Cary Grant and the Real Mr Bliss

a.k.a. The Amazing Adventure of Robert Garrett:

As this piece is partly about a film that has three different names, it seems fitting to give it another title that contains the name of the person who produced Cary Grant’s only British movie. Made in 1935, when Robert Garrett was 25, The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss was a rather unwieldy name which people had difficulty remembering. But it had been taken from the title of a successful five-episode silent film serial, produced in the 1920s, and, before that, a best-selling book. So I understand why Garrett originally chose it.

The film turned out to be a box-office disappointment, which made it all the more easy to assume that it was not worth remembering. The film critic Richard Schickel wrote about it in his 1998 book Cary Grant: A Celebration: “[Paramount] proposed that he take six months off, during which time, with no objection from his bosses, he made The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss (a.k.a. Romance and Riches and also Amazing Adventure) for an independent producer in Britain. All those titles, and the fact that its release in the US was delayed for two years, tell the tale of a flop. A negligible and rather antiquated fable about a man who inherits a fortune, suffers from idleness and then redeems himself with humble toil, the film was clearly face-saving make-work.”

Schickel, who quite likely hadn’t even seen the film, resorts to that often-made assumption that a box-office failure means an artistic failure too.  But his assessment is notably at odds with a later Cary Grant biographer, Eliot Marc, who in 2004 wrote: “Grant was enormously pleased with his work in Bliss, which finally allowed Grant to give the kind of performance he was capable of, the first true glimpse of what was to become the classic Cary Grant persona of charm, looks, wit and decency.”

When it opened at the New Gallery cinema in London in November 1936, The Times described the film as, “Not amazing, but amusing”, and wrote that “Mr Cary Grant helps it along with a smooth and tactful performance”.

The other reviews were  mostly positive too. But as was so often the case with British films of the period, it fared much less well in the US. There was a general perception in the 1930s US film industry – to the point of an almost unthinking prejudice – that British films were too complicated and slow for American audiences. So although it featured a prominent star who worked for a major Hollywood studio, it received a fraction of the publicity that Grant’s other films were receiving.

The Amazing Quest of Mr Bliss was distributed in the US  by a small, newly formed company called Grand National. It was released in March 1937, four months after its British opening (not the two years that  Schickel stated). Its title was changed, I assume by Grand National, to Romance and Riches, and the slow passages that defied the American taste for snappy action were cut.

 “Although made in England, this is suitable for the American market,” commented Harrison’s Reports, a US trade paper aimed at independent exhibitors, “because the two leading players are known well, and the atmosphere is not decidedly British. It is a moderately entertaining program comedy with some human appeal.” It listed the film as only 58 minutes long. More than twenty minutes – the reflective bits that had made it much more than simply a program comedy – had been cut from the original British release.

But the other trade papers were less positive. “This Grand National release of a British-made film is a waste of time,” commented Variety. The Hollywood Reporter thought it had a “swell” story but that a “ponderous” treatment dropped it into “the weak-sister class”. The names of its two Hollywood stars, Cary Grant and Mary Brian, would help it a little, but ultimately it belonged “on the lower half of the bill”.

What the Hollywood Reporter meant by “ponderousness” was what others might have called “sophisticated”, but sophistication was regarded as a box-office handicap in 1930s America. Although Grand National went bankrupt in 1940, the film briefly resurfaced in 1943 when it was reissued by a different US distributor on 16mm under the third of its three titles, The Amazing Adventure.

The only version I could find available online or on DVD was the drastically shortened North American release. To watch the original, uncut British version I had to view a print from the BFI National Film and Television Archive, which last received a public showing at the National Film Theatre more than forty years ago. Although it required running several 35mm reels on a creaky old Steenbeck, I  was able to enjoy an intelligent, often touching film.

The Amazing Story of Ernest Bliss tells the story of a rich young man, who makes a wager with his doctor that he can set out with only £5 and earn his own living for a year without having to rely on his wealth. In pursuit of this quest, he discovers how the other half lives and develops a social conscience. It was a polished romantic comedy with a dark edge that did not flinch from exploring some of the inequalities of 1930s British society.

It is a little dated now, but still a hugely engaging, likeable film with heart. Robert Garrett found in the Cary Grant character an appealing alter ego who embodied the values that he would carry into his own life. Although Ernest Bliss ultimately loses his wager, he learns how to use his fortune for good, setting up in business those people who helped him during the year he struggled without money.

The only condition that he sets on his generosity is that they should run their businesses with decency and goodwill. “Now that you own that restaurant,” he tells the former head waiter who took pity on him when times were tough,  “don’t forget: never charge more than the usual 1/6 for dinner. And if ever you see a young fellow with a young girl, and they seem hard up, throw in the wine and charge it to me.”

Britain’s youngest film producer at the time of the film’s release, Robert Garrett was a member of the Bowring insurance and shipping dynasty. His mother, Janet Garrett, died in 1933, leaving him a large fortune. After graduating from Cambridge, he had started out in the diplomatic service, but – with no lack of romance or riches to distract him – he soon gave up his job to pursue a career in the entertainment business.

His girlfriend at the time was Princess Paul Troubetskoy, a then well-known novelist, socialite and fashion columnist, who was twelve years older than him. Born Rhoda Boddam, she had been a former show girl, who had appeared on stage in several revues under the name Gay Desmond. In 1931 she married the elderly Prince Paul Troubetskoy, but it seems to have been a marriage of convenience (even if it’s not quite clear for whose convenience). Soon after their wedding in London Troubetskoy returned, without her, to continue his life as a distinguished sculptor in Paris and Italy. “That all-important attribute which is not charm nor good looks nor education but which unlocks the door of opportunity for those who possess it,” the Princess once wrote in one of her newspaper articles, is “personality”, which she obviously possessed in bundles.

Princess Troubetskoy and Robert Garrett, along with the Princess’s blue Chow Chow dog, divided their time between a country house in Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, and a flat in Berkeley Square. It was the last decade when the idle rich, who regularly featured in the pages of the Tatler or the Bystander, could still hope to hear nightingales sing there. 

In The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss, the doctor tells Bliss: “You know, your father was a clever man, but he made a big mistake when he left you £2 million to play the fool with.” This seems essentially to have been Garrett’s situation in the 1930s. After toying with the idea of becoming a publisher, he decided to go into the film business.

While most young men might have expected to work their way up, Garrett was able to start at the top. With Czech theatre producer and literary agent Otto Klement, whose clients had included Marlene Dietrich and Erich Maria Remarque, he formed the independent production company Garrett-Klement Pictures. Together they moved into an office, a little apart from the traditional filmland haunts of Soho, in the much more plush environs of St James’s Street, Mayfair.

“It is possible that there are two newcomers more spectacular than Robert Garrett and Otto Klement,” wrote the journalist Connery Chappell in a profile of the new team for the Sunday Despatch, “but I doubt it.” Remarking on Garrett’s natty lavender waistcoat, he described him as “the only film man in two hemispheres who looks as though he has just stepped out of the Royal Enclosure”.

The new company announced a programme of six international pictures with world-famous stars, which would cost approximately £60,000 ($300,000) each, a huge amount of money for that time. In the event only two were made: the Cary Grant picture, The Amazing Quest for Ernest Bliss, and A Woman Alone, a romance set in the time of Imperial Russia, starring the Ukrainian actress Anna Sten.

The Hollywood mogul Sam Goldwyn had been hoping to build Sten into a second Garbo. But it was not to be. Ultimately she would become much more famous for her brief appearance in a Cole Porter song than any of her movies: “When Sam Goldwyn can with great conviction / Instruct Anna Sten in diction / Then Anna shows / Anything goes...” 

One of the most highly paid movie stars in Hollywood, Sten was still at the height of her fame when she moved on to Garrett-Klement, which paid a colossal fee of £20,000 for her services. “An exceptionally fine dramatic love story,” wrote the Era magazine when A Woman Alone opened at the London Pavilion in August 1936, but unfortunately its box-office reception served only to cement her new, fast-growing reputation as “Goldwyn’s folly”.

The commercial failure of both pictures skittled Garrett-Klement’s ambitious programme of six films. In 1937, the two partners split up. Garrett  then established a new film company of his own, before the outbreak of the Second World War forced him to postpone his plans yet again.

If there was one thing that most characterized Garrett’s 1930s foray into production, it was bad luck. The first of the two films to go on the floor, in September 1935, was A Woman Alone. The stage that Garrett-Klement rented  from the British & Dominions studio at Elstree had not been sound-proofed: carpenters could be heard hammering on the stage next-door; and if it rained, there was a pitter-pattering sound from the roof. Anna Sten’s makeup was also causing problems. A set of eyelashes that cost six guineas turned white  whenever they were washed, which meant that replacements had to be ordered from Berlin until a London beauty firm managed to develop a special solution to keep the lashes the same colour.  Then an electrician’s strike closed down production for four days, and, tragically, far worse, an extra was killed during a Cossack cavalry charge: his horse bolted, tripped on a cart-track and fell on top of him. An inquest found that no negligence had been involved, but the incident must have badly shaken Garrett.  

A Woman Alone was a huge production for such an inexperienced film producer to have taken on, presenting Zhivago-style spectacle but also the challenges of dealing with a Hollywood diva. One situation which must have tested Garrett’s skills as a former diplomat was the fact that the director and writer of the film was Sten’s first husband Fedor Ozep, while  the line producer was  her new husband Eugene Franke. It was a dynamic that mirrored the love triangle storyline of the film. When it was announced that the first husband, Ozep, had fallen ill and the second husband, Frenke, would be stepping into his shoes as the replacement director, it was hard to know whether to take the given reason for the change at face value. But whatever was really going on behind the scenes, the need to sort out yet another major crisis can only have further contributed to the sense of A Woman Alone being a jinxed production.

Shooting on the second Garrett-Klement film, The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss, began on Monday 25 November. The first week was overshadowed by the grave illness of Cary Grant’s father. Over the weekend, he had an operation in Bristol, which he did not survive. Grant was given compassionate leave, which occasioned yet another of the many costly breaks in production that afflicted Garrett-Klement’s programme.

Worse was to come. The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss was still on the floor when in the early hours of Sunday 9 February 1936 a huge fire broke out at Elstree. It destroyed six stages. Over a hundred firemen fought to bring the blaze under control. The negatives for both Garrett-Klement productions were among the films that had to be rescued from the vaults.

Garrett’s introduction to the film business had been a literal baptism by fire, which had burned through a significant chunk of his fortune. Few people could have had a more thorough grounding in the perils of film production. When the war began, it was maybe even something of a relief to be able to step away from it for a few years. 

He joined the Royal Air Force in 1940 and, appointed a Flying Officer in July 1941, rose to become a Wing Commander. It’s difficult to say exactly what he did for the very good reason that he worked in intelligence, first at RAF Cheadle, a wireless station near Stoke-on-Trent, and then at Bletchley Park, where he was Deputy Head of the Air Section. He was one of those geese that, in Churchill’s memorable phrase, “laid the golden eggs and never cackled”. But the fact that, if he did choose to cackle, he could do so in fluent German, gives some idea of why he would have been useful.

What he certainly did do during his time in the RAF was to grow up. The person who emerged on the other side of the war – no doubt, like so many of his generation, scarred by the vicissitudes of those long, difficult years – had left behind the young man about town who had fallen for the dazzling Princess Troubetskoy.

He still loved the movies, though.  And when he went back into the industry, he was determined to do what he could to minimize some of the chaos and uncertainty he had  experienced in his earlier life as Britain’s youngest film producer.

In 1948 he set up an independent production company with Anthony Havelock-Allan, an experienced  producer whose production credits included David Lean’s Great Expectations and Brief Encounter. The first production of Constellation Films was The Small Voice, a thriller which starred a young American actor Howard Keel, making his film début – although he was credited under his original name "Harold Keel", having first come to Britain to star in the West End stage production of Oklahoma!

The following year Constellation went on to produce The Shadow of the Eagle, a historical romance shot in Italy, with Richard Todd and Valentina Cortese. The  biggest challenge facing Garrett and Havelock-Allan was securing finance in an industry that was now entering the latest of its many perennial crises.  The Rank Organisation, the most powerful film corporation in Britain, was reporting huge losses, while the banks were increasingly reluctant to support independent producers without capital in what was now perceived to be a dangerously risky and unprofitable activity.

The situation gave Garrett the idea for a company that would have the expertise to help independent producers manage the risks of production, which he knew all too well from his own experience. The key functions of the new company would be (1) to appraise whether a film could be made for a proposed amount; (2) to monitor any such film that then went into production; and (3) to meet, through reinsuring the risk on the Lloyd’s insurance market, any unforeseen overcosts.

In August 1949, during the production of The Shadow of the Eagle, Robert Garrett wrote the business proposal for what would become the world’s first specialised completion guarantor. Incorporated on 24 February 1950, the new company was called Film Finances. Princess Troubetskoy, if she had still been around, would no doubt have suggested a name that had more personality. But perhaps recalling all the trouble he had over the title of The Amazing Quest of Ernest Bliss, this time Garrett decided to keep things short.

Film Finances became a vital source of financial security and production expertise that would go on to underpin the growth of the international independent film industry over eight decades, providing completion guarantees to more than 6,000 films, including some of the most celebrated ever known, from The African Queen in 1951 to Conclave just recently.

Garrett, who ran the company for its first thirty years, would become one of the great unsung heroes of independent film-making. He was too modest to talk about his achievements, just as he never talked about what he had done to earn a brick in the Codebreakers Wall of Honour at Bletchley Park. But in this year of Film Finances’ 75th anniversary, it is a good time to talk about him now.