Charade - 1963 film review

Charade is a film made by an accomplished director, Stanley Donen, who was here venturing into Hitchcock territory with a light thriller starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. The movie was a commercial success and boasted a theme song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer. When I first saw it, the mix of crime with romance and comedy slightly underwhelmed me, and the same was true (as I said on this blog twelve years ago) when I took another look.

But time passes and views change and on a recent third viewing - intended as light relief in the lockdown era - I enjoyed it more. It's a well-crafted confection of highly commercial if highly derivative ingredients although not in the same league as, say, Hitchcock's North by North West, which is by far my favourite Cary Grant film.

The source material was a short story called "The Unsuspecting Wife", written by Peter Stone. He and Marc Behm (best known as author of The Eye of the Beholder) turned it into a screenplay. When this didn't sell, Stone turned the story into a novel, Charade, which did. Donen secured a high-calibre cast, including Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy.

Hepburn plays Regina, whose marriage is on the rocks at the start of the film. She's not too heartbroken to learn of the death of her husband Charles or to meet a charming man (Grant) who calls himself Peter Joshua. When it turns out that Charles was a crook who nicked a quarter of a million dollars that assorted villains want for themselves, Regina finds herself in danger. Peter comes to her aid - but what's his real game?

There are some good set-piece scenes and I enjoyed George Kennedy's steel claw, which reminded me of Major Whitlow in Mortmain Hall, not to mention Louis Crandell, the inspiration for my character! The Parisian backdrop adds to the movie's charm and overall it ranks as an agreeable piece of escapism. Very suitable at the moment!

To Catch a Thief

Alfred Hitchcock based his famous film To Catch a Thief on a book by the American crime writer David Dodge. It’s the story of jewel theft on the Riviera and it stars Cary Grant and Grace Kelly, who combine together splendidly. To use a term that wasn’t around when the film was first shown, it’s a ‘feelgood movie’.

Grant , who plays John Robie, lives quietly in a lovely villa. He was once a famous jewel thief, but worked in the Resistance during the war, and has now renounced his old criminal ways. But when wealthy women of the south of France suffer a fresh series of jewel thefts which seem to bear all his hallmarks, Robie is the inevitable suspect. His old friends don’t believe in his innocence, let alone the police. Danielle, daughter of a former comrade who is now a wine waiter, urges him to take her to South America with his ill-gotten gains. But Robie decides to prove that he is innocent by catching ‘the Cat’.

This brings him into enjoyably close contact with Grace Kelly, playing the daughter of a scoundrel’s widow whose jewels make her an obvious target for ‘the Cat’. Kelly’s lustrous beauty and the couple’s developing relationship are more memorable than the actual plot. This is one of Hitchcock’s lighter movies, and the plot is scarcely complex, but even so, it offers a couple of hours of pleasant entertainment.

Notorious

My recent post about Alfred Hitchcock prompted comments encouraging me to watch his 1946 film Notorious, and a sensible blogger always pays heed to people who take the trouble to offer constructive comments. So I’ve now seen Notorious, and on the whole I enjoyed it.

I say ‘on the whole’ because it got off to a very slow start. In fact, watching it after a very long day at the office, I was on the verge of going to sleep after quarter of an hour. But then the story warmed up, and so did my enthusiasm for the movie.

Ingrid Bergman is the patriotic American daughter of a traitor who is persuaded by secret agent Cary Grant (playing T.R. Devlin – no relation to Harry) to infiltrate a group of German sympathisers based in Brazil. She takes the job so seriously that she marries wealthy mummy’s boy Claude Rains, and duly discovers the wherewithal for a uranium-based bomb in his wine cellar. Rains discovers her duplicity, and he and Mum start to poison her, but of course they haven’t reckoned on Grant’s devotion to Ingrid.

There are several neat Hitchcockian touches in the film, and the ending is genuinely chilling – not least because Rains makes the bad guy rather sympathetic. He was an interesting and talented actor, whose CV includes not only a famous role in that great movie Casablanca, but also teaching Gielgud and Oliver, and somehow finding the time to marry no fewer than six times.