THE AMAZING QUEST OF ERNEST BLISS (1936) **1/2 Cary Grant's greatest strength, as an actor, may have been his ability to simultaneously transmit the seemingly incongruent qualities of being both cavalier and aristocratic. Laid back but within excessive social constraint, willingly. Here he's a wildly affluent playboy, suddenly backed, by social convention mainly, into taking a bet that he can live off the sweat of his brow for a year. It's not an original premise, but he wears it well. The real interest, however, is that they frame the terms of the bet in a manner that allows him to use his money to help out others (which he then cleverly, so cleverly that the writers didn't even catch it, uses to peripherally assist his fortunes). They couldn't figure out how to make him an honest working class guy if he didn't have cash in the first place! Interesting. Suggests to me that the proponents of free market corporate-endorsed capitalism, in those early pre-Cold war days, were nearly as blind to the effects of their ideology as the proponents of totalitarian communism. Blind, inattentive, whatever. So when we see Cary at the end, joyfully using his capital to endow the deserving, it's political hogwash along the lines of some utopian society where everyone is equal in every way. Except that in Cary's fairy tale, the only ones who get picked up out of the muck are the few who come to his attention, by the accident of fate. So are there really teleological religious underpinnings to the ruling societal framework, or is the construct supporting that framework just a lottery for those willing to assume the mantle of subservient conformity?
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