INHALL: Mark Kidel - FILM: Becoming Cary Grant

Becoming Cary Grant presents a radically new perspective on one of the greatest of all Hollywood actors. Known for his suave sophistication, Grant became an icon through his roles in some of the great films of the golden area of Hollywood cinema.

But Grant was a troubled man.

This film, an Official Selection at the Cannes Festival in 2017, uses extracts from his unpublished autobiography to tell the story of Archie Leach from Bristol. Grant travelled to the USA aged 17 with a group of acrobats and made his way to Hollywood. With the help of canny film studio executives and major film directors including Howard Hawks, George Cukor, Leo McCarey and Alfred Hitchcock, Grant created a persona that allowed him to put his past behind him, yet evoked some of the man behind the mask.

At midlife, in the late 1950s, when psychedelics were legal and used for self-discovery, Grant went on a courageous three-year course of LSD therapy.

Many of the key images in the film are drawn from material shot by Cary in the late 1930s, conjuring the demons that haunted him. His film-maker’s eye and refined intuition produced images that resonated with his soul, images that reflect the ups and downs of his tumultuous inner journey.

The words of Cary Grant are spoken by the celebrated actor Jonathan Pryce (Game of Thrones, Wolf Hall, Pirates of The Caribbean, Tomorrow Never Dies, Brazil) and the music is by Bristolian musicians from Adrian Utley (Portishead) and The Startled Insects.

Becoming Cary Grant is no ordinary biopic, but a film that allows access to Cary Grant’s intimacy, to plumb the depths of his insecurity and to journey with him on a unique journey of self-exploration and - ultimately - redemption.

Mark Kidel is an award-winning documentary filmmaker, writer and critic working in France and the UK, and specialising - not exclusively - in music and the arts. He has written a great deal about music and visual art, participated in the creation of the WOMAD world music festival, and run conferences, seminars and lecture series at Dartington Hall.

In 1976, frustrated by what he saw as television's increasing superficiality and the professional pressure to make formulaic films to please as wide an audience as possible, Mark left the industry to work for the Dartington Hall Trust in Devon. Mark was director of the "New Themes for Education" international and cross-disciplinary conference held at Dartington Hall from 1984 to 1986. The conference included the exploration of the experience of illness and brought together people from the worlds of medicine, psychology and the arts, and led to Mark and Susan Kidel co-editing The Meaning of Illness (Routledge, London, 1986).

In 1984 Mark invited the post-Jungian writer and psychologist James Hillman and therapist and writer Pat Berry to Dartington to run a weekend seminar on animals in myths, dreams and fairy tales. Following this, Mark, James and Susan collaborated on seven films based on Hillman's ideas. In The Architecture of the Imagination (1994) Hillman explores the rich and archetypal ambiguities of such images as The Door, The Staircase, The Window, the Tower and the Bridge. The first four films were shown last year at the Cube. The other two films are Kind of Blue: an essay  (Winner of a Royal Television Society Award in 1995, shown last year) and The Heart Has Reasons. 

Becoming Cary Grant explores the actor’s LSD therapy in the late 1950s. Recent films explore the French artist Fabienne Verdier, the English sculptor Bridget McCrum, and Elvis Costello.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Kidel
https://markkidelfilms.com/