Charade (1963) one perfect story-telling machine (Review)

For a decade which produced some of the most enduring, beloved hits in American cinema history – everything from The Sound of Music to Psycho – it can be hard to love 1960s Hollywood in toto. The Golden Age was over, the 1970s New Hollywood was yet to be born, and old reliable genres like the Western, the musical and the noir were tattered from overuse. Yet the decade’s output still has its own distinctive style and tone, one which, in the right hands, can be a unique treat. Few films capture it better than Stanley Donen’s Charade, released on Blu-Ray by Criterion UK.

It begins with a man being thrown from a speeding train at night, a scene which Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone leave unexplained for a daring length of time. It’s a surprisingly gritty opening, one which makes you wonder if you’re watching one of those darker, tougher crime films that emerged ten years later. Then it cuts to Maurice Binder’s playful, abstract animated opening credits, Henry Mancini’s typically sophisticated theme and a credit for Audrey Hepburn’s outfitters, and suddenly you can’t mistake this for any other decade.

Hepburn is Regina Lampert, an American translator holidaying in the French Alps and pondering whether to divorce her husband. The decision becomes rather academic when the gendarmes inform her that her husband is dead, and three strangers turn up to his funeral. They behave strangely around the body, seemingly testing if he’s dead or not, and also one of them is played by James Coburn so you know something shifty’s going on. As Lampert investigates this, she runs into another American tourist, Peter Joshua, played by Cary Grant. She begins to suspect he might be linked to the three sinister strangers, and she’s also attracted to him because, well, he’s Cary Grant. That said, Grant was acutely alert to the 25-year age gap between himself and Hepburn, and asked for Stone’s screenplay to be rewritten to allow Lampert to take the lead in pursuing Joshua rather than the other way round.

It’s one of a number of touches that are pleasingly ahead of their time. The mix of foreign locations and complex international skulduggery gives Charade the feel of a Bond film, albeit one made before Eon Productions had worked out what the Bond formula actually was. Certainly, George Kennedy’s hook-handed contract killer is the sort of colourful henchman Blofeld would kill for, and there’s also a nod to Fleming’s Casino Royale in a scene where Hepburn walks past a spy complaining to his friend about having to go undercover at a card game. That spy is played by Stone but voiced by Donen, which feels like a metaphor for the film in general: writer and director fusing into one perfect storytelling machine.

Perhaps Donen is underrated because his greatest films feature a second strong authorial voice; Singin’ in the Rain and On the Town are co-directed by Gene Kelly, Bedazzled is written by its star Peter Cook. Charade is dominated by its stars, yet it’s worth asking if anyone other than Donen could have pulled off this weird mix of glamorous rom-com and dangerous thriller. Certainly, enough people have tried since its release. What they lack, apart from Donen’s light touch and Stone’s quick wit, is a star like Grant. Hepburn might be the viewpoint character – even more so after the rewrites – but Grant has the more complex task of making you like a character who almost certainly isn’t who he says he is. And of course, you do, because – one more time – he’s Cary Grant. The resulting film is something akin to Hitchcock without the inner demons, starring a version of Roger O Thornhill who really is involved in all the shady, morally dubious business Thornhill is wrongly presumed to be into, and yet is somehow even more loveable. The formulas of Golden Age Hollywood might have been on their way out in the 1960s, but if you get the right combination of stars, script and director they can still produce something this great.

Thank you for reading Graham’s Review of CHARADE (2020)

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