Cary Grant Movies

Want to know the best Cary Grant movies?  How about the worst Cary Grant movies?  Curious about Cary Grant’s box office grosses or which Cary Grant movie picked up the most Oscar® nominations? Need to know which Cary Grant movie got the best reviews from critics and audiences? Well you have come to the right place.

I would say my favorite three actors of all-time are Sir Michael Caine, Mr. Bruce Willis, and Archibald Leach….better known as Cary Grant (1904-1986). I discovered Cary Grant when I was in high school. During a sick day, I was stuck at home and bored out of my mind while watching television. As I flipped through the channels I came across a black and white movie. Back then I extremely disliked black and white movies. But I started to watch the movie that was on television. It took about 5 minutes before I realized I was enjoying the movie and another 45 minutes to realize I needed to see the beginning of the movie. That movie was called Bringing Up Baby and it opened the wonderful doors of Cary Grant movies.

Cary Grant made 73 full length movies from 1932-1966. When I wrote the page the first time I was able to find all the required information on 50 of the movies. Since then I have found box office information on the rest of the 23 movies.   In the table below Ultimate Movie Rankings ranks 73 of his movies in 5 different sortable columns.  Television roles, shorts and straight to DVD movies were not included in the rankings.

I have seen 51 of the 73 movies listed in the following tables. So I figure I would add my personal Top Ten Cary Grant movies…..located at the bottom of the page

Cary Grant Movies Ranked In Chronological Order With Ultimate Movie Rankings Score (1 to 5 UMR Tickets) *Best combo of box office, reviews and awards.

Cary Grant Movies Can Be Ranked 6 Ways In This Table

The really cool thing about this table is that it is “user-sortable”. Rank the movies anyway you want.

  • Sort Cary Grant movies by co-stars of his movies.
  • Sort Cary Grant movies by adjusted domestic box office grosses using current movie ticket cost
  • Sort Cary Grant movies by domestic yearly box office rank or trivia
  • Sort Cary Grant movies how they were received by critics and audiences.  60% rating or higher should indicate a good movie.
  • Sort by how many Oscar® nominations and how many Oscar® wins each Cary Grant movie received.
  • Sort Cary Grant movies by Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score.  UMR Score puts box office, reviews and awards into a mathematical equation and gives each movie a score.
  • Use the sort and search buttons to make this a very interactive table.
Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in 1955's To Catch A Thief
Cary Grant and Grace Kelly in 1955’s To Catch A Thief

Stats and Possibly Interesting Things From The Above Cary Grant Table

1.  41 of Cary Grant’s movies crossed the magical $100 million mark.  That is a percentage of 64.06% of his movies listed.  His top box office hit was Operation Petticoat (1959).

2.  An average Cary Grant movie grosses $147.10 million in adjusted box office gross.

3.  Using RottenTomatoes.com’s 60% fresh meter.  49 of Cary Grant’s movies are rated as good movies…or 77.77% of his movies.  His highest rated movie is 1959’s North by Northwest.  His lowest rated movie is The Last Outpost (1935).

4.  28 of Cary Grant’s movies received at least one Oscar® nomination in any category…..or 44.44% of his movies.

5.  8 of Cary Grant’s movies won at least one Oscar® in any category…..or 12.63% of his movies.

6.  A “good movie” Ultimate Movie Rankings (UMR) Score is 60.00.  48 of Cary Grant’s movies scored higher that average….or 76.19% of his movies.  The Philadelphia Story (1940) got the highest UMR Score.  Born To Be Bad (1934) got the lowest UMR Score.

7.  Cary Grant starred in 6 movies that were nominated for a Best Picture Oscar® nomination.  She Done Him Wrong (1933), The Awful Truth (1937), The Philadelphia Story (1940), Suspicion (1941), The Talk Of The Town (1942), and The Bishop’s Wife (1947).

Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story (1940)
Katharine Hepburn and Cary Grant in The Philadelphia Story (1940)

Cary Grant Box Office Grosses – Adjusted World Wide

67c47ca87efd161407f941275ce01c98Cary Grant made many great movies….so picking a personal Top Ten for him is very very tough…but here goes my list in alphabetical order.

1. The Awful Truth (1937)….Cary Grant and Irene Dunne made a great screen couple, this was their first of three movies together. Grant is hilarious in the movie. Movie was nominated for a Best Picture Oscar® and won the director, Leo McCarey an Oscar® for Best Director.

2. Charade (1963)…..Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn team up in this almost Hitchcock like movie. Is Grant the good guy or the bad guy? A great supporting cast in James Coburn, George Kennedy and Walter Matthau.

3. Gunga Din (1939)…Gunga Din was one of my father’s favorite Cary Grant movies….so this story of soldiers in 19th century India makes my list….great action, great fun and a terrific ending.

4. Father Goose (1964)…Father Goose is a movie can I watch again and again. Grant is stuck on an island with a school teacher(Leslie Caron) and her 7 students(all girls) during World War II. Great lines throughout this movie.

5. His Girl Friday (1940)….one of the few times that Cary Grant got to be instigator of the comedy mayhem….versus being the one that had to react to all the craziness. A fast pace, fast talking comedy classic.

6. My Favorite Wife (1940)….his second movie with Irene Dunne and another classic. Dunne is assumed to have perished in a boat sinking seven years ago, she is rescued and returns home just as Grant remarries….and then the fun begins.

7. North by Northwest (1959) ….Grant’s fourth and final film with Alfred Hitchcock…. great scenes throughout the movie like the crop dusting plane, the auction scene and of course the Mount Rushmore finale.

8. Only Angels Have Wings (1939)….one of his lesser known classics from the great movie year of 1939…Howard Hawks directed this story about pilots that risk their lives flying in South America…a great supporting cast of Rita Hayworth, Jean Arthur and Thomas Mitchell.

9. The Philadelphia Story (1940)….Grant and Katharine Hepburn made 4 movies together…this by far is their best movie together….and yet James Stewart is the one that won the Oscar® for this movie…..this movie gets better every year.

10. To Catch A Thief (1955)…Grant thought his movie career was over….and then Hitchcock talked him out of semi-retirement to play a cat burglar nicknamed “The Cat”. This movie gives you a Cary Grant and Grace Kelly falling in love on screen and off screen…direction by the great Alfred Hitchcock….with the French Riviera as a backdrop…what more could you want?

Other great movies that just missed my Top Ten cut….Notorious, Operation Petticoat, Arsenic and Old Lace, An Affair To Remember and Bringing Up Baby.

Our brand new Cary Grant You Tube Video.

If you do a comment….please ignore the email address and website section.

Want more Cary Grant information? Then I highly recommend http://www.carygrant.net/articles/i%20cary.htm

My Cary Grant letterbox.com reviews.  Highly recommend Letterboxd.com.  It is free and great way to keep track of the movies you have watched.

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225 thoughts on “Cary Grant Movies”

  1. I appreciate the feedback, and am not upset…….That is Cogerson’s strange sense of humor. It is a good thing I love him so much.

    Thanks to all who voted. The single color of the ticket ratings wins over the multiple colors.

    Reply

  2. Hey Bob and Steve. So this page now has a “new” ticket rating system. WoC and I are arguing about it…..she wants bad movies to be red…..average movies to be yellow….and good movies to be green. This is table now has only one color (the way I am leaning). Notice that each ticket has 5 tickets….the better the movie the more the movie is colored in. WoC is currently creating a table with her idea. As we discussed our differences….I said…It does not matter what we think….just what Bob and Steve think.So what do you think?

    Reply

    1. HI BRUCE I appreciate the consultation. With the caveat that one is advised never to takes sides in a dispute between husband and wife my thoughts are as follows

      1/ As I’ve said before my personal preference is for your original simple black and white traditional star system. I prefer that the presentation of hard information is not “sexed up” in a way that is too elaborate

      2/My own preference apart I am concerned that newcomers who are not familiar with your rating systems might be confused by the new format(s) whereas most people would presumably comprehend a straightforward star system

      3/However if you and W o C are adamant that there must be a colour scheme you are the bosses but I would prefer the one above using a single colour

      4/My thinking is that the more “flamboyant” that you make a stats/factual information table the more you risk distracting from the information itself.

      5/ Looking again at your kind gift of The Master’s book I see that once he gets beyond the flashy cover his information is provided in an adequate black and white format with no fancy artwork and I’ve already told you that I value a lot of the information that he provides even where I don’t agree with his criticism.

      6/However at the moment there is a gender imbalance of opinion in that trying to make herself heard against you Steve and me there is just W o C and another feminine opinion might be worthwhile having. Flora has already provided some comment in the matter but she is usually worth listening to a 2nd time around so why don’t you ask her what she thinks of the latest options

      Anyway Happy new Year to you and W o c and family.

      Reply

  3. Hey Bob and Steve….your comments about WoC’s ticket ratings, has her headed back to the drawing board…..she is thinking of changing the tickets a couple of ways. First change is only three colors….red (which would be don’t watch) yellow (caution) and green (for recommended). Those would be linked to movies under 40 on the UMR score for red, between 40 and 65 for yellow and above 65 and higher to be green.

    The second change would be each ranking would show all 5 tickets…..just only the rating would be the appropriate color on first comment….sort of the way IMDb does it. Maybe you will find this change to your liking. This means…I will have to go back and change all the pages in the book that I am getting ready to send to the printers….thanks for the added work…lol.

    Reply

    1. HI BRUCE

      It will be interesting to see the revisions but I am a fan of the old cliche “If it isn’t broken don’t fix it,” and on balance I share Steve’s preference for the original “at a glance” presentation.

      Reply

  4. Hi Bruce, I see you’ve colorised the rating system at the top with the UMR logo. It looks pretty but IMO it’s not as effective as the old fashioned ‘at a glance’ star rating that was up there before and used in various film guides. But I suppose your readers will get used to it in time. 🙂

    Reply

    1. Hey Steve. Thanks for the feedback. I think you are correct…in time the readers will get used to it….WoC spent lots of time creating the ticket images….apparently the “the stars” are copy right protected…..to use the stars we would have to pay almost $200 bucks a year to use them. I will be deleting the stars when I get back home. Thanks for sharing your thoughts. – Cogerson

      Reply

      1. The old star rating is copyright protected? Did not know that. Whoa!

        I wonder who first used that rating system. Maltin? Scheuer?

        Thanks for the info um… Wife Cogerson. Can i still call you Bruce? 😉

        Reply

        1. Hey Steve. I did not know that. I was trying to find some half stars…and everywhere I looked wanted money for the use of the image. It was when trying to find where I got the original stars that I realized I had taken them from a site that had copy right protection. That is not a road I want to go down, so I will delete the stars I have used. WoC then said….we will create our own rating symbol…and thus the UMR tickets were born.

          Reply

  5. HI BRUCE

    Sorry to be a “party pooper” but I presume you want feedback and like your President I like to “tell it as it is”

    In part the latest change that you have displayed on this page of Archie’s doesn’t appeal to me over much. I prefer the, to me, clearer system with actual stars that you have presented for example on Alan Rickman’s page as I write.

    Maybe again old age is catching up with me but I didn’t immediately grasp what the little coloured boxes with UMR written in them were meant to represent and it was only when I revisited the Rickman page to make comparisons that I saw what you were getting at, at which point I felt that the coloured boxes were too elaborate for a cold, factual stats information table and I was reminded of some of the fancy artwork that Steve at times successfully dazzles us with on this posters!

    However I do like (1) the system that you have displayed on the Rickman page (2) the new overall scores break down table that you have now introduced on this Leach page.

    Please go with your own instincts though as you will be more successful than I at judging what your viewers overall will probably prefer.

    Hope you and your family are continuing to enjoy your Christmas. I am sure though that that mind of yours is not over-resting and is already buzzing with potential fresh projects for the New Year!

    Reply

    1. Hey Bob. Thanks for sharing your thoughts on the new rating format. Hopefully you will come to like it more as time passes. Doing it this way helps create a “branding” for the rankings. I think it looks better than the table we started using a few months ago. That extra table seemed a waste or space. At least the UMR ticket is way different than that table. Thanks for the feedback.

      Reply

      1. WoC hit the comment submit button before adding my name. Probably because she was so mad about your party pooper comment…..lol. Constructive criticism has made our website better, so we like to see it as well.

        As for the holidays….we are hanging out with the grand children so it is awesome. They saw Mary Poppins Returns and were not too impressed with it.

        UMR has had two awesome view days in a row….which is even greater because I am not doing any sharing or tweeting. It is doing it all on it’s own.

        Reply

        1. HI BRUCE

          Thanks for the response. My family DID like Mary Poppins Returns and I see that you have given it a respectable 75% rating on your Emily Blunt page.

          I note that in its first 7 days of release it took $50 million at the US box office and a further $22 million abroad. I was hoping to see an overall box office projection from you but haven’t been able to spot one yet.

          General press reports say that it’s box office performance to date is relatively disappointing but it has shot to the top of the United Kingdom charts.

          Apologies to W o C if my comments upset her but Steve and I like our hard stats to be presented in a plain and boring manner.

          Reply

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