The Grass Is Greener Reviews

(OK) Pure sophistication, in the middle of "Funny face" melancholy and "Once more with feeling" frivolity, kinf of "Indiscreet" quartet. Grant is better than miscast but imposing Mitchum and Kerr is amusing with sidekick delicious bitchy Simmons...

As a Cary Grant fan, it’s a little hard to deal with some of the later films in his career. As the 50s and 60s went on his particular brand of debonair irony, grace, wit, romanticism, sharp intelligence and movie star charisma seemed to become old fashioned and he did a lot of movies which are watchable but hardly indicative of his best work which twisted his mold into interesting shapes. The Grass Is Greener is a prime example of this.

With a cast that includes Robert Mitchum, Deborah Kerr and Jean Simmons acting alongside Grant, there’s no way the movie could ever dip into unwatchable territory, but it never really highlights the supremely talented actors’ best assets. Mitchum is great playing tortured, complicated characters, romantic comedy was never his greatest strength, so placing him inside of one was a terrible idea from the start. He doesn’t find the right vibe with the rest of the cast or the material and seems to have indifferently drifted in from an entirely different set. Kerr played a lot of prim, proper English ladies but she usually brought something different to them. In Black Narcissus she found the erotic longing within her nun and crafted a deceptively simple and elegant performance from that. Or in The King and I in which she played it as a sweetly rebellious and proto-feminist archetype, a woman who could charm the king and make him rethink his grandiose ideals about female subservience and intelligence. Here she seems frequently adrift and doesn’t generate much chemistry with Mitchum. And Grant for his part dips dangerously close to supreme indifference and pure slumming. Watching him play a cuckold husband in the 40s may have yielded some comedic results, but in the 50s he just seems mildly amused by it.

Does the plot even matter? Explorations of marriage, infidelity and societal differences between males and females engaging in said things are brought up with the minimalist of interest before being completely abandoned. It’s too “polite” a film about subject matter that requires a more brusque treatment. Or maybe just a funnier one? Most of the comedic moments are stolen by Jean Simmons as a party-ready minx. That she stands outside of the central romantic triangle is what probably aides in our enjoyment of her frivolity and one-liners. We’re not being asked to sympathize and like people who are willfully hurting each other and going through the motions before reuniting in the last reel with her. The Grass Is Greener never truly slides into cringe-worthy and awful territory, but it is too cloying and runs about twenty minutes too long, but it’s serviceably watchable.