Charade

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Charade

See also Charade Circuit for the race track and Charades for the game

Charade is a 1963 movie written by Peter Stone and Marc Behm, directed by Stanley Donen, and starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. It also stars Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Dominique Minot, Ned Glass, and Jacques Marin. It spans several genres including suspense-thriller, romance, and comedy.

This movie fell into the public domain due to a lack of a copyright notice.

Plot

Audrey Hepburn plays Regina 'Reggie' Lampert, who returns to Paris from a skiing holiday in Megeve. She plans to ask her husband Charles for a divorce, but finds that the flat is empty and that all their possessions have been sold for cash. The police tell her that her husband has been found murdered, thrown from a train, but the money cannot be found. Reggie meets a stranger who gives his name as Peter Joshua (Cary Grant) and claims to want to help her. She is also summoned to the US Embassy, where she meets Hamilton Bartholemew (Matthau), who claims to be a CIA officer.

Joshua changes his name several times, further confusing Reggie, and says he's interested in her husband's money, which apparently came from a World War II payroll he had stolen. The late Charles' partners in crime (played by Coburn, Kennedy and Glass) assume Reggie is in on a scheme to steal and hide the money from them. Reggie realises that she actually knows nothing about her late husband.

Everyone assumes Reggie must know where the money is. The situation becomes tense as the searchers begin turning up dead, with each survivor suspecting all the others.

In addition to the clever, catchy script, and the repartee between Grant and Hepburn, Charade is also memorable for its location filming in Paris, Henry Mancini's score and theme song, and the animated titles by Maurice Binder.

The movie was remade in 2002 as The Truth About Charlie starring Thandie Newton and Mark Wahlberg & directed by Jonathan Demme.

Trivia

In true Alfred Hitchcock style, the writer of the story, Peter Stone, and the voice of director, Stanley Donen, appear briefly in the movie. When Reggie goes to the U.S. Embassy to meet with Bartholomew, two men get on the elevator as she gets off. The man who says, "I bluffed the Old Man out of the last pot -- with a pair of deuces," is Stone, although the voice is Donen's. Stone's voice is also used for the U.S. Marine, guarding the Embassy, at the end of the film.

The movie was said to be an attempt by the studio to unite Hepburn and Grant. Previously, Grant had been offered the role opposite Hepburn in Roman Holiday, but had turned it down, citing the fact that he felt he was too old to play Hepburn's love interest. The role in Roman Holiday, ably played by Gregory Peck, is often said to have been tailor-made for Grant to play.

Awards

Cary Grant & Audrey Hepburn were nominated for Golden Globes in Best Motion Picture Actor - Musical/Comedy & Best Motion Picture Actress - Musical/Comedy.

Copyright status

According to the Archive.org website and other sources, due to an irregularity involving the lack of a copyright notice on this film, it is now in the public domain. No claim of copyright was put into the original prints, despite that copyright notices were mandatory in the US prior to 1989. This was not a major issue until the introduction of VCR equipment meant that companies could produce retail copies with no need to pay any licence fees. As a result, there are many editions of Charade on VHS and DVD, of widely varying sound and picture quality. Two notable releases include a restored Criterion DVD edition (selling for, on average, ten times the average cost of most DVD releases of the film), and the film was also included as a bonus feature on the DVD release of the remake, The Truth About Charlie.

External links

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Plot

Trivia

Awards

Copyright status

External links