship and suavity.
