Bresson = humor

"On the way to the projection, we pulled up at the top of Avenue Wagram next to another car with its windows open. Very funky, urban music poured forth, loudly and Robert leaned out of his window and told the driver that his music was very beautiful. The young man looked at Robert, elderly and in the front seat of our over-crowded vehicle, as though he were mad. Robert then started miming to the music saying "this is how the modern music goes", bouncing around in his seat."

Dietrich by Sternberg

A modern bathroom is like a scientific instrument

Who the Hell's In It

JOHN GALLAGHER: The Cary Grant persona really came out of The Awful Truth .

PETER BOGDANOVICH: It happened in that picture. It came together for him in that picture. Having met McCarey, albeit when he was not himself really, I could see where that came from because he had a very sophisticated dry wit, kind of mischievous, with all those little kinds of noises that Cary makes in the movie, that's very McCarey. I can see Leo McCarey giving him that stuff. You can see it in other McCarey pictures without Cary Grant where people react that way. In Ruggles of Red Gap (1935), Roland Young has that very dry quality. Well, the Laurel and Hardys have that kind of reserved humor, slightly laid back.
I think what is the key to the big movie stars -- and I'm writing a book about that for Knopf tentatively called Who the Hell's In It , all the actor pieces that I've done, all being rewritten and I'm writing new stuff -- and one of the main points I'm going to make in there is that the really big movie stars were all personalities of a certain kind and they were seen differently by major directors and those directors had an impact on those actors which they carried with them. Cary Grant is a perfect example. One of the things I left out of the book really by accident, it'll be in the next one, was that I asked Cary about Von Sternberg ...

JG: They did Blonde Venus (1932) together.

PB : Blonde Venus . I said to Cary, "Do you direct much?" He said, (Peter does a flawless Cary Grant ) "Not really. But the first day he saw me he looked at me and he said 'Your hair's parted on the wrong side.'" I said, "What'd you do?" He said, "I parted it on the other side and I kept it that way the rest of my career." There's a perfect example. If Joe hadn't said that maybe it would have been different. But that was a little thing but big deal, parting your hair on the other side! And then, wow. Then you can see in Sylvia Scarlett that Grant, as George Cukor said, found himself in a certain way as an actor, he allowed himself to be free, cause he's kind of reticent in all the other pictures, kind of laid back. He had been a straight leading man up to that point but not very interesting. In Sylvia Scarlett suddenly he explodes into a characterization. It was Cockney that he had grown up with, though he was from Bristol, he knew people like that. Then with McCarey on The Awful Truth suddenly he took the sophistication and the slapstick -- and Cary of course had been a circus performer, an acrobat -- so McCarey used that and you can see how the character and persona changed from Von Sternberg to Cukor to McCarey and then to Hawks who used him for the comedy stuff in Bringing Up Baby (1938) and added elements and then had him play a dramatic part for the first time in Only Angels Have Wings (1939). So really in the few years between 1936 and 1939, Sternberg was earlier, but in those three years he worked with Cukor, McCarey and Hawks and then Hitchcock in '40 which gave him another thing. With all those things going through, he had a career. He knew what to do for the rest of his career. He knew how to play each aspect of himself. So his personality in those roles, with that fine tuning the directors gave him, made him a movie star.

JG: Jimmy Stewart is another great example, from Capra to Cukor to Hitchcock to Mann to Ford.

PB: Yeah, Jimmy is a little less obvious than Cary Grant because he always had a certain persona. He had the Westerner and the Easterner that he played. It's odd that he played both those things so effectively, and you see them both in 1939 with Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and Destry Rides Again . That was the rest of his career right there in those two pictures. The only thing that was different was that after the war he added a certain element of harshness and cynicism which was exploited not just by Anthony Mann but by Hitchcock and Preminger, kind of an awareness about himself. He told me about that, he said (perfect Jimmy Stewart imitation) "I thought I better toughen it up." Somebody was putting him down after the war and he drew on the more neurotic aspects of his personality.

Swan Song