Cary Grant and his ubiquitous suits

I've long considered Gary Grant to be one of my favorite classical movie stars, but I sometimes wonder if he was born wearing a suit.

In every movie I can ever remember seeing that starred Grant, he wears a suit in almost every single scene. In fact, he wears so many suits that any time he's not wearing a suit it seems odd.

The most recent such viewing was Houseboat, a frivolous 1958 film directed by the excellently named Melville Shavelson and co-starring the incomparable Sophia Loren. I didn't like the film all that much, as it feels very much steeped in retrograde gender ideas and general corniness. But Loren? Magnificent.

Grant? He wears a lot of suits.

I guess the suit was a more typical everyday wardrobe choice for the professional man in 1958, and Grant's character has the type of job that would require him to wear one (though I already forget what that job was, even having finished the movie only 15 minutes ago). I think it's more of a window into a different area than anything particular about Grant, though I can't think of another actor with such a near total percentage of his wardrobe consisting of suits.

There's one time in the movie when Grant is wearing only a shirt and pants, no jacket, and I thought he looked like a bit of a namby pamby. (This is not a word I would ordinarily use, but old-fashioned movies put me in mind of old-fashioned vocabulary.) Perhaps even sillier than that no jacket look was his pajamas, which were white from head to toe and buttoned all the way up to the neck.

Better put back on that suit, stat, Cary.

I don't see a lot of movies from this era, I guess; I was somewhat shocked to learn that Houseboat was only the ninth film I've ever seen released in the year 1958. The fifties were not a great decade for cinema, per se, but I should have seen more than that.

If I do try to increase that total -- and I'm trying to increase my total for all other years at the same time, mind you -- I'll try to make note of what the other actors are wearing and whether it is almost always a suit. It probably is. Though I do think it's also a Grant thing. He was in North by Northwest the next year, and damn if it he doesn't wear a suit in every single scene in that movie as well.

At the end of the movie, he's getting married, and so I don't have to spoil a 61-year-old movie I'll avoid revealing who the bride-to-be is, since there are two contenders. I will say that I wasn't at first sure if he was the groom, as the suit he was wearing to his own wedding looked pretty much exactly like every other suit he had worn in the movie. That's the problem with wearing suits all the time. When it's time to actually look special, what do you have to do to distinguish yourself?

He actually does wear a tuxedo at one point in this movie, but not for the wedding. Funny.

Loren's wardrobes were a lot more fantastic, including a gold dress she wears to a ball. As I haven't seen a lot of classic period Loren, I think it's fair to say my jaw pretty much hit the floor.

However, it's hard to drool too much over Loren without acknowledging those retrograde gender politics. I won't get into specifics, but I will say Hollywood's tendency to cast a very young woman as the love interest of a much older man has been alive and well for some time. I knew Grant was older than Loren, obviously, but until I checked their respective dates of birth I had no idea how much older. He was in fact 30 years older than she is, to the year, meaning that when Houseboat was released he was 54 to her 24. At least they had the decency to cast an actor to play her father who was 15 years older than Grant, reducing some of the ick factor, sort of.

If these were the old days, I might research and list 20 other examples of Grant's ubiquitous suit wearing and even possibly provide you with a rash of photographic evidence.

But it's 2019, it's a Wednesday night, and I need to go to bed.