The Partnership with Hitchcock
Four films over eighteen years. What did each man take from the other?
Hitchcock said, more than once, that Grant was the only actor he ever loved. The remark tells us less than the pictures do.
Between Suspicion in 1941 and North by Northwest in 1959, the two made four films together, each one asking the actor to compromise the persona a little further. Devlin is cold. Robie is a thief. Thornhill is a fool. Only the last of these was allowed to be entirely charming.
Read as a sequence, the collaboration is a slow experiment in how much the audience will forgive of a man who looks like Cary Grant.
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