Stanley Donen's CHARADE: THE BEST HITCHCOCK HITCHCOCK DIDN'T MAKE by Craig Hammill
There have been many Hitchcock homages: David Fincher’s Panic Room, Francois Truffaut’s Don’t Shoot the Piano Player, Steven Spielberg’s Duel/Jaws/Jurassic Park (re-workings in a way of The Birds), even Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Phantom Thread (which is a kind of ingenuous re-working of Rebecca). All of them dynamite. All of them also supreme examples of their own filmmakers’ voice/art.
But for this programmer’s money, the only filmmakers who actually managed to out-Hitchcock Hitchcock at his own game are director Stanley Donen and writer Peter Stone when they collaborated to make 1963’s Charade starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.
Charade follows newly widowed Regina Lampert (an as always effervescent Audrey Hepburn) who not only discovers that her now dead husband was up to some pretty shady things with his WWII Buddies but that the “Buddies” have all come back to get something. And they’re willing to do anything, even kill Regina to get it.
Enter Peter Joshua (Cary Grant in full-on “I make this look effortlessly easy” entertainment mode) who claims to want to help protect Regina but Hamilton Bartholomew (a wonderfully grumpy and skeptical Walter Matthau) a local US spy in France, warns Regina that Joshua, in fact everyone who she comes in contact with, is almost certainly just in it to get the money too.
From this great premise, director Donen, who got his start co-directing such musical masterworks as Singing in the Rain, On The Town, and It’s Always Fair Weather with fellow dancer/choreographer Gene Kelly, delivers a movie that is like one non-stop heady French dinner of delicious culinary delight, champagne bubbly, perfectly puffed chocolate souffle.
Donen is aided (not just a little bit) by one of the great screenplays of all time written by Peter Stone (who would go on to write another all-time screenplay in The Taking of Pelham One Two Three). It’s always movies like Charade that remind one that a great film usually comes out of a great story. If you have a great story, all the creative decisions afterwards (as long as you’re not totally incompetent) can’t help but work as long as you make sure you’re doing justice to that story.
You see as in many of Hitchcock’s greatest, there is a MacGuffin. The MacGuffin, as Hitchcock used to say, is the whatsit everyone wants. It’s gotta work. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s the Ark of the Covenant. In Hitchcock’s own North by Northwest, it’s microfilm with government secrets. Here it’s. . .
Well. . .that’s actually the whole point of the movie. What is everyone after? The great twist here is that no one really knows. They just know it must have been on the dead man when he died (because he was on the run). And they know it must be worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Charade is one of those movies where all the elements like stars in the firmament align. Cary Grant has been here before (in Hitchcock’s North by Northwest, To Catch a Thief, Notorious) but he still finds a way to add a twist here. We never really know until the very end of the picture if Grant is a good guy, a bad guy, or somewhere in between. Grant knows this tension is key to his character and so he plays the character like a Cassanova who is so charming you get worried he knows EXACTLY how to get you to let your guard down.
Audrey Hepburn both channels her persona’s essence-the soul of innocence, sweetness; sweetness in a world of sour-and plays with it. She knows her dead husband was a louse. And she’s totally into Cary Grant. And she’s also nobody’s fool, no matter how intimidating all the men around her try to be.
And Matthau. . .oh sweet Matthau. Did ever actor make such sweet music out of grumpiness and a hound dog face? Did ever thespian spin such sweet stuff out of being perpetually non-plussed by the idiots in this world? Matthau too, like Hepburn and Grant, knows exactly how to play his character to throw us off.
Finally, Charade is one of those movies that hinges on the reveal (what’s the Macguffin, who’s the real bad guy, will Hepburn get out of this) and the third act. If the reveal and the third act don’t work then that aforementioned souffle collapses and desert is ruined.
But the souffle doesn’t collapse. As many times as I’ve seen Charade, the big reveal moment is always ridiculously satisfying. You slap your head and say “Of course! That’s it. That’s the MacGuffin.” And it’s been in front of our faces the entire time. It’s a sleight of hand magic trick at which this Programmer always marvels.
What Donen and Stone add.-what makes Charade the best Hitchcock that Hitchcock didn’t direct-is a kind of elan, a lightness to the whole proceedings that make the entire movie like drinking a delicious fizzy soda drink where the bubbles get in your nose. Or endlessly supping a bottle of champagne that doesn’t give you a nasty hangover.
Hitchcock is untouchable. This programmer doesn’t want to be misunderstood. NO ONE has ever bettered Rear Window, Psycho, The 39 Steps, Shadow of a Doubt, Vertigo, etc. etc. etc. But even Hitchcock’s greatest masterpieces feel slightly “micromanaged”. And this Programmer will take that. It’s not a criticism. It’s just an observation. Donen, somehow, turns his movie into a kind of party where everyone is a co-equal. And so the vibe is slightly lighter and more carefree.
So anyway, do you need an escape from the hum drum skull rattling nattering of everyday struggle? Do you need to getaway to 1960’s Paris with impossibly charismatic people, amazing filmmaking, great storytelling?
Then watch Charade asap. It’s a movie that even the master would almost certainly return to for seconds.
Craig Hammill is the founder.main programmer of Secret Movie Club.