However, to the extent that Europe hasn't "borrowed from the future" or "mortgaged the present", it may be able to shake off the hangover from the earlier euphoria much more quickly than the US. Europe's tortoise may still be no match for the best that the US has to offer but America's over-confident hare may now find the race a lot harder than it ever imagined at the start.The writer is managing director of economics at HSBC.. There isn't much need or point now to waste time saying that Cary Grant was a great actor. Go back to 1975, say, and it was deemed reckless and ridiculous when one maverick critic (by the name of Thomson) called Grant "the most important actor in the history of the cinema".

Now, on the eve of a long season of his films at the National Film Theatre (the second they have given him since 1975), it seems an entirely reasonable proposition. Out of the 72 pictures he made, you could try such classics as Blonde Venus, She Done Him Wrong, Topper, The Awful Truth, Bringing Up Baby, Holiday, Only Angels Have Wings, His Girl Friday, The Philadelphia Story, Suspicion, Notorious, I Was a Male War Bride, People Will Talk, Monkey Business, To Catch a Thief or North by Northwest.Do I mean the others are not as good? Well, certainly some of them aren't – such as The Pride and the Passion. But it would take solemn idiots to let this epic folly pass by without hoots of delight. And if people full of the new orthodoxy might murmur, "What a silly picture for the great Cary Grant to be doing!" – putting aside his profound love for one co-star (Sophia Loren) and his giddy admiration for the other (Frank Sinatra) – still The Pride and the Passion is the kind of raw melodrama that made him. In March 1918, a bright, naughty boy named Archie Leach was expelled from Fairfield Secondary School in Bristol. At that time, he lived with his father, Elias Leach, in the grandmother's house. Father and son shared a room, but the father was often away: he was a drunk who sometimes worked as a tailor's presser, and spent time with a woman who lived on the other side of Bristol.

Archie didn't get on with his grandmother, who was a cold woman His mother, Elsie, had left home when he was nine. He had no idea where she was.It was Archie's habit to find entertainment in the music halls. He even got a part-time job working for an electrician who did repairs to their lights. That's how Archie met Bob Pender, who led a troupe of comic acrobats. At 14, he joined the Pender troupe, lived with their family in Brixton, and learned the tough trade of knockabout comedy. He could do all manner of tricky leaps and stunts, and he could make people laugh. In 1920, still only 16, he went with the Penders to New York.For the next 12 years, he did what he could to advance in American vaudeville and theatre.

The best book on Grant so far (Cary Grant: A Class Apart by Graham McCann) spends about 10 pages on those years I'm sure that grieved McCann as much as his readers. It means, simply, that we don't know much about that time – the roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the most exciting of legendary eras – except that this increasingly tall, dark, handsome guy was on the loose all over the country, learning how to fall, how to time visual jokes, making his way, surviving, and, somehow, having his Bristol accent turn trans-Atlantic. If ever there was a subject fit for a movie it's Archie Leach in those years, finding a new self and sorting out the mix of what a reviewer at the time called "John Barrymore and cockney".Cut to 1931. By now, Archie has had some speaking parts in legitimate theatre – he can talk. There is a new play, Nikki, written by John Monk Saunders, and set to star Mrs Saunders, an actress named Fay Wray. There was a reading of the play, in which she worked with this young English actor as the male lead, a character named Cary Lockwood. "There are some people," Ms Wray would write later, "who seem to have an incandescent light behind their eyes that turns on to the switch of their interest The eyes have to be dark Picasso's eyes seemed always to be on His bodily electric bill would have been enormous Cary's eyes flashed as a moment excited him 'Oh ...how interesting I love what you have to say I like you Say what you just said again: I love hearing it.

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