Filmfest explores the many aspects of classy Cary Grant

Bristol’s biennial Cary Grant Comes Home festival will focus on the theme ‘Class’ when it presents its fifth edition in and around the Hollywood star’s birth city from November 18 to 20 this year. 

The line-up offers seven screenings exploring class in its broadest sense via plots that depict high life, low life, social mobility and faked identities and also a walking tour highlighting some of the experiences which transformed a working-class Bristol boy named Archie Leach into a multi-millionaire Hollywood legend and epitome of style, Cary Grant.  Highlights will include:

A screening in the parish church of St Mary Redcliffe on Friday 18 November of THE BISHOP’S WIFE, starring Cary Grant, David Niven and Loretta Young, with a video introduction from the last surviving member of the cast, Karolyn Grimes, now 82 but who appeared in this film and in IT’S A WONDERFUL LIFE as a child star.

A gala event at one of the UK’s oldest cinemas - the Curzon, Clevedon - on Saturday 19 November offering prizes for the guests whose outfits best echo the Golden Age of Hollywood, a photo booth, live music, cocktails and a showing of the film often described as the best Alfred Hitchcock thriller Hitchcock didn’t make: CHARADE (1963) in which Grant’s co-star is Audrey Hepburn.

Morning screenings with expert introductions at Watershed of two films (SYLVIA SCARLETT on Saturday 19^th and NONE BUT THE LONELY HEART on Sunday 20^th) in which Grant drops his familiar chic to portray a Cockney wideboy -  engaging in cons with a cross-dressing Katharine Hepburn in the first and mothered by an Oscar-winning Ethel Barrymore in the second.

A Sunday afternoon takeover of Bristol’s biggest screen, the former IMAX at Bristol Aquarium that will include film journalist and historian Pamela Hutchinson introducing the censorship-defying BLONDE VENUS, co-starring Marlene Dietrich, and a showing of another Pre-Code rule-breaker BORN TO BAD, in which Loretta Young lives up to the title and Cary gets blackmailed.

To finish, the zany and hilarious ARSENIC AND OLD LACE, featuring murderous old ladies, an embarrassed bridegroom, a killer on the run, a brother who thinks he’s President and, for the eagle-eyed, a gravestone bearing Grant’s Bristol birthname, Archie Leach.

Festival director Charlotte Crofts says: “Cockney Cary Grant delivers a line in Sylvia Scarlett; ‘It don't do to step out of your class,’ but he did it time and again, both personally and on screen. So, for this year’s festival we’re looking at the various versions of himself that he presented to the world and, celebrating how he navigated that journey from Archie to Cary, demonstrating that whatever his origins, Cary Grant was truly THE class act.”

To find out more about the fifth Cary Grant festival, including its history and this year’s ticket booking arrangements, please visit www.carycomeshome.co.uk and Visit Bristol or find/follow @carycomeshome on Facebook, Instagram or Twitter.

This year’s festival is taking place from 18 to 20 November with the kind support of the BFI Film Audience Network, awarding funds from the National Lottery; IMDb (the Internet Movie Database, www.IMDb.com); UWE Moving Image Research Group and the Digital Cultures Research Centre.