New from Criterion: Stanley Donen's Charade

Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in Charade. (Photo: Universal/Criterion Collection.)

In a career devoted to giving audiences pleasure, Stanley Donen was never closer to the mark than in his 1952 musical Singin’ in the Rain (Betty Comden and Adolph Green’s hilarious burlesque of Hollywood’s conversion from the silent era to the talkies) and the 1963 Charade. These are two of the most blissful entertainments in American movie history. Charade is a witty, elegant and ingenious thriller written by Peter Stone, from a story he devised with Marc Behm, that is a romantic comedy at its heart. Donen and Stone didn’t invent this hybrid; Hitchcock did, in 1935 in The 39 Steps, and he returned to it twice, in To Catch a Thief in 1955 and North by Northwest in 1959. Both these later vehicles star Cary Grant – as a retired jewel thief on the French Riviera who has to find out who is emulating his illicit style in the first and as an innocent bystander mistaken for a government agent in the second. His leading ladies are Grace Kelly (27 to Grant’s 51) and Eva Marie Saint (35 to Grant’s 55). In Charade Grant is 59 and his acting partner, Audrey Hepburn as Reggie Lampert, is 35. I don’t provide these statistics in order to invoke an unconvincing platitude about aging male stars and young female ones: no one who watches him parry and trade quips with these three stunning, sexy women should make the mistake of thinking that Cary Grant can be reduced to a man of a certain age with a taste for younger partners. With each of them, as with Katharine Hepburn in the thirties and forties, his is the art of erotic understatement, and he’s always the one who gets seduced.

He’s more active in Charade than he is in those two Hitchcock classics – he gets to do a little clowning. (In one sequence he takes a shower with his clothes on for Reggie’s amusement. In another they get into a game at a club that requires the players to pass an orange tucked under their jaw without the use of their hands. It’s quite the silliest scene, and like the memorable cocktail party in another of Audrey Hepburn’s hits, the 1961 Breakfast at Tiffany’s, it feels very early sixties.) The movie begins at a ski resort in the French Alps. Reggie has decided to divorce her husband Charles because he’s remote and secretive. But before she has a chance to file papers, Charles turns up dead, tossed rudely from a train. To Reggie’s shock, the police inspector investigating the homicide (Jacques Marin) produces four passports for her husband, each under a different name, and when Reggie returns to their Paris apartment she finds it has been ransacked. Grant plays Peter Joshua, who befriends her at the resort – though their initial encounter, in the mode of romantic comedies, is off-putting for both of them – and offers to protect her when the three unsavory characters who show up at Charles’s wake (Ned Glass, James Coburn and George Kennedy) insist that her husband stole money that belongs to them and threaten to kill her should she fail to turn it up. But Charles isn’t the only figure in the movie who may not be who he seems to be. What makes Charade both a rom-com and an unconventional one is that, every time the other major supporting character, a CIA man played by Walter Matthau, comes up with a piece of information that seems to throw a shade over Peter, instead of keeping it to herself the smitten Reggie throws it in his face. She’s continually furious over his furtiveness and the lies he appears to be telling her, but whereas she had no trouble ungluing herself from Charles, she can’t let go of Peter. Well, why would she? He’s Cary Grant. And she’s Audrey Hepburn: the chemistry, especially for this most chic of romance thrillers, is ideal. (Stone has chosen the perfect profession for Reggie: she’s a translator for E.U.R.E.S.C.O, or European Research Conferences.)

Everyone in the cast appears to be having a marvelous time, with each other and with Stone’s spiffy dialogue – especially, I would say, Matthau, who wears a mustache and keeps scrunching up his face as if he wants to scratch himself but can’t quite locate the itch. The scene that introduces the trio of bad guys, who seem to have arrived at Charles’s wake for the sole purpose of determining if he’s truly dead, spins off Harry Lime’s funeral in The Third Man, and it’s very funny. Each of the intruders has a distinctive walk: Glass’s Leopold Gideon marches into the room, Coburn’s Tex Penthollow saunters, and Kennedy’s hulking Herman Scobie, looking incensed, stalks up to the coffin, removes the pin from the corpse’s buttonhole carnation and stabs Charles’s finger with it.

The art direction is by Jean D’Eaubonne, the cinematography by Charles Lang Jr.: both gleam in the crisp, rich Criterion restoration. Hepburn wears magnificent outfits by Givenchy. The theme song is another winner by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, who had written “Moon River” for Breakfast at Tiffany’s two years earlier and “Days of Wine and Roses” in between; for some reason “Charade” didn’t follow the pattern and win the Oscar for Best Song. (It went to Jimmy Van Heusen and Sammy Cahn’s “Call Me Irresponsible,” from Papa’s Delicate Condition.) Over Maurice Binder’s op-art credits, the title tune is an instrumental, played fast and with an undercurrent of mystery and menace; we don’t hear Mercer’s romantic lyrics until the scene where Peter takes Reggie to dinner on a cruise ship on the Seine. 

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.