#passion vs sophistication vs down to earth vs grace vs looking out vs looking in

[silvermarmoset]

meditating on the @hotvintagepoll bracket again, specifically looking at cary grant and james stewart and being like what is the appeal here?. Because running the bracket, you see a lot of people who have never met any of them before, so they're voting purely on looks—and looking through their eyes, yeah, what makes square-jawed Cary or chinless James worth watching?

and I think what I've come to is that Cary Grant is always outside whatever movie you're watching him in, which is his particular appeal, while James Stewart is always deeply inside the movie, and that's his. Cary Grant plays every role with a little wink and a smile, always a slight touch of artificiality, and he's always Cary Grant™—the suit, the hair, the tone. He could turn to the screen and wink at you because he never seems that trapped in what he's doing at any given time. He could step out of the screen and still be this creation Archibald Leach made.

And James Stewart, meanwhile, is always playing the same handful of characteristics—the voice, the swallow, the slight awkward tallness, the lowered brow—but no matter what is happening to him, he always conveys that he believes it. There's not a soul of a wink in his performances. He believes the 6' tall rabbit, the angel on the bridge, the murder in his lens. No matter how insane the story, Jimmy Stewart conveys that he is entirely involved in it, grounded to the point of no separation.

Maybe that's what makes The Philadelphia Story such a magic experiment in onscreen chemistry—Cary standing on the sides of the action, seemingly never that bothered that his former wife is running off with two different men, always a slight smile away; Jimmy, meanwhile, immediately entangled in the story, immediately getting into fights and bungling into things and 100% inside.