Welcome gentle reader to another installment of the Sunday Morning Movie. Today it’s a romantic comedy-thriller starring the immortal Cary Grant and the effervescent Audrey Hepburn.
Reviews:
The Guardian says:
It is sad that Hepburn and Grant took so long to make a film together, and that they never made another. They would have made a good pairing for a remake of Hitchcock’s Notorious, with Grant rumoured to have spied for the British in Hollywood, and with Hepburn genuinely having a father with fascist (indeed Nazi) connections. Yet at least we have Charade, a movie that unifies two highly compatible acting styles. On the one hand there is Grant’s ironic presence, performing himself and somehow standing aloof from that performance. Then there is Hepburn’s heartfelt earnestness combined with her genius as a comedian, present in her ability to transform in an instant seriousness into silliness. Donen’s film manifests the same doubleness – it’s a screwball suspense movie, a comedy laced with violence, channelling the droll anxieties of Hitchcock at his lightest. In its plots and counterplots, its version of an endlessly various Grant (his identity changes four times), Donen taps into the latent fear in Grant’s urbane demeanour – the potential killer of Hitchcock’s Suspicion lurks behind his persona’s unruffled calm. As such, Charade plays on the spy film’s interest in the notion of trust as the basis of love – in a world of espionage, of deceits and dishonour among thieves. With two actors whose whole image was nourished by the contrivance of an artful naturalness, the film wants to ask: how can we tell when someone is lying to us? How do we know who is merely an actor?
Letterboxd says:
The Film Magazine says:Even though this movie introduces a new status quo about every 20 minutes or so, I wouldn’t consider it a “twist” movie. It’s got a light touch—there’s no real danger—and that’s fine because it’s a delightful comfort watch of two all time movie stars in their element.
Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone handle Charade’s tonal shifts flawlessly. Its duality as both a comedy and a suspenseful mystery is evident from the very first frame. After an opening scene, where we witness Charles being thrown from a moving train, landing on the tracks with blood dripping down his face, we cut to the beautiful, snow covered mountains of the French Alps. We see Reggie eating lunch out on an open air deck and the camera pans away from her to reveal a gloved hand, pointing a gun directly at her. But as the mysterious figure pulls the trigger, water hits Reggie right in the face and it’s revealed that it’s only her best friend’s son, Jean-Louis (Thomas Chelimsky), having fun with a water gun. This subversive moment, juxtaposed with the gruesome one that comes before it, perfectly sets up the tone of the film as being equal parts hilarious and dangerous.
My take: A fun little confection of a film. Hepburn was truly iconic and her Givency outfits even impressed me, a guy who wears the same clothes until their zippers break. She is light hearted and light footed as a naïve innocent who has fallen amongst thieves and killers. Cary Grant is stunningly handsome in his sixties and plays his warmly duplicitous role with ease. James Coburn and George Kennedy are perfect as the cold-hearted crooks looking for their stolen loot. Matthau makes only a few appearances but is funny as the CIA agent also in pursuit of the money.
Director: Stanley Donen
Written by: Peter Stone and Marc Behm
Notable actors: Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, George Kennedy, James Coburn, Walter Matthau
Plot (Spoilers!):
Regina “Reggie” Lampert (Hepburn) has problems. Her husband has been murdered. The Parisian police are demanding answers. The CIA is demanding 250K dollars they say her husband stole. And now a trio of murderous thieves is after her as well.
She also meets Brian Cruikshank (Grant) who gives her a couple of aliases before she learns his real name. He seems to be on her side but she can’t be sure. Neither can the viewer.
While the thieves plot and plan, the cops investigate, and the CIA demands, hi-jinks and hilarity abound. The thieves are killed off one by one and Brian and Reggie are left. The money is discovered in the form of rare stamps. The CIA plays it’s hand. Brian reveals his true identity and the two declare their undying love to one another, no surprise.
Soundtrack by Mancini !!!
Yes I forgot to mention that!
I’ve seen this one many times–practically have it memorized. Another good Donen/Hepburn collaboration is the earlier musical Funny Face with Fred Astaire. That one though is probably not free to watch unless you have a library.
Stanley Donen grew up in Columbia, SC, left in the 1940s and never looked back. Pauline Kael suggested that Singin’ in the Rain, his directorial collaboration with Gene Kelly, was the greatest musical ever made.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanley_Donen
Funny Face is free, doubtless with commercial for non-members, on YT. It’s on the list.
Thanks. I also recommend The Pajama Game from Donen with some great Bob Fosse dances and an exuberant Doris Day as the union top kick.
I love that observation of The Film Magazine review, where the very first thing we see is a body being thrown from a train, with the bloody face of the freshly murdered Charles Lambert ending up front and center on the screen—it’s really a bit of a shock—juxtaposed with the gun being aimed at Regina Lambert at a posh ski resort turning out to be a water gun. It is the perfect beginning. (And, speaking of beginnings, the opening titles by Maurice Binder, who, apparently, had never done film titles before, deserve some kind of mention.)
Charade is often called “the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made” but I never think of it like that—it doesn’t have the tight precision of the shots that Hitchcock always employed or his subtly perverse themes. I think of it as one, maybe the first, of those suspense comedies of the early-to-mid-1960s—think Topkapi, How to Steal a Million, Arabesque, Gambit, The Thomas Crown Affair—stylish, sophisticated, often taking place in exotic locales. (I guess the closest Hitchcock film would be To Catch a Thief.) With the ridiculously charming repartee between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, and Grant adopting a new identity every few minutes, it’s a fun, very watchable film.
Oh, and one of the most watchable moments involves a French actor, Paul Bonifas, who almost never gets mentioned anywhere (except here).
Errata: the characters names are, of course, Charles and Regina (Reggie) Lampert. Apologies for the error.
“it’s a screwball suspense movie”
I just note the screwball dialogue when the pair meet cute.
Thank you so much for this post. As with Carolinian I have watched this many times. Even though I know the next dialogue or scene I never fail to be enchanted.
Can one get too much of Audrey? She was the star attraction in all her movies.
And Cary is great too. As mentioned in the very elaborate Wiki entry he and Donen did several movies together. Donen later snarked that Grant–notoriously tightfisted after growing up poor in Bristol England–had a deal where he would only wear off the rack suits from a suit company. This may be the source of the shower ‘drip dry’ scene as a bit of self deprecation.
Even The Lavender Hill Mob?
Glad you like it!
Saw this when it came out. Back when movie stars were very attractive, without botox and tons of makeup, and could really act. (Sigh)
Every era of film has its own flavor but modern films taste like aspartame. There is something so, how do I say it, processed about them.
For all the interference that studio heads wielded in the past, most actually both loved the medium and had some sense of story and art. Current top decision makers are ruled by one thing only – money. Not everything produced by Disney through the years was great, but I am hard pressed to name much in the last decade or so that was not derivative slop or bad cut and paste from their previous legacy.
It might not be as obvious with other studio/distributors but it is much the same with more emphasis on reproducing the most recent money makers with sequels and bad fan fiction copies.
Very good review. Great movie! I, too, have watched it many times. My favorite Hepburn movie, though, is How to Steal a Million, with Peter O’Toole, directed by William Wyler. A great romantic comedy, also featuring Paris in the 60’s.
Thanks!
Love it, too.
And the forgery aspect is still topical.
Criterion came out with a well-regarded BluRay release in 2010 (region-locked to NA) and subsequently Universal as a “50 year anniversary” that appears to be visually identical and is cheaper/unlocked. The Universal also includes a DTS-HD Master Audio audio track in addition to the original mono.
Interesting that the movie The Aviator had Hepburn’s father as a democrat