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Only Angels Have Wings (1939)

Five of Cary Grant's greatest films from the height of his success. Holiday (1938) stars Grant as a free-thinker with a hearty appetite for life whose impending marriage to an image-conscious socialite threatens to douse his independent spirit and Katherine Hepburn as the sister of the bride inspired by his passion. Directed by George Cukor, it’s not as well known as the other classics in the collection but it is one of Grant’s best and the third of four films staring the well-matched romantic pair. Leo McCarey’s awful funny screwball comedy The Awful Truth (1937), one of the great comedies of remarriage, pairs Grant with Irene Dunne, Howard Hawks’ adventure Only Angels Have Wings (1939) is the quintessential Hawks movie of male bonding and tough love, where life is lived minute to minute, men are good enough, and the highest compliment one can receive is “professional.” His Girl Friday (1940), Hawks’ remake of The Front Page, casts Rosalind Russell opposite Grant as the feisty reporter who happens to be his ex-wife and loads it with comic flourishes and slyly suggestive asides. George Stevens’ Talk of the Town (1942) is populist-inflected comedy with Grant as a social activist on the run from a phony murder charge, Jean Arthur as a bubbly landlady, and Ronald Colman as a stuffy legal scholar who gets a crash course in the real world of human justice.