Cary Grant’s Suit

Now the suit is in the woods for the reconciliation scene with Eva Marie. This suit doesn’t look too bad in the woods, and you reflect that Mount Rushmore seems a very formal national park, there were a lot of people dressed up in the cafeteria, paying their respects. Cary gets punched out for trying to interfere between the Professor and Eva Marie, AND WHEN HE WAKES UP THE SUIT HAS BEEN CONFISCATED! The Professor has locked him in a hospital room with only a TOWEL to wear! He’s not going anywhere! (Although you feel a lot of relief that he’s had his second shower of the picture.) But then comes the real act of betrayal: the Professor brings CARY GRANT a set of hideous clothes from some awful ‘menswear shop’ in Rapid City (you can just imagine the smell of it, Ban-Lon shirts and cheap belts). He gives him an off-white white shirt, a pair of black slacks, white socks and icky black slip-on shoes.

You get the creeps because this whole thing is about insecurity, exposure, clothing anxiety. When Cary escapes out to the window ledge he’s inching his way along in a pair of brand-new slip-ons which may not fit! Your feet and hands start to sweat at this moment. But something major has occurred: Cary is now in black and white. Everything is CLEAR to him, and he can act decisively OUTSIDE the suit, in order to be able to win it back. It’s all wonderfully Arthurian. Now he knows ‘what to do’. And for us there’s the thrill of a badly dressed Cary: the situation is now a real emergency.

Now Cary crawls off the hospital lintels and up the stone wall of James Mason’s millionaire’s-hideaway. It looks like the face of the office building in the beginning, the rectangles of a snazzy suit. And in this white shirt with no jacket, Cary is a sitting duck in the bright moonlight! A New Yorker without a jacket on. It is too frightening.

Delightful, though, to discover that in the end, when Cary and Eva Marie are on the train back to New York (she in virginal white nightie), he’s got his suit back! He’s not wearing the jacket (woo-hoo!) but those are definitely the suit’s trousers and his original shoes and the gorgeous socks. The shirt has remained impeccable. Like Arthur, he needs a woman to be safe, to be alive and to be a king, even on Madison Avenue. Now he really knows how to wear that suit.

I managed to acquire a pair of trousers several years ago that were somewhat like Cary’s. They weren’t tailor-made, and weren’t the same quality of material of course, but the colour was really close and the hang of them wasn’t bad. And they turned out to be Lucky trousers, very Lucky. Until I burned a hole in them. The veneer of civilization is thin, fellas. Exceeding thin.