Charade
All actors and roles (10)
Short description
Regina Lampert, an American living in Paris, returns from a skiing holiday in the French Alps to find her apartment emptied and her husband dead. She soon learns that he had stolen a quarter of a million dollars intended for the French Resistance during the Second World War, and that his former accomplices believe she knows where the money went. As she tries to work out who killed him and why, she turns for help to Peter Joshua, the charming man she met at the resort, whose name and motives keep shifting. Trust becomes the central problem as the people around her die and the pursuit closes in.
Stanley Donen directed and produced the film, working from a screenplay by Peter Stone. It was the eighth of the sixteen features Donen directed, following Indiscreet and preceding Arabesque. Cary Grant plays Peter Joshua opposite Audrey Hepburn as Regina, with Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy and Dominique Minot among the twenty-seven credited cast.
The film was released in December 1963 and runs 113 minutes. Made for about four million dollars, it took roughly thirteen million worldwide, a solid return. On IMDb it holds 7.8 out of 10 from around 93,000 votes, and on TMDB 7.7 out of 10 from about 1,600 votes. A critics' rating of 8.4 out of 10 from fifty-four reviews places it above both audience scores, indicating stronger admiration among reviewers than among the wider public.
What's left behind the scenes
- Audrey Hepburn once said that the scene where her character stains Alex's suit with ice cream was taken from real life. Once, at a reception, she accidentally spilled wine on Cary Grant's suit.
- The young man in the elevator in the embassy building who talks about poker is screenwriter Peter Stone, whose speech was dubbed over by director Stanley Donen.
- When Audrey Hepburn's character smokes in the empty apartment, Cary Grant's character also enters. In this scene, the tips of the actor's ears were glued to his head with adhesive tape, as they were literally glowing red and were very noticeable due to the spotlights behind him.
- Considering that Cary Grant was almost 60 years old and his body was slightly softening, it was decided that he would take a shower in his clothes. The very first take convinced the filmmakers and actors that it was even funnier that way.
- The film features copies of truly very rare, and therefore valuable, stamps.
- When Audrey Hepburn's character is in a nightclub, her then-husband, Mel Ferrer (1917-2008), can be seen in the background smoking a cigarette.
- Initially, Cary Grant refused to star in the film. He believed that at 59, he would look like an old man pursuing Audrey Hepburn's much younger heroine. Screenwriter Peter Stone told the actor that he would rewrite the script, after which Grant withdrew his objections. As it later turned out, Stone simply "transferred" all the ambiguous lines of Grant's character to Hepburn's heroine.
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