Review: Cary Grant takes acid. Fiction ensues.
A decade and a half is a long time in the Hollywood studio system. One has the opportunity to make a whole lot of money and have a great career, then be replaced by someone else.
Cary Grant, who played Grant during his lifetime, was replaced by Gene Kelly in 1955. Kelly was a movie star, a comedian (and later, a television star as well), a dancer, and a singer, but he had never seen a movie. He was also an acid trip.
So in that sense, Kelly was Cary Grant.
In a 2009 interview with The Daily Beast, Kelly reminisced about Grant and his acid trip:
“I’ve never thought of Cary as being a bad actor, because there were times when his acting was really good. When I saw The Country Girl [1946] with Fred Astaire and Jean Harlow. Cary did a very wicked thing, and I found it quite fascinating. It was a little odd, of course, but it was part of his act. And he would do these things that would make you forget he had an acting career. You never noticed him. On The Country Girl, for instance. He was great in The Blue Angel [1946]. But in The Country Girl and Blue Angel, he wasn’t acting. There was a lot of that going on. But I did notice, after a while, as I saw him a bit better—that his acting really didn’t get much better. It got a little more sophisticated.”
Kelly, a huge fan of the director King Vidor, thought that Grant wasn’t a great actor, but it’s hard to see him as a bad one. Kelly said that when he started doing acid he had a great idea:
That was my idea. I would sit up there and I’d put all my anxiety, all my tension,
