Shock! Horror! A bad Cary Grant!

The other day we watched what I thought was impossible–a bad Cary Grant movie. Or rather, it was a bad movie–a lame, wooden, limp(to thoroughly mix metaphors) in which Cary Grant had the misfortune of being completely miscast. It’s the historical potboiler, 1957’s The Pride and the Passion (of which two qualities nothing was in evidence!) set in the Napoleonic wars in Spain and based on a CS Forester novel, The Gun. Misdirected by Stanley Kramer, this film also starred Sophia Loren(whose breasts mainly acted for her) and Frank Sinatra, as respectively a feisty young Spanish lass and her guerillero boyfriend; with our Cary as a British naval officer who’s been sent to help them–or rather to retrieve a big gun they have, which the French are trying to capture. And who falls in love with our Sophia..

Cary is wooden and uncomfortable-looking in this, as well he might be; the plodding, banal and cliched script leaves him no room for wit or the lighthearted deftness which is so much a part of his charm; but the other two fare just as badly. As I said, Sophia’s boobs act for her, and Frankie tries hard to keep the Bronx out of his face and look like a Spanish guerilla leader. There is zero chemistry between the stars and you simply cannot believe in the ‘passion’ either between Cary and Sophia, or Sophia and Frank. Everyone just looks uncomfortable.
And there’s no sense of war at all. There is a strange lack of urgency in this film, despite the desperate times and the French are played as such ‘Allo, ‘Allo’ buffoons that you don’t even feel any danger from them–everyone just goes through the motions. There’s a cast of extras of thousands–tens of thousands, in fact, the film’s credits proudly state!–but they just run around most of the time and look picturesque. Though it was shot on location in Spain–and features the obligatory flamenco dance–it does not feel Spanish at all.
To look on the bright side at least it made me think that some of the lame historical war ‘epics’ of our time–eg Pearl Harbour, Troy, Alexander–aren’t just a product of our times which haven’t really known war and danger! And that big-budget Hollywood movies have flopped at all times, when they’ve been as poor as this!
I had only got out the film because of Cary’s name(I think Sinatra was a far greater singer than actor and Loren has never really impressed me). Having seen Cary in such gems as Holiday, His Girl Friday, An Affair to Remember, To Catch a Thief, The Philadelphia Story, North by Northwest and so on, I’d thought our boy couldn’t put a foot wrong. What this film did show was what a modern persona he had as an actor, really; how twentieth-century; he looks utterly stiff and unbelievable as an early 19th century naval officer.
Was this Cary’s only foray into costume drama? Has anyone else seen this film?And..I hesitate to ask this–but are there any other bad Cary Grant movies, so I can avoid them??