Cary Grant made three films with director Stanley Donen between 1958 and 1963. Those three films arguably define the sunset of his acting career. The last of the three, Charade (1963), is Grant's last legitimately great film. He made two more films afterward and then retired from acting in 1966. Charade is also a transitional film for American cinema generally, perched as it is between the last gasps of big studio filmmaking in the 1950s and the first rumblings of the American New Wave. Stanley Donen was the ideal director for such a film, given that his filmmaking style already resembled various New Waves before any of them even began to swell on the cinematic horizon. Donen was flexible and creative, able to slot right into whatever genre to which he was assigned (maybe not science fiction, but that may not have been his fault). Even though Donen was primarily known for making musicals in the 1950s including arguably the greatest musical ever made, Charade demonstrates a surprising--and surprisingly brutal--facility for thrillers in the mode of Alfred Hitchcock. Charade is sometimes described as the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made, though that might be hyperbole.
Donen was also one of Audrey Hepburn's principal directors, having made Funny Face with her in 1957 and with Two For the Road--a New Wave film if ever there was one--ahead in 1967. The pairing of Hepburn and Cary Grant perhaps delayed Grant's retirement. Of his experience on Charade, he said, "All I want for Christmas is to make another movie with Audrey Hepburn." Alas, that never came to pass. He was lured into making Father Goose with the promise of Hepburn as a co-star, though the part ultimately went to Leslie Caron. Maybe that's just as well. Donen intended to make a further film with Grant, too, but the actor retired and the part in Arabesque went to Gregory Peck instead. For what it's worth, that's a pretty good movie, but I don't think Grant and Sophia Loren would have gotten along well. They had a history. And Grant was probably too old by then for that kind of globetrotting adventure anyway.
Charade begins with a man being thrown from a moving train. He's been murdered. This is Charles Lampert. His widow, Regina, is on a skiing holiday with their son at the time. She tells her best friend that she's thinking of leaving Charles, but when she returns to her flat in Paris, she discovers that it has been cleared out and Charles is gone. The police are waiting to talk to her, too, given that he has been murdered. They hand her his effects, including a letter offering his apologies for what he's done to her. She doesn't know whether to be relieved or apprehensive, because the cop on the case, one Hamilton Bartholemew of the CIA, tells her that Charles has absconded with $250,000 dollars from a World War II heist his unit pulled near the end of the war. At his funeral, his army buddies come one by one to pay their respects. One by one, they menace Regina for information about the money. She hasn't got it. She has no idea where it might be. They don't believe her. Her only help is Peter Joshua, an American she met on holiday who helps her move into a hotel. But Joshua has secrets of his own. The thieves tell Regina that he is not "Peter Joshua" but the brother of one of their confederates who was killed in the heist. Then Regina discovers that that man had no brother, and he owns that he is a professional thief. Meanwhile, the thieves themselves start to get murdered, casting suspicion everywhere. And what DID Charles do with the money, anyway?
Charade gives the Cary Grant persona a good workout. The character he plays here is protean, changing from scene to scene to fit the needs of the plot while remaining essentially Cary Grant. A viewer who thinks that Grant was always playing himself will not change their minds while watching this film, but Grant, as usual, had the last word. "Have you ever seen people trying to play themselves at parties?" he once asked an interviewer some years after he retired from film. "They're terrible!" Unspoken here is the idea that Grant was NOT playing himself. He also once told an admirer who said they always wanted to be Cary Grant, "So did I." Archie Leach was always somewhere down at the foundations of his identity. What Charade does with the Grant persona is akin to the Kuleshov effect. It is charming, sinister, untrustworthy, and heroic by turns not through any particular change in Grant's performance, but by the context of the given scene in which it is placed. Grant absolutely could change the tenor of his performance for effect, but in this film he doesn't have to. Indeed, it's not even a desirable thing. The steadiness of the character here, by whatever name he goes, keeps the audience in the dark. The character's true motivations are opaque until the very end. It's a compelling hook. All Grant needs to do is hit his marks and not flub his lines. The persona does the rest.
This is not Grant's movie, though. It's Audrey Hepburn's. Fittingly, she's the character we meet first, and it's her point of view through which we perceive the events of the film. Hepburn is asked to play a wide range of emotions. Her character is not reliant on her movie-star persona. The movie asks her for terror, attraction, comedy, craftiness, motherhood, distrust, sorrow, resignation, and anger. It's a broad canvas for an actor, and Hepburn was certainly game for it. Significantly, Hepburn is an actor who did not cultivate a specific movie-star persona, per se, though in the public's mind she was probably Holly Golightly or Sabrina. She was never accused of "playing herself," because her portfolio doesn't allow that kind of pigeonholing (and, seriously, have you ever actually read her biography? It's a LOT). The character is a type, though. Regina is a variant of the wrong man accused, or the poor sap mistaken for a guilty party. She's the equivalent of Roger Thornhill in North by Northwest, a character who thinks her world is secure and comprehensible until the bottom drops out and a world of chaos lies below. She doesn't understand anything for most of the film, and has to keep her wits to stay alive as she pieces things together. This was Hepburn's first go at this character type, and you can look at this film as a warm-up exercise for Wait Until Dark five years later if you like. That film is very similar to Charade, though it removes the comfort of a white knight.
Charade leans in to the more romantic aspects of the Hitchcockian thriller. Grant, for his part, thought the increasing age gap between him and his leading ladies was troublesome, while Hepburn had been paired with a ridiculous succession of MUCH older co-stars. The gap between Hepburn and Grant was "only" 25 years, which is perhaps less distasteful when Hepburn was in her mid-1930s than it was a decade earlier. Grant insisted that it would be undignified for him to chase after her, so the filmmakers reversed this element of their dynamic and had her chase after him. For my tastes, it works better this way. Both of these characters are worldly and tired of the world. Their banter doesn't seem rehearsed so much as it comes from deep wells of experience. Regina is married to Charles at the beginning of the film, but she's resigned to divorcing him. She knows he doesn't love her and she doesn't love him and that's that. This is not Audrey Hepburn the ingenue, nor Cary Grant the handsome screwball comedian. This is a movie about adults, starring adults. The scenes of intimacy between them aren't coy, and their relationship isn't headed anywhere chaste.
Donen's directorial style here is geared for editing rather than indulging in elaborate shot compositions. This isn't a film that overawes you with it's beauty, no matter how photogenic it finds Paris to be. It's an attractive film as a baseline of commercial professionalism, but it's one that moves rapidly and doesn't dawdle on the scenery. Donen finds his meaning in the cut. It differs from Hitchcock in so far as this film isn't interested in emphasizing significant objects, which makes the deftness of how it leads the audience to the conclusion even more remarkable. The film tells us where Charles hid the money within the first five minutes of the film, which puts the audience in the same situation as the characters. The solution to the mystery is hidden in plain sight. When Regina eventually figures it out, the film rewards both her and the audience for their cleverness with a riot of images related to that solution thrown onto the screen in a rapid montage. The film conceals its true Villain, too, though there are plenty of villains with a lowercase "v" throughout. Of the major characters, four of them are played by actors who had already won or would go on to win Oscars. Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy are a murderer's row of supporting actors, if you'll pardon the pun. In one respect, Donen takes his cues from Hitchcock: he puts his leading lady in a series of chic outfits. Audrey Hepburn could wear the hell out of clothes and this film insists on indulging that skill. The chic of 1963 pins this film firmly in its era, if the style of the film didn't do that, too. The film debuted in theaters a month after the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and you can look at this film as a coda of sorts for the fashions of Camelot. Things changed quickly afterward. The form of the film is more forward looking than its fashions. This is a New Wave film in spite of dialogue that sometimes seems like it comes from a 1930s screwball comedy. A lot of the film's flourishes are completely arbitrary in the finest tradition of Godard and his followers. I like to think that Godard is a follower of Donen, though I doubt that's the case. The goofy face Grant makes when Regina figures out who he is being perhaps the most arbitrary of the film's flourishes. But the cast, though...the cast imparts on the film a Hollywood glamour and commercial sheen that disguises its provenance. This is a film first and foremost about movie stars, and in some ways the plot and even the form of the film doesn't matter so long as light is bouncing off Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.
I wonder if Ian Fleming saw Charade and again contemplated the idea of Grant as James Bond, given that the opening credits have a sinister early sixties espionage score and were designed by Maurice Binder. Maybe not, though. Even after he retired and all the way until his death in 1986, Grant was thought to be ageless, but I think he looks noticeably his age and noticeably out of shape in Charade. It makes the fight sequence with the much younger, much larger George Kennedy seem rigged for the story because Grant is the designated hero. Because, you know, he's Cary friggin' Grant.
The credit sequence deserves one other piece of scrutiny. It doesn't have a correct copyright notice, which means that the film entered the public domain the minute it was first exhibited to an audience. This also means there are a raft of shady versions of the film. The one I've used for screen caps is the Universal blu-ray and digital edition, though the Criterion edition is excellent, too. Beware of other vendors, though. The film has long been a favorite of fly-by-night grifters.
My other posts on Cary Grant. Only about sixty more films to go:
This is the Night (1932)
Enter: Madame (1935)
The Eagle and the Hawk (1933)
The Last Outpost (1935)
Wings in the Dark (1935)
Only Angels Have Wings (1939)
Penny Serenade (1941)
Suspicion (1941)
To Catch a Thief (1955)
North by Northwest (1959)
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