The George Stevens Seminar Part 7
He made three films with Cary Grant, all of them extremely successful and all of them quite different from each other. Gunga Din is a huge action/adventure piece with Grant as a ne’r-do-well. Penny Serenade is a marital drama with Grant as a n’er-do-well, and this piece, The Talk Of The Town, is a modern comedy with Grant as a n’er-do-well.
The latter two are half of a quartet of films Stevens made just before The War, and, in a way, they are sad to examine since after The War he never made another comedy. Katharine Hepburn scolded him for making no more comedies; and well she might have, for one of those four was The Woman Of The Year, the first and best of her Spencer Tracy films.
What you find here is Stevens’ unforced comic style, a style which does not depend on gags or jokes or physical comedy, though Grant was a great physical comedian, but comedy of human response, which Stevens had learned watching Stan Laurel in the many comedies of his he filmed and directed. The first-meeting scene of Hepburn and Tracy is a sterling example of this. And in The Talk Of The Town, Grant’s physical alertness ups the ante in every scene. Watch for it. Grant, as an actor, is always on his toes. He is always leaning into the scene, and this physical force-field from him drives the comedy of the picture. It means he is always slightly intrusive, even when he does not mean to be, and this intrusiveness is the key element playing through the entire story as the determining ingredient of the lives all the characters.