Movie Medicine: Whenever I feel blue, I watch a Cary Grant movie as a pick me up. It's not his easy charm, or his dark sophisticated brand of handsome that lifts the spirits, but his indefatigable devil-may-care attitude. In a Cary Grant movie, even when things are going badly for him, he still radiates good cheer. No care is great enough to subdue him. Too bad it wasn't like that for him real life.

Last night, I watched The Amazing Adventure of Mr. Bliss. Grant starts the movie as a depressed millionaire playboy, but he doesn't know he's depressed. He just knows he doesn't feel well. He visits a fancy Harley Street doctor - "the best diagnostician in England," for treatment. Today, he would be given a dose of Prozac and sent on his way. But this was 1936, and the doctor was grouchy after seeing five similar patients - all bored out of their gourd with their idle riches. He tells Grant straight up what he thinks is wrong with him, and not in a flattering way. The doctor's diatribe ends with the assertion that Grant's character won't follow his advice - "none of the others do." Grant takes him up on it and decamps to the East End with nothing but the clothes on his back and five pounds in his pocket. His intent: to live on 1-2 pounds a week for one year. And thus begins the adventure in which the bored millionaire learns to live by his wits and to use his money to help others. Oh, and of course he falls in love along the way. In the end he gets the girl, but only when he tells her how rich he really is. The moral of the story, it seems, is that money can buy happiness as long as it comes attached to Cary Grant.

Ah, well. For me, just Cary Grant will do. He can even make me forget I'm living in the twilight of Western Civilization - at least for a few hours.