Reviews and notes

With his 1935 thriller The 39 Steps, Alfred Hitchcock introduced a delectable formula: Take a casually elegant couple, throw them together in extraordinary circumstances and watch their banter gradually evolve into endearments without ever once losing its wit. In CHARADE the most sophisticated of these movies, a thug forces Cary Grant to climb to the roof of the Parisian office of American Express for the unexpressed purpose of pushing him off. Instead of panicking, Grant offers a dismissive complaint: "All right, but the view had better be worth it." He's so relaxed that when he gets to the roof, he turns his back on his would-be killer, puts on his glasses, gives nighttime Paris a cursory glance and says "Mmm, very pretty," like someone who's been forced to look at one too many holiday snaps.

That almost perversely degage attitude is the defining spirit of CHARADE. When the picture's director, Stanley Donen, danced his acceptance of an honorary Oscar earlier this year, as charming as one of his films, people said that he's exactly the man they'd expect to have made movies like Singin' in the Rain and It's Always Fair Weather. Well, CHARADE is exactly the type of thriller you'd expect a man like Donen to make. CHARADE, which takes place in Paris, dances, it capers. Even the moments when the movie's trio of bad guys (James Coburn, George Kennedy, Ned Glass) come to their gruesome ends are presented as macabre jokes, as if you'd been passed a book of Charles Addams drawings over cocktails. As the title suggests, this is a prankish, playful picture, with a pair of charming jokers at the top of its deck, Grant and Audrey Hepburn. They play the movie in what might be called high deadpan. Even when the imperiled Hepburn lets her nerves get the better of her, she puts quotation marks around her frightened reactions that are as exquisite as a pair of Cartier cuff links. Hepburn exaggerates so that we can see she's playacting, and the movie's light, sparkling tone remains undisturbed.

The plot kicks off with Hepburn learning that the husband she was about to divorce (because she felt she didn't know him) has been murdered. Then she finds out just how much she didn't know. He had stolen money from the government during the war, then double-crossed the Army buddies who were in on the theft. They figure his widow has the stolen boodle and come to Paris to get it. Grant is the beguiling stranger who steps in to lend her a hand. He's infinitely more appealing than her dead dullard of a husband, but that's not saying much. After all, Cary Grant is more appealing than almost anyone. (There must be at least two or three exceptions, but I've never met them.)

The complication is that Grant may be harboring as many secrets as the late unlamented. Shifting effortlessly from identity to identity, he poses, in the course of the picture, as a businessman, the revenge-seeking brother of one of the bad guys' victims and a professional thief who's also after the stolen money. Each time Hepburn catches him in a lie, he simply comes up with a new name and occupation. "The man's the same even if the name is different," he assures her. True: gray hair and all, no matter what name he gives, he's unmistakably Cary Grant, dapper and viewing the world with an amused reticence that masks a true romantic. The fun of CHARADE has less to do with its who's-got-the-money plot (which is nonetheless very well worked out) than with seeing Hepburn learning to trust the instincts that lead her to nuzzle up to Grant whenever they're alone. This is the movie in which Hepburn says to Grant, "Do you know what's the matter with you? Nothing," as a beatific, dreamy smile breaks like a slow wave across her face.

That line also sums up the approach to romance shared by both the The 39 Steps and the great American romantic comedies of the 30s. Those pictures got rid of all the mush that clogged up most movie love scenes and replaced it with a style that's quintessentially American. All the longing and idealism is clothed beneath breezy practicality, as comfortably chic as Grant's impeccably tailored suits and Hepburn's Givenchy dresses. That style isn't an evasion of emotion, but a way to avoid diluting the feelings that matter. Love, in romantic comedy (which is essentially what CHARADE is), is too big a subject for sentimental spooning. And, the internal logic of these pictures goes, if you can talk lightheartedly about something as monumental as love, you can be flip and sassy about whatever else comes up. It's simply a more gracious way of getting through the day. In CHARADE, with killers breathing down their necks almost every minute, Grant and Hepburn play their scenes as a series of japes and come-ons, with the entranced serenity of two people playing ping-pong while gazing - grinning - into each other's eyes.

Made when the studio system was on its last legs (and four years before Bonnie and Clyde announced a new American cinema), CHARADE still feels fresh, quick-witted, nothing like the artificial, airless Hollywood pictures of its time. That's a tribute to the cleverness and taste of the people involved: Donen, screenwriter Peter Stone, cinematographer Charles Lang and Henry Mancini (who contributed a lovely score, alternately percussive and lyrical). And it's because Donen (who was living in Europe) got the camera out of the studio. You wouldn't mistake CHARADE for the French New Wave - much of it was filmed on sets - but, apart from the plot and the charisma of its stars, the movie could almost be a Hollywood version of an imagistic poem celebrating Paris.

When I think of CHARADE I remember a Punch and Judy show in a park framed by autumn leaves; an ice-cream vendor by the Seine; a flea market for stamp collectors; an illuminated phone booth in an empty Metro station; the Opera House at night; the slim, solitary figure of Hepburn smoking at twilight in an elegant apartment stripped to its gilt-framed walls. Each of those shots is evanescent, over much too quickly, like the delight of the movie itself. You content yourself with memories, like the elderly stamp collector in one heartbreaking scene who surrenders the precious stamps he's briefly possessed. "For a few moments," he says, "they were mine. That is enough." The chemistry of Grant and Hepburn seems even more precious, and for two hours it is all the treasure we could ever desire.
- Charles Taylor, Salon, 19 May 1998

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