Cary Grant’s Suit: Nine Movies that Made Me the Wreck I Am Today – Todd McEwen

“North by Northwest isn’t about what happens to Cary Grant, it’s about what happens to his suit. The suit has the adventures, a gorgeous New York suit threading its way through America. The suit, Cary inside it, strides with confidence into the Plaza Hotel. Nothing bad happens to it until one of the greasy henchmen grasps Cary by the shoulder. We’re already in love with this suit and it feels like a real violation.”

Todd McEwen grew up in Southern California, so his head was hopelessly messed with by the movies. As the son of relatively normal people, Todd had no in with Hollywood, a mere thirteen miles away, yearn and try as he might.

This is a kid who loved the movies so much, he got up at 4:30 in the morning to watch Laurel and Hardy. A kid who insisted on his birthday that his father project 8mm cartoons onto the family’s dining room curtains so they could be slowly parted, just like at a real cinema.

This is a kid who liked to leave the movie and trudge up hundreds of dangerous iron steps to visit the lugubrious and always surprised projectionist. This is a kid who, years later, watched Chinatown over 60 times.

A love letter to old Hollywood, this is a book for anyone interested in film. Movies discussed include Blotto, The Wizard of Oz, The Three Stooges, To Catch a Thief, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps, The Trouble with Harry, and many, many more.

Hardcover, 168 pages

Language: English

Noting Hill Editions, March 2023

EDITOR’S NOTE:

There are many good books about film that I have read, but Cary Grant’s Suit: Nine Movies That Made Me the Wreck I Am Today is by far one of my favourites. It has humour in it. Just like a good film (that is not a comedy) has humour in it (like Hitchcock’s). Just like life (amidst hardships, tragedy, rises and falls) has humour in it. Todd McEwen writes from a very personal point of view. Movies are truly woven into his life and it’s absolutely thrilling to read how he meanders through some of the movies that have marked him in one way or another. He makes you live the movies, make them part of life. A film lover just knows. And the way he writes about, yes, Cary Grant’s suit in North by Northwest, well, it may be the best writing about the most written about suit in the history of film.