Criterion Collection - Online Cinematheque

Stanley Donen’s Charade occupies a special place among ’60s thrillers. In an era of spy films resplendent in eroticism (the James Bond series), cynicism (Michael Caine’s “Harry Palmer” series), and farcical irreverence (Casino Royale), it is the only thriller of the ’60s to place a woman at its center.

This concept boldly separates Charade from the adolescent male fantasies that drove the Bond pictures, which were hitting their stride as Donen’s film was going into production. In place of a hero-on-the-case, there is the innocent Regina Lampert (Audrey Hepburn) and her sudden, unexpected involvement with murderers, thieves, and spies. She’s not only a rare female protagonist in a spy thriller, but she’s also as bewildered as the audience by the mysterious and bizarre turns of its plot. In a sense, Charade is almost the distaff answer to North by Northwest.

Charade also has a distinctly different feel, both in its casting and script, from other thrillers of the era. The Bond films were built around Sean Connery’s fiercely sexual persona and his buxom, but largely unknown, female counterparts. Here, the glamour of established Hollywood shines with the presence of its two leads. Cary Grant had been a major star for more than twenty-five years when he and Donen decided to collaborate on what would be the last of four movies they would make together. He was one of the few genuine matinee idols whose appeal wasn’t merely nostalgic in the early ’60s. Similarly, Hepburn was one of the last female screen stars to emerge from Hollywood with a recognizably glamorous style. They give Charade an elegance more akin to a ’50s romance than a ’60s thriller.

The film’s morality is also more rooted in the ’50s than the ’60s. When Charade was released in 1963, the range of “acceptable” behavior for movie heroes and heroines was beginning to change. In the two Bond movies already released, Connery’s 007 had already bedded more women without benefit of marriage (or, in some cases, knowledge of first names) than Grant had in thirty years of screen exploits. In this relatively permissive environment, Charade has a gentle, almost sweetly nostalgic sexual agenda, involving romance and, in its denouement, matrimony. In fact, it may well be the most successful non-Hitchcock picture ever made to mix murder, mayhem, romance, and marriage in one screenplay. The mystery at the center of its action is diverting enough, and executed in an entertaining fashion, but the real mystery to the viewer is how the twisting, turning plot will allow Regina Lampert and Peter Joshua (Grant) to get together.

The onscreen coupling of Grant and Hepburn also allows the film to comment on and play off of their specific screen personae. Grant had been a star since the ’30s, when he worked with such actresses as Sylvia Sidney and Mae West. Hepburn (born in 1929) was of course young enough to be the daughter of such leading ladies. She’d made her name in the ’50s playing romantically distressed child-women in the company of older leading men such as Humphrey Bogart, Gregory Peck, and Fred Astaire. By the time she did Charade, however, she was 34 years old. Once Hepburn’s and Grant’s characters become romantically interested in one another, there’s hardly a scene in the film that doesn’t include some reference to the difference in their ages. For Grant, in particular, the movie marks a turning point in his career—Charade was his last film as a romantic lead, and his third-to-last movie before retiring in 1965. In turn, it signals the beginning-of-the-end of Hepburn’s onscreen “gamin” phase.

Another important aspect of Charade’s appeal is the fun it has at the expense of the thriller genre. From the opening close-up shot of a gun (quickly revealed to be a water pistol) aimed at Regina, we know we’re seeing a film about deception, and the layers of deception multiply as the plot evolves. Charade is laced with a dark sense of irony from its first scene: “I already know an awful lot of people, and until one of them dies, I couldn’t possibly meet anyone else,” she says, brushing off Peter Joshua in a wicked moment of foreshadowing.

Charade was Stanley Donen’s biggest box-office success, eclipsing even the popularity of his earlier work with Hepburn (Funny Face) and Grant (Indiscreet). Its plot caught the public’s burgeoning taste for espionage thrillers at just the right moment, but its quirky humor, irony, and casting have held these audiences and attracted new fans over the last three decades. Charade continues to resonate and reveal new bits of wit and sophistication with each repeated viewing.

Categories: Film Essays