by Douglas Messerli
Peter Stone (screenplay, based on a story by Stone and Marc
Behm), Stanley Donen (director) Charade /
1963
Stanley Donen’s comedic thriller, Charade, begins with a wealthy young woman, Regina Lambert (Audrey
Hepburn), ensconced at a ski resort (Megève) where she admits to her friend,
Sylvie, that she is soon going to get a divorce from her husband Charles: there
are too many things she does not know about her husband, too many secrets that
he has seemingly kept from her. A few moments later a handsome stranger, Peter
Joshua (Cary Grant), complains to her about her friend, Sylvie’s water-gun
shooting son. The stranger is rebuffed with a clever put-down:
Reggie: I already know an awful lot of people and until one
of them dies I
couldn’t possibility meet anyone else.
Peter: Well, if anyone goes on the critical list, let me know.
When he turns to go, she chides him, “You give up awfully
easily.”
The scene sets
up the movie in a nutshell: love, divorce, guns—or violence, at least—will be
our focus for the next 100 and some minutes, along with, of course, some
tuneful songs by Henry Mancini. And the hero, with whom Regina quickly falls in
love, will never properly pursue her, at least romantically. He will give up
time and time again, excusing himself simply by changing his identity, insisting
that he has only a mother, while refusing to become a true lover. The device is
perfect for Grant, who, as a now cinematic gay icon, can accordingly pretend to
make constant love to Hepburn’s character while offering her a figure who will just
as quickly disappear from her life, only to be replaced by another charming and
handsome version of himself.
Upon her return
to Paris, Reggie discovers her entire apartment has been cleaned out, her maid
is missing, and, before long, she receives news of her husband’s death, a man
murdered and tossed from a train. She can now “meet” that new someone, and on
cue Peter Joshua again shows up—a clumsy and basically unexplained plot element
that nonetheless seems to make sense, for we already know that they are, by the
rules of the plot, destined to fall in love.
But the reality
of the tale is that Reggie has no choice now but to head to the streets, where
she spends most of the film, or, at the best, to check into a cheap Paris hotel
with Joshua, quite inexplicably, as her “next door neighbor.”
Charade’s ludicrously labyrinthine plot
suddenly takes over as we are introduced, one by one—at Charles’ funeral, no
less—to the minor characters, Tex Panthollow (James Coburn), Herman Scobie
(George Kennedy), and Leopold Gideon (Ned Glass), a group of ex-soldiers,
along with Charles and another missing and mysterious figure, Carson Dyle, who
together robbed an OSS shipment of $250,000 in gold that was to have been
delivered to the French Resistance, and the US government—so Reggie is told by
embassy officer, Hamilton Bartholomew—who wants it back. He, as a government
authority, as well as the three surviving robbers, are convinced that, since
Charles held the money, she must know of its whereabouts.
Once this ridiculous plot contrivance is set up, the movie settles back into a false romantic comedy as Reggie and Joshua rush about Paris, threatened and harassed, from time to time, by the evil “gang.”
Grant, so the story goes, was hesitant
about being involved in a film where he (at the 59 years of age) was chasing
Hepburn (34), so the writers simply cut all of his lines that suggested his
sexual interest in her, and gave them to the character Reggie, the result of
which is that Grant plays his character with the most laid-back diffidence of
his film career. He seems more bemused by Reggie than sexually interested. In
truth, this is the role that Grant played in most of his films.
As the threats and acts of violence—a burning-match attack in a telephone booth, the kidnapping of Sylvie’s son, a battle between Joshua and Scobie on the roof of the hotel—begin to pile up, it also becomes evident that Joshua is not whom he seems, finally admitting that he is Carson Dyle’s brother, Alexander. At first horrified at his lies—it is lies, we must remember, that separated her from her husband—Reggie quickly recovers her equilibrium and, even more incredulously, her trust in Grant’s character, the authors repeating the same conversation that she had with Peter Joshua, as a standing joke:
Reggie: Is there a Mrs. Dyle?
Alexander Dyle: Yes…
[Reggie’s face drops]
Alexander Dyle: but, we’re divorced!
Reggie [smirking] I thought
that was Peter Joshua?
Alexander Dyle: I am just as difficult to live with
as he was.
Despite the fact
that she was ready to divorce her now-dead husband because he was not honest
with her, off she now goes with the interloper for more adventures, these
ending in several deaths, as the robbers begin to suspect each other. Once
more, Reggie and, now Alexander, go through the contents of a small bag Charles
Lambert had left behind: toothpaste, a small calendar, a letter, a ticket to
Venezuela, and passports in multiple names etc., nothing that seems of value.
But now,
following the instructions of the embassy official Bartholomew, Reggie finds
herself in an even more terrifying situation, particularly when he insists that
Dyle’s brother died years ago. Soon after the camera pulls back to find the
Grant figure in the room with the remaining “gang” members.
The former Peter
Joshua, Alexander Dyle now admits he is simply a professional thief, Adam
Canfield. The series of questions is repeated once again, her trust in the man
amazingly intact.
As the body count
raises, both Reggie and now Adam, follow a clue in her husband’s calendar where
they encounter several booths selling stamps to collectors. In a simultaneous
instant both she—who has given the letters on the envelope to Sylvie’s young
son—and he realize the truth: the money has been used to purchase several rare
stamps, which the boy, Jean-Louis, has exchanged with a stamp dealer for a
large package of international stamps. When they track down the dealer, he
admits the rarity of the stamps, returning them to Reggie.
But now that
they have the “money,” Reggie is in even more danger as Bartholomew, the
embassy man, lures her to a square outside the Paris Opera, with
Joshua/Dyle/Canfield chasing after. Bartholomew, we discover, is really Carson
Dyle, one of the original soldiers who have stolen the gold, and is now about
to kill Reggie. Hiding in the prompter’s box Reggie is stalked by Dyle as
Canfield, as high above, he tracks his steps across the stage, finally
springing open a stage trap door which sends Dyle to his death. I told you the
plot was ludicrous and labyrinthine, now becoming quite operatic.
No matter,
Reggie is safe, has the money in hand, and has fallen in love with Canfield.
Crime seems to have paid off, even if the stamps, now glued to the envelope,
may not have the same net value. Oddly, despite being a professional thief,
Canfield, encourages her turn over the stamps to the US embassy.
As Reggie enters
the office of the US agent, Brian Cruikshank, the government official in charge
of recovering stolen property, she is suddenly greeted—you guessed it—with Cary
Grant, who now admits, just maybe, his real name:
Reggie: Is there a Mrs. Cruikshank?
Cruikshank: Yes.
Reggie: But you’re divorced.
Cruikshank: No.
[Regina’s face drops]
Cruikshank: [getting out his
wallet to show her a picture]
My mother, she lives in Detroit, you’d like her, she’d
like you too.
Reggie: Oh, I love you, Adam, Alex, Peter, Brian, what-
ever your name is, I love you! I hope we have a lot of boys
and we can name them all after you!
So, it appears,
she has traded in the stamps—which presumably had formerly been the contents of
her house—for a new husband. And so many people have died or simply been
extinguished in this story, that she will now clearly have room to meet many
another in her future life.
Yet there is
absolutely no evidence that “Adam/Alex/Peter/Brian” or any other version of
Grant’s personae will hug her close to his chest and take her home as a
husband. We need only recall that when he showered in an earlier scene, it was
with his suit on, the proper gentlemen whom only a mother could love.
Los Angeles,
November 10, 2011
Reprinted from World
Cinema Review (November 2011).
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