Charade (1963)

Charade is a 1963 American romantic screwball comedy mystery film produced and directed by Stanley Donen, written by Peter Stone and Marc Behm, and starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. The cast also features Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Dominique Minot, Ned Glass and Jacques Marin. It spans three genres: suspense thriller, romance and comedy.

Charade was praised by critics for its screenplay and the chemistry between Grant and Hepburn. It was filmed on location in Paris and contains animated titles by Maurice Binder. Henry Mancini's score features the popular theme song "Charade".

In 2022, the film was selected for preservation in the United States National Film Registry by the Library of Congress as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant".

Plot

While on holiday in the French Alps, Regina "Reggie" Lampert, an American expatriate working as a simultaneous interpreter, tells her friend Sylvie that she is divorcing her husband Charles. She also meets Peter Joshua, a charming American.

On her return to Paris, she finds her apartment stripped bare. A police inspector says that Charles auctioned off their belongings, then was murdered after leaving Paris. Reggie is given Charles's small travel bag containing a letter addressed to her, a ship ticket to Venezuela, four passports in multiple names and nationalities, and miscellaneous personal items. At Charles's sparsely attended funeral, three men show up to view the body. One sticks a pin into the corpse to confirm Charles is dead. Another uses a hand mirror to see if he is breathing.

Reggie is summoned to meet CIA administrator Hamilton Bartholomew at the American Embassy. She learns that the three men are Herman Scobie, Leopold W. Gideon and Tex Panthollow. During World War II, they, Charles, and Carson Dyle were assigned by the OSS to deliver $250,000 ($4.6 million in current dollars) in gold to the French Resistance, but instead stole it. Carson was wounded in a German ambush and left behind. Charles double-crossed the others, taking all the gold. The three survivors are after the missing money, as is the U.S. government. Hamilton insists that Reggie has it, even if she does not know what or where it is—and that she is in great danger.

Peter finds Reggie and helps her move into a hotel. The three criminals separately threaten her, each convinced that she knows where the money is. Herman shocks her by claiming that Peter is in cahoots with them, after which Peter says that he is Carson Dyle's brother Alexander and is trying to bring the others to justice, believing they killed Carson. As the hunt for the money continues, Herman and Leopold are murdered. Hamilton tells Reggie that Carson Dyle had no brother. When she confronts Alexander, he says that he is Adam Canfield, a professional thief. Although frustrated by his dishonesty, Reggie still trusts him.

Reggie and Adam go to an outdoor market, the location of Charles's last known appointment. Spotting Tex, Adam follows him. At the stamp-selling booths, Adam and Tex each realize that Charles bought some extremely valuable stamps and affixed them to the envelope in his travel bag. Both men race to Reggie's hotel room, but discover that the stamps are missing from the envelope. Reggie, who gave the stamps to Sylvie's young son Jean-Louis, suddenly realizes their significance. She and Sylvie find Jean-Louis, but he has already traded the stamps to a dealer. They find the dealer, who says that the rare stamps are worth $250,000; he returns them to Reggie.

Reggie returns to the hotel and finds Tex's body; Tex managed to write the name "Dyle" on the floor before dying. Convinced that Adam is the murderer, Reggie telephones Hamilton, who says to meet him at the Colonnade at the Palais-Royal. Adam sees her and gives chase. At the Colonnade, Reggie is caught in the open between the two men. Adam claims that Hamilton is Carson Dyle; surviving the German ambush, he became obsessed with revenge and reclaiming the treasure. Reggie runs into an empty theater and hides in the prompt box. Carson is about to shoot her, but Adam activates a trapdoor under him, sending him crashing to the floor far beneath him.

The next day, Reggie and Adam go to the embassy to turn over the stamps, but Adam declines to go in. Inside, Reggie discovers that Adam is Brian Cruikshank, a U.S. Treasury agent responsible for recovering stolen government property. With his true identity now revealed, he proposes marriage to Reggie. She says that she hopes that they have lots of boys so that they can name them all after him.

Cast

Cary Grant as Brian Cruikshank (alias Peter Joshua, Alexander Dyle and Adam Canfield)

Audrey Hepburn as Regina "Reggie" Lampert

Walter Matthau as Carson Dyle (alias Hamilton Bartholomew)

James Coburn as Tex Panthollow

George Kennedy as Herman Scobie

Dominique Minot as Sylvie Gaudel

Ned Glass as Leopold W. Gideon

Jacques Marin as Inspector Edouard Grandpierre

Paul Bonifas as Mr. Felix, the stamp dealer

Thomas Chelimsky as Jean-Louis Gaudel

Production

Writing and casting

When screenwriters Peter Stone and Marc Behm submitted their script The Unsuspecting Wife around Hollywood, they were unable to sell it. Stone then turned it into a novel, retitled Charade, which found a publisher and was serialized in Redbook magazine. The serial caught the attention of the same Hollywood companies that had passed on it earlier. The film rights were quickly sold to producer/director Stanley Donen. Stone then wrote the final shooting script, tailored to Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, with Behm receiving story co-credit.

At the end of the film, Hepburn lists Grant's aliases, concluding, "I hope we have a lot of boys and we can name them all after you". In the Criterion Collection's 1999 commentary, Stone laments the fact that the music swells to mask his "best closing line". Donen tells him that he can say it now and get his own back.

Cary Grant, who turned 59 years old during filming, was sensitive about the 25-year age difference between Audrey Hepburn (33 at the time of filming) and himself, and was uncomfortable with their romantic interplay. To address his concerns, the filmmakers agreed to add dialogue that has Grant's character comment on his age and Regina being portrayed as the pursuer.

Filming

Production began in Paris on October 22, 1962. About half the film was shot on location, with interiors being filmed at Studios de Boulogne. The scenes in which Grant and Hepburn first meet were shot in January 1963 in a ski resort in Megève, in the French Alps. Hepburn had just filmed Paris When It Sizzles the previous summer in a number of the same locations in Paris, but difficulties with the earlier production caused it to be released four months after Charade.

When the film was released at Christmas time 1963, Audrey Hepburn's line, "At any moment we could be assassinated", was overdubbed with, "At any moment we could be eliminated", due to the recent assassination of President John F. Kennedy. Official video releases of the film have since restored the original dialogue, although some public domain copies of the original release still carry the dubbed line.

Locations

All locations are in Paris, except for the railway and ski resort.

Paris–Bordeaux railway (Charles Lampert's murder)

Résidence Le Mont d'Arbois, Megève (Alpine hotel)

5 Avenue Velasquez (Lampert apartment)

Théâtre Vrai Guignolet, Carré Marigny (puppet theatre)

24 Rue Censier (Hôtel Saint-Jacques)

Les Halles (meeting with Bartholomew at the market)

11 Rue Scribe (American Express building)

Quai de Montebello (walking along the river)

UNESCO Headquarters (EURESCO headquarters)

Carré Marigny (stamp market)

Varenne station (interior of the Saint-Jacques station)

Palais-Royal (chase in the colonnade)

Comédie-Française (the theatre)

Embassy of the United States, Paris

Studio scenes filmed at the Billancourt Studios.

Release

The film was slated for a Christmas release, but Universal consented to a one-time advance screening at the Palace Theatre in Washington, D.C., which was a benefit to raise money to help low-income children stay in school. Singer Ella Fitzgerald performed and, according to Jet magazine, $50,000 was raised (equivalent to almost a half-million dollars in 2023).

Charade premiered as the Christmas film at Radio City Music Hall in New York on December 5, 1963. It ended up breaking the box office record at the theater. It went on wide release soon after, and was the highest-grossing film in the country for five weekends straight in January, and ended up the fourth highest grossing film of 1964.

Copyright

Before 1978, U.S. law required works to include a copyright notice to have legal protection. The film includes a notice reading "MCMLXIII BY UNIVERSAL PICTURES COMPANY, INC. and STANLEY DONEN FILMS, INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED", but this fails to meet this requirement, because it does not include the word "copyright", the abbreviation "copr.", or the symbol "©". Consequently, the film entered into the public domain in the United States immediately upon its release. As a result, copies from film prints of varying quality have been widely available on VHS, DVD and Blu-ray, in addition to official releases of the film from Universal, as well as The Criterion Collection. The film is also available for free viewing on YouTube and free download at the Internet Archive. However, although the film is in the public domain, the original music remains under copyright if used outside the context of the film.

Reception

Charade received positive reviews from contemporaries, as well as from 21st-century critics. At Rotten Tomatoes, the film has an approval rating of 95% based on 55 reviews. The consensus reads: "A globetrotting caper that prizes its idiosyncratic pieces over the general puzzle, Charade is a delightful romp with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn's sparkling chemistry at the center of some perfectly orchestrated mayhem." On Metacritic, the film has a weighted average score of 83 out of 100 based on 16 critics, indicating "universal acclaim".

In a review published on January 6, 1964, in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther criticized the film for its "grisly touches" and "gruesome violence", but also praised it for its screenplay, with its "sudden twists, shocking gags, eccentric arrangements, and occasionally bright and brittle lines", as well as Donen's direction, said to be halfway between 1930s screwball comedy and North by Northwest by Alfred Hitchcock, which also starred Grant.

In a Time Out review, the film was rated positively, with the assertion that it is a "mammoth audience teaser [...] Grant imparts his ineffable charm, Kennedy (with metal hand) provides comic brutality, while Hepburn is elegantly fraught".

While reviewing the Blu-ray version of the film, Chris Cabin of Slant Magazine gave the film a three-and-a-half rating out of five, calling it a "high-end, kitschy whodunit" and writing that it is a "riotous and chaotic take on the spy thriller, essentially, but it structurally resembles Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None", as well as describing it as "some sort of miraculous entertainment".

Awards and nominations

See also

List of American films of 1963

The Truth About Charlie, a 2002 remake of Charade

References

External links

Charade at IMDb

Charade at the AFI Catalog of Feature Films

Charade at the TCM Movie Database (archived)

Charade is available for free viewing and download at the Internet Archive

Charade: The Spy in Givenchy – an essay by Bruce Eder at The Criterion Collection

Charade at YouTube