Charade
1963 US
Dir:Stanley Donen
Stars:Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter
Matthau, James Coburn
Left:Cary Grant, Right:Audrey Hepburn
What's it like if two big stars like Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn costar? The answer is this movie "Charade".
If William Wyler's original intention in making his famous movie "Roman Holiday"(1953) of giving Cary
Grant the male principal role, which, as you surely know, was actually played by Gregory Peck on account of Cary
Grant's reluctance and denial of playing just another Cary Grantish role had actually come true, the answer would
have been given ten years earlier than this movie. However, we can witness by watching this movie "Charade"
that Cary Grant was, after all, Cary Grant, and never was anybody else. I guess that Cary Grant himself, by the
time he appeared in this movie, had noticed the bare fact that his audience never wanted out of his personality
something new and novel, but just Cary Grant and that's all. If I'm permitted to say so, Cary Grant was definitely
the greatest manneristic personality the silver screen has ever witnessed. In this regard, the director of this
movie Stanley Donen seems to have been quite ideal for projecting Cary Grant's Cary Grantish character. Because
Stanley Donen's movies are always devoid of any serious and acute edge, and even though this is the very reason
why he is sometimes referred to as a kind of lukewarm director, Cary Grant's personality that is also quite devoid
of such attributes quite fitted Stanley Donen's movies' overall charcteristics. As is the case with Donen's another
movie "Arabesque"(1966), despite the fact that "Charade" is a mystery, all the aspects of seriousness
and acuteness are completely reduced to the minimal extent and proceeding of this movie is dominated by the sense
of sophistication, not by tension-ridden drives. Surely, like other usual mystery movies, this movie also has such
cruel scenes as George Kennedy forced to be drowned in a bathtub or James Coburn smothered to death with his face
completely covered with a plastic bag. But, on the contrary, the very fact that these scenes aren't the least salient
in this movie verifies the point that this movie's main focus doesn't reside in scaring audience by means of tension,
suspense and even cruelty as other mytery movies usually do. In other words, "Charade" could be best
described as a mood-mystery with the focus being rather placed on the aspect of "mood" than "mystery",
and Cary Grant's tremendous abilty to function as a mood-catalyst is contributing enormously to this movies overall
ambiance. Although I read some reviewer writing this movie's theme is "transformation" because the Cary
Grant character changes its identity several times, I rather think this movie is a movie whose identity never changes
because the identity throughout this movie is always the one of Cary Grant's, and never is anything else.
