Erin from Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs and I have been watching movies that take place in Paris for the last couple of months.
For our last week, we watched Charade with Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.
Directed by Stanley Donen this movie was released in 1996 and tells the story of Reggie Lambert (Hepburn) and Peter Joshua (Grant) who meet briefly on vacation in the Alps. When Reggie returns home, she finds that the husband she’d planned to divorce has been murdered, but before he was murdered, he sold the contents of their apartment, including all of her possessions.
A mystery ensues and what follows is a movie that was good but was very confused about which genre it should be in.
When Reggie returns to Paris and her empty apartment, a police officer approaches her and tells her that her husband was found in his pajamas dead by the train tracks and that he was apparently trying to leave Paris quickly.
While Reggie was discussing her husband at the beginning of the movie with a friend, and we learned he was wealthy, we learned very little about him and now it is clear that Reggie also learned very little about him. As the police show her several different passports from different countries with his face on them, she begins to realize she didn’t know the man at all.
Reggie is bewildered later when Peter Joshua shows up to her empty apartment and says he read about the murder in the newspaper and wanted to check on her.
She believes the police think she murdered him.
Peter offers to find her a hotel room until she can find a new job and apartment.
Peter asks what she’s going to do now that her husband has been murdered and she says she’s going to try to get her old job as a translator back.
At his funeral, Reggie is even more bewildered, because there aren’t any guests other than her and her friend. Three American men (James Coburn, George Kennedy, and Ned Glass) show up and either spit on him, poke his body, hold a mirror to his nose, to make sure he is dead, or say something inappropriate. James Coburn approaches her and doesn’t offer condolences. He just says, “Charlie had no reason of doing it thatta way. No siree.” and walks away.
Um..okay…poor Reggie is even more bewildered.
A large man then approaches, handing her a letter requesting she visit the American embassy the next day to discuss the death of her husband.
She shows up to meet with Walter Matthau who seems to know her husband. He informs her that her husband was wanted by the CIA and his real name was Charles Voss. He also tells her that her life might be in danger.
He suggests that she somehow has the money her husband earned from selling all their possessions. That money is the same amount he stole from the United States government during World War II, he says. He instructs Reggie that she needs to find the money and return it to him before the other, dangerous men find her. Looking for help and someone to talk to, Reggie contacts Peter, who decides one way to help is take her out for a night on the town to cheer her up. What results is a very strange game where people have to pass an apple down a line of people only using their chins and necks.
So..yeah..that was strange and uncomfortable to watch. *laugh* I am not sure how the actors did the scene without totally falling apart in laughter or embarrassment.
It was nice to see Cary’s familiar goofy expressions in this scene. I’ve noticed watching his later movies that he doesn’t loosen up the same way he did when he was younger which is natural, but also hard to watch sometimes.
The game leads Reggie and Peter in some compromising positions where they pause to look at each other for a long time and you can tell in that moment that Peter is thinking about what it would be like to kiss her and vice versa.
It’s all fun and games until all three men track Reggie down at the club and begin to threaten her for the money they think she has.
This movie is categorized as a comedy/thriller which makes it a little hard to figure out at times. I sometimes wondered if I was supposed to laugh or feel dread during certain scenes. There is a terrifying scene where one of the men (Coburn as Tex) keeps lighting matches and dropping them on her lap while she screams and cries and I couldn’t laugh at that scene so I don’t know what the director and writers were going for – maybe that was it — to have the viewer not sure what to think.
When Peter convinces Reggie to tell him what he is going on, he decides he will help her find out why she is being pursued and tells her that he will keep the men from hurting her. Now we viewers have to decide with Reggie who Peter is and if he is really a good guy or not.
I read that Cary actually didn’t want this role at first because he said he felt like a predator, going after the younger Audrey.
That’s funny since he was in many movies in his older years where he was “going after” younger women and he married a woman much younger than him, but I digress….
Cary turned 59 during filming and it was this movie that made him decide it was time to stop playing the romantic lead. The reviews focusing on the 26 year age difference between him and Audrey was one big driving factor in this decision, he later said.
He was so uncomfortable with the idea of their age gap he asked for the script to be changed so screenwriter Peter Stone made Audrey the aggressor and Cary the man trying to fight her off.
Stone said he wrote things like “Can’t you just think of me as a woman?” and have Cary say, “I’m already about to get into trouble for transporting a minor above the first floor.”
He then says, “Come on, child, let’s go.”
Stone said, “Cary made me change the dynamic of the characters and make Audrey the aggressor. She chased him, and he tried to dissuade her. She pursued him and sat in his lap. She found him irresistible, and ultimately he was worn down by her. I gave him lines like “I’m too old for you, get away from me, little girl.’ And ‘I’m old enough to be your father.’ And in the elevator: ‘I could be in trouble transporting you beyond the first floor. A minor!’ This way Cary couldn’t get in any trouble. What could he do! She was chasing him.”
When I first started the movie, I was afraid I wasn’t going to like this film at all. Cary’s acting was stilted and “off” for me right from the start.
I found some parts of the movie confusing and odd because of its identity crisis, or inability to choose between being a comedy or a thriller, but I don’t want to spoil too much of the movie by commenting on which parts.
What I will say is that it was just weird to that Audrey’s character continued to throw herself at Cary’s character even when she isn’t sure who he really was. And this is just after her husband has been murdered and she is being pursued by people who want money her husband stole.
I enjoyed the action and the movie overall but really would have liked it the movie had picked a lane and stayed in it.
This was Cary’s chance to finally work with Audrey, by the way, after turning down leading roles in at least four movies she’d been in — Roman Holiday (1953), Sabrina (1954) and Love in the Afternoon (1957). He’d turned them all down because of the quarter-century age difference between them, according to TCM.com.
The rumor at the time was that he’d also turned down the role of Henry Higgins in My Fair Lady because he didn’t want to work with Audrey. This wasn’t true, but instead was a decision made out of respect of Rex Harrison who had created the role on Broadway.
The article on TCM.com reads: “In the Barry Paris biography, Donen recalled that “Cary thought he was going to do a picture with Howard Hawks called Man’s Favorite Sport? [so he] said no to Charade. Columbia said get Paul Newman. Newman said yes, but Columbia wouldn’t pay his going rate. Then they said get Warren Beatty and Natalie Wood. So I got them and Columbia decided they couldn’t afford them or the picture. So I sold Charade to Universal. In the meantime, Cary had read Hawks’s script and didn’t like it. So he called me and said he would like to do Charade.”
I want to share another quote from the TCM article because it is such a funny story: “ In Audrey Hepburn: A Biography by Warren G. Harris, the director recalled: “I arranged a dinner at a wonderful Italian restaurant in Paris. Audrey and I arrived first. Cary came in, and Audrey stood up and said, ‘I’m so nervous.’ He said, ‘Why?’ And she said, ‘Meeting you, working with you – I’m so nervous.’ And he said, ‘Don’t be nervous, for goodness’ sake. I’m thrilled to know you. Here, sit down at the table. Put your hands on the table, palms up, put your head down and take a few deep breaths.’ We all sat down, and Audrey put her hands on the table. I had ordered a bottle of red wine. When she put her head down, she hit the bottle, and the wine went all over Cary’s cream-colored suit. Audrey was humiliated. People at other tables were looking, and everybody was buzzing. It was a horrendous moment. Cary was a half hour from his hotel, so he took off his coat and comfortably sat through the whole meal like that.”
Despite that awkward first meeting, the pair apparently hit it off very well, even ad-libbing some of their lines.
Do you ever look up trivia like this for movies when you watch them or am I just the weirdo in the group?
Have you ever seen this one? What did you think of it?
You can read Erin’s thoughts here: https://crackercrumblife.com/2025/05/08/springtime-in-paris-charade/
If you wrote about today’s movie, or any of the movies we watched during this movie event, you can post your links below.
Also, thank you so much for participating and I hope you all had fun taking part! Do you have an idea for a themed movie event? Let us know in the comments!
I hope you will join us for the next one, though I am not sure when we will do it. Erin and I both have a lot going on in our personal lives with family health situations so we might not hold one until autumn. Not sure yet. We will have a meeting of the minds on it at some point.
We are, however, holding Drop In Crafternoons where we meet on Zoom and do crafts of any kind while chatting.
I had planned to try one this weekend but things are a bit up in the air right now with my parents’ health and the fact my whole family came down with a cold/virus and I am waiting to see if I am next, so we are sticking with one on May 24th for now.
