BEFORE: I've reached the end of the Audrey Hepburn chain, but it's also the start of the Cary Grant chain. Since Cary Grant was TCM's star of the month for December, that makes him my star of the month for March. And since Mr. Grant's real name is Archibald Leach, and since the NCAA basketball tournament starts today (I think) then I'm calling this chain (M)Archie Madness. Damn, that's just stupid enough to stick.
As it happens, I'm starting with one of Grant's later films, and I'll sort of work backwards from here, since this is sort of the "Benjamin Button" year I'll watch him get a little younger with each film.
THE PLOT: Romance and suspense in Paris, as a woman is pursued by several men who want a fortune her murdered husband had stolen. Who can she trust?
AFTER: IMDB also tells me that Cary Grant passed on "Love in the Afternoon", because he felt he was too old to play against Audrey Hepburn. Perhaps his instincts were right at the time, but he ended up making this film with her six years later. He almost passed on this one too, but "Charade" came to be known as "the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never made".
You probably noticed that Paris also carried over from "Love in the Afternoon", but this is a very different Paris. That was a city of hotel rooms for illicit affairs, this is a Paris of spies and intrigue. I don't think it's a coincidence that the first real James Bond film was released the year before this. One of the villains here has a metal claw for a hand, and that feels sort of Bond-like. Of course, it all comes out of the same sort of Cold War time period, and everything can be traced back to earlier films like "The Third Man" and Hitchcock's films, where audiences learned not to trust government agents, and people were forced to fake their own deaths and go on the run.
Tonight Hepburn's character finds herself a widow (seems like she was about to get divorced anyway) and then finds her husband might not have been who he claimed to be. If this were made by Hitchcock in the 1940's, she'd have been framed for her husband's killing and sent on the lam with a mysterious stranger to prove her innocence. But no, this time the mysterious stranger helps her search for her husband's fortune and fight off three men who are also looking for it.
I'll admit I didn't see most of the twists coming, and I was way off with regards to the location of the money and the identity of the killer. But there were plenty of red herrings - like the guy who sneezed at the funeral. This led me to believe, when he sneezed later, that her husband was still alive - like maybe that guy was allergic to his cologne or something. Nope, I was totally wrong. (to be fair, the Punch and Judy show also suggested this plot direction...)
EDIT: I found the scene where the agents were testing the corpse at the funeral to make sure he was really dead to be a bit familiar - I finally realized there was a similar scene in "RED 2", which was probably a shout-out to "Charade", only with a different result. I also realize now that the sneezing guy wasn't reacting to the dead guy's cologne or anything, he was probably sneezing to make the dead man flinch, if he were faking.
This film was darn good, but is it the best Cary Grant film? We'll need to wait until the end of the tournament to find out...
Also starring Cary Grant (last seen in "North By Northwest"), Walter Matthau (last seen in "Ensign Pulver"), James Coburn (last seen in "Midway"), George Kennedy, Ned Glass, Dominique Minot.
RATING: 7 out of 10 liverwurst sandwiches
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