The Cary Grant Signature Collection (Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House / Destination Tokyo / The - Region 1 DVD

The earliest picture, and a sheer delight, is 1940's My Favorite Wife, one of Grant's blissful pairings with the wonderful Irene Dunne. He's about to remarry when his first wife washes up again after having been lost on a desert island (with he-man Randolph Scott) for seven years. Destination Tokyo is a WWII submarine picture, with Grant as the stalwart skipper--slightly odd casting, but he brings it off with admirable professionalism. (The film's propagandistic jabs at demonizing the Japanese enemy have not aged well.)

Night and Day is one of those composer biographies that veers rather radically from reality, with Grant playing Cole Porter. A ton of great songs and the canny casting of Cary as the champagne-sophisticate Porter make it passably de-lovely, despite the whitewash of the composer's real-life story. The Bachelor and the Bobby-Soxer puts Grant in deliciously antic mode, mooned over by teenager Shirley Temple but preferring the company of her older sister, Myrna Loy. He re-teams with Loy in Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House, an artless but regularly hilarious tale of Manhattanites whose Connecticut fixer-upper becomes a money pit. --Robert Horton