Hello everyone!! Welcome to week six of our Paris film journey! Lisa from Boondock Ramblings and I wanted fun and whimsy and beauty this spring, and although an actual trip to Paris in the spring would be better, a film journey will have to do.
This was our final week viewing movies set in Paris, and I feel like we saw six very different stories. It was fantastic, and I had so much fun!
Our final movie was Charade, starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant.
I was very excited about this movie! I love both of these actors, and I could not wait to see them on screen together. I didn’t know what to expect at all, and I can guarantee you had I thought about it, I would never have imagined this movie and dynamic.
First, let’s see how Rotten Tomatoes sums it up. “After Regina Lampert (Audrey Hepburn) falls for the dashing Peter Joshua (Cary Grant) on a skiing holiday in the French Alps, she discovers upon her return to Paris that her husband has been murdered. Soon, she and Peter are giving chase to three of her late husband’s World War II cronies, Tex (James Coburn), Scobie (George Kennedy) and Gideon (Ned Glass), who are after a quarter of a million dollars the quartet stole while behind enemy lines. But why does Peter keep changing his name?”
Hmm where to begin! First, this cast was pretty spectacular. Besides our two leads, we have Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy. I don’t think I had ever seen any of those men young before so that was interesting in itself! James Coburn was terrifying, honestly, as Tex. There was a scene where he had Hepburn’s character, Reggie, trapped, and was flicking lit matches at her and it was very creepy! It was a well shot scene, and Coburn played menacing very well.
This movie was crazy and all over the place and I liked the chaos. Hepburn and Grant meet while she is on vacation in the Alps, and they have a strange conversation about divorce and views and are they now friends, etc. She has already stated that she is planning to divorce her husband, as neither of them love each other, so when she returns home and learns her husband is dead, she is not super upset over it. She is a bit confused, as she doesn’t know why anyone would want to kill him, or why he would have chosen to sell everything in their apartment, or where the money from that sale is. Which is the point of the movie. Just where is that money, because everyone wants it.
Hepburn’s character is that of a cute little imp, slightly scattered and irreverent, silly, yet she has a pretty important job as a simultaneous translator. She meets with all of these different men, Walter Matthau of the CIA, Jacques Marin of the Paris police (who was also in How to Steal a Million), the men who knew her husband during the war, and while she takes them seriously, there is also an air of.. je ne sais quoi about her. She is hard to describe and summarize, which I enjoyed.
She cracked me up in her pursuit of Grant’s character. It was very cheeky on her part, and he seemed to do his best to hold her at bay, in his own goofy way. I read online that this was Grant’s last role as a leading man, as he felt weird about the age gap, and that they actually changed the script around so that Hepburn was chasing Grant, rather than Grant chasing Hepburn. They felt it would be more palatable to the viewers. There is one scene where Hepburn “traps” Grant in her hotel room by trickery, and that scene might have been slightly off putting if done differently. First, if Grant had done that to her, it would have come off very differently to the audience; in this scene though, it was more like two kids playing, and that was because of how the two treated it. Hepburn slammed the door shut and laughed and Billy and I had a chuckle because it reminded us of The Count Van Count from Sesame Street laughing, and the expression on her face was very open and just like it seemed, like “ha ha ha”. Grant’s character took it in stride and handled the whole thing in a very goofy way as well, by showering in his suit.
I thought their dynamic was just so playful and friendly in this movie. I think it was obvious that the two enjoyed each other’s company in a platonic way, that they were just good friends having a lark, and that this was all good fun for them. I enjoyed just watching the two of them interact much more than I cared about where the money was or who the killer was or figuring out the mystery.
The two remained friends throughout their lives. I found this on the Christie’s website, and it just seems so perfect.
Hepburn and Grant met for the first time in a Paris restaurant just before filming began on Charade, introduced by their mutual friend and director Stanley Donen. Audrey, admitting she was terribly nervous, knocked over a bottle of red wine, staining Grant’s cream suit. Donen wrote the funny incident into the film, when Hepburn as Reggie accidentally tosses a scoop of ice cream onto Grant’s jacket. Like all Hepburn’s leading men, with the possible exception of Bogart, Grant was instantly charmed by her, telling a reporter after filming All I want for Christmas is another movie with Audrey Hepburn.
As evidenced in Grant’s playful letter, the co-stars remained affectionate friends. Years after Grant’s death in 1986, Hepburn reminisced Cary – such a lovely souvenir in my life… He had me down flat the minute he met me. I think he understood me better than I did myself.
And I have wandered a bit away from the movie itself, but that is ok, right?
And that my friends, is a wrap on Springtime in Paris! I hope that you have enjoyed it as much as I have. Thank you to everyone who has commented and watched and posted along with us! I have enjoyed reading your thoughts on these movies!!
Did you watch? What do you think of this movie? Feel free to comment and/or link up with us!
Thank you again everyone!
Still Life, With Cracker Crumbs.. 