Had Stanley Donen directed only ‘Singin’ in the Rain‘ it would probably have been enough for him to have a place of honor in the history of cinema. But Donen has directed and produced many other successful films, most of them between the 50’s and 70’s of the last century. Blessed with a long life, Donen died two months ago, and on this occasion the local cinematheque screened a few of his films. On this occasion, we saw ‘Charade‘, a typical blockbuster entertainment for that period, combining the genres of espionage thriller and romantic comedy, taking place in tourist advertising landscapes and casting famous celebrities whose clothes gave the tone of the fashion to the times. It’s here that the James Bond series started.
The main heroine of the film is an American young woman (Audrey Hepburn, permanently dressed impeccably by the Givenchy house) who finds herself a widow of a husband she did not know much about and whom she was planning to divorce, deprived of the comfortable life she had before, in an illustrated postcards Paris. Moreover, she is suspected by the French police of being involved in her husband’s violent death and becomes the target of the pursuit of a gang of picturesque gangsters who are convinced that she is the possessor of a wealth she has no idea about. She is helped or at least seems to be by another American in Paris (Cary Grant, about 26 years older on screen and in reality) and a clerk of the American embassy (Walter Matthau). Our heroine will inevitably fall in love with the older man despite the age difference, but he also seems to hide more than one secret and will assume successively several different identities. The love story and action thriller progress in parallel with the game of changing identities of the hero, with the young woman having to guess and choose permanently between the ‘good guys’ and the ‘bad guys’ while the number of corpses increases.
The introduction scene and the generic are so modern that in the first two or three minutes I was wondering whether I entered the wrong cinema hall and I was seeing a new movie. I cannot say the same about everything that followed. I never was a great enthusiast of Cary Grant‘s type of actor and I believe that the difference in age between him and Audrey Hepburn makes the relationship between them on screen look not so credible in this movie. High quality acting creations can rather be found in the secondary roles, and here we have an exceptional cast including Walter Matthau, James Coburn and George Kennedy, all of them gorgeous actors. Paris of the 1960s looks very well, filmed with the characters one in pursuit of the other. It is said that ‘Charade‘ is Hitchcock‘s best film that was not filmed by Hitchcock. The reason is that around the same period the master of suspense made several films based on spy stories, including ‘North by Northwest‘, which also features Cary Grant, or ‘Topaz‘, which also takes place in part in Paris. I believe that Hitchcock would have been able to get more out of this movie, perhaps with different casting, perhaps with a more subtle use of the identity mysteries in order to create a denser suspense atmosphere. I am sure however that he would have liked Henry Mancini‘s music. Anyway, ‘Charade‘ remains now, 56 years after being released, overall, more than honorable entertainment.