Cary Grant’s Suit

When Cary and Eva Marie walk from the train into La Salle Street station the next morning, he’s wearing a purloined red-cap’s outfit, open at the neck and showing a triangle of snowy-white undershirt. She has the same white triangle peeping from under the jacket of her dark suit, which rather matches the suit James Mason wore the night before. But here are two little white triangles who spent the night together on the train. There might be an opportunity here in Chicago for a shower, you itch, but it looks like he chooses merely to loosen his shirt and have a quick shave, with Eva Marie’s minuscule razor. His suit was temporarily stuffed into her luggage while he made his exit from the train in disguise. Has it suffered? Has it hell. It looks like a million bucks; his shirt still blazes out. But now comes the suit’s greatest trial, the crop-dusting scene at ‘Prairie Stop’. This begins with Cary and the farmer eyeing up each other’s attire across the hot highway. The farmer wears a clean though saggy brown suit and a slouchy hat. Going to town? Here Cary gets covered in dust from giant trucks passing by (a deliberate and somewhat comic attack on the suit), sweats like a pig (or should — we do), has to throw himself into the dirt, gets sprayed with DDT by an evil crop-duster plane, then practically gets run over by a tanker; he grapples with its greasy undercarriage and writhes around on the asphalt.

After all this, and having fled the scene in a stolen pickup truck, Cary has only his hanky with which to make himself presentable at the Chicago hotel where he thinks ‘Kaplan’ is staying. Still, he’s done a pretty good job with it — he looks like he’s been teaching school all afternoon — just a bit chalky. His tie is still pressed and the shirt is white, even the collar and cuffs. You cannot violate the white shirt of the Sixties. You might kill me but you will never kill this shirt.

Eva Marie enters this scene in a really luxurious red-and-black dress — a sign of her decadent double life with James Mason — and it’s all pretty uncomfortable because now Cary is dirty, a DIRTY MAN loose in civilization, too easily spotted. But the suit gets rescued here! Eva Marie tells Cary she’ll have dinner with him if he’ll let the valet clean it! Cary tells her that when he was a kid he wouldn’t let his mother undress him. Eva Marie says, ‘You’re a big boy now’ — Cary’s growing up, from an impressive but essentially childish New York executive and, you suppose, a playboy, into a man taking charge of his life. He grows into his suit over the course of the adventure and finds a life (and wife) to suit him. In another sense, though, he maybe has a BONER — he’s been sniffing round Eva Marie and suggesting a skirmish. This is all very good neurotic Fifties movie dialogue. I don’t know who suffered more, who was the more repressed: the writer, the actors or the audience in those days.

So Cary takes off the suit, goes into the shower; she gives it to the valet and she splits! The suit is not there, so Cary is not there. We get to see that he wears yellow boxers, another sign that he’s a daring guy in a ‘creative’ profession — whew!

Once Cary gets to the auction house the suit is perfectly restored. That valet is some little ‘sponger and presser’. Eva Marie and the bad guys are bidding on a pre-Columbian figure. It’s not very well dressed. It’s only wearing shorts. Cary gets in a fist fight (no blood), is arrested, taken to the airport, put on a plane to Rapid City. The next day it’s hot as blazes at Mount Rushmore, but the shirt is clean, the suit’s fantastically smooth, a hot breeze rustles it a little. The monument itself is wearing a rock-like suit in solidarity with Cary. He’s turning into a patriotic rock, too (ignore what I said up there). Eva Marie arrives in mourning, essentially — black and dove grey; she’s about to have to leave Cary and her entire life behind. James Mason is in a weird English fop get-up, to suggest, I guess, he’s never been one of us, he’s not long for these shores now. He’s frail. Eva Marie ‘shoots’ Cary: no blood again, of course, as it’s a charade, but wouldn’t you think the CIA would have some fake blood? How else are they going to put this over on James Mason? He’s not an idiot. But you can’t do this to the suit.