Many of us, more than would like to admit to it, dwell on our own little islands of weird, but we would do well to remember to build a bridge so that others might reach us. It need not be a bridge as conscientiously engineered as the one in Bridge on the River Kwai, but it should not be as tenuous as a swinging rope bridge over a ravine which a hero has to cross while someone saws away at one end of it. The rope bridge is a trope, and was even when Laurel and Hardy tried to move a piano across one in their 1938 movie Swiss Miss. I’m not a fan of Laurel and Hardy. I wouldn’t call my regard for them an aversion as much as an absence from my various screens, a trait I must surely share with much of the intended readership of Todd McEwen’s memoir-in-essays collection Cary Grant’s Suit: Nine Movies that Made Me the Wreck I Am Today.
McEwen, a novelist and creative writing teacher, focuses on the Laurel and Hardy movie Blotto but discusses more thoroughly the duo’s work as a whole. He regards their oeuvre, as he calls it, as “a novel about Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s, about married life … Stan and Ollie are married to or entangled with a series of women, but they all represent the same thing: fear.” McEwen nurses his own fear, in his 1950s childhood in suburban Los Angeles, which he addresses (both the childhood and the fear) a lot more directly than he does these films which shaped him. Despite the sunny tranquility of his cul-de-sac, he is already wary of the outdoors, the neighbors. “With everyone … on the street I had either an uncomprehending relationship or a potentially fractious one steeped in fear.”
So he sought solace in movies: he reenacted them, lived in them, saw them so often he could play them in his head. But what he often neglects to do in many of these essays is provide us with enough detail to bring us into these small worlds.
I have a film degree and an immovable crush on both Ben Mankiewicz and Eddie Muller, two of the hosts on Turner Classic Movies. I am not unfamiliar with the concept of reading extensively about movies I haven’t seen. But McEwen has a tendency to assume a knowledge on the part of the reader which he should instead be providing, with the result that sometimes we are missing his humor and his insights, which is a shame because he has plenty of both.
He does supply the background, somewhat, when considering 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, a 1954 Disney film based on the Jules Verse novel, starring Kirk Douglas, James Mason, Paul Lukas and Peter Lorre. But it would have better served the reader if he’d presented all of the information I just supplied at the outset of his chapter instead of feathering in references (“of course, we expected Kirk Douglas’s musical number …”), which are, once you work them out, clever and sharp. We need, if you will, an establishing shot before the dry, witty voice-over begins. (If this book had a voice-over, it would be a combination of William Holden in Sunset Boulevard and Kevin Spacey in American Beauty, both dead wise-asses narrating from beyond the grave. This is not a spoiler because it is established in the first shot or the opening monologue of their movies. See? I explained that. Not so hard, is it?)
“’Someday they’ll understand me!’ thought Todd and [childhood friend] Fard sitting together in the dark, thinking of the horrors we were enduring in elementary school. James Mason started this whole bad-guy-in-a-turtleneck esthetic. Ever since this movie, smart bad guys have taunted heroes while wearing smoking jackets and so on, a kind of déshabille which suggests they never have to go to an office, or even outside.”
Even without having seen 40,000 Leagues Under the Sea, you can understand the “bad-guy-in-a-turtleneck esthetic.” This moment with elementary-school age Todd and his friend Fard (perfect name!) encountering the daunting urbanity of James Mason would serve well as a childhood flashback in a movie, a bit of backstory to explain the kind of obsessive cinephilia that compels a man to write a book in which a chapter is entitled “Ornaments in the Tree of White Christmas.”
I can’t always tell whether these idiosyncrasies bother me less with McEwen’s chapter Chinatown and Casablanca is because I am more familiar with those films or because McEwen more effectively blends the autobiographical and the droll asides with the authoritative. In relating his tale of taking a date to a revival cinema screening of Casablanca in 1970s-era Manhattan, we sympathize with her well before McEwen admits we should:
“She didn’t know much about movies and since I had grown up with very little else in my head I thought that this, this was where I should strike.” Oh dear. We are not surprised to learn that this relationship does not end well. “She got rid of me and I don’t blame her. I noticed I was going around in Bogartian deeps.”
Because the film is Casablanca and because the author is McEwen, who must have seen it 50 times, we are rewarded with flashes of his perception. He is quite engaging when he relates the significance of the cigarettes smoked and the drinks drunk and how the motif of stripes – the barred windows, the venetian blinds and the stripes on Ingrid Bergman’s blouse – indicate that all the characters are their own kind of jail. But then McEwen’s closely-held Hollywood knowledge — demonstrated earlier by his strangely oblique detailing of the wife of the inventor of Technicolor – leads him to pronounce of the scenes at Rick’s Café in Casablanca: “Everybody drinks, and because it’s Warner Brothers there’s glassware to match.”
I wish I knew what this meant. Was the Warner Brothers Studio known for its glassware? Should I know this? Should the average reader?
In the titular essay, McEwen takes us by the hand and walks us through the movie, from the opening: “North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America.” Here we get all the context we need, as we follow the suit through the plot, “by far the best suit in the movie: the villains, James Mason and Martin Landau, wear funereal, sinister (though expensive) black, while their greasy henchmen run around in off-the-peg crap.”
James Mason, again, villainously dressed. Perhaps McEwen best finds his stride in describing how clothes make the man. Dare I suggest it is his strong suit?
[Published by Notting Hill Editions on March 7, 2023, 168 pages, $21.95]