5 things to know about Charade, by Stanley Donen
The police comedy filmed in Paris, and carried by Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, is rebroadcast this Friday on France 5.
Stanley Donen is not only the director of Let’s sing in the rain
We too often associate former dancer and choreographer Stanley Donen, who died in 2019, with musicals. Certainly, we owe him masterpieces of the genre like Let’s sing in the rain Or Royal Wedding (and its floor-to-ceiling dance scene). But the filmmaker has also successfully tried his hand at many other genres. Charade is a model of detective comedy. The music here is the machine-gun delivery of actors Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn. Their dialogues often have two or even three meanings since they serve as much to advance the plot as to establish their romance by prickling each other. The story takes the viewer from presumption to presumption so much so that we often qualify Charade for best Hitchcockian film not directed by Alfred Hitchcock.
Refused seven times, accepted seven times
When Peter Stone and Marc Behm (an American writer based in France) proposed their story entitled The Unsuspecting Wife (the unsuspecting woman), seven film studios (including Universal) refused the project. Peter Stone then had the idea of transforming it into a novel and renaming it Charade. When Charade was serialized in a magazine, the same seven studios then jumped on it.
See Paris in the 1960s
It’s great to see or discover Paris in the 1960s since the filmmaker filmed in the capital in natural settings in the fall of 1962. We can see in the film little-known places that still exist such as the Guignol theater in the Jardin des Champs-Elysées, the legendary stamp market which is held on the Rond-Point. It is also an opportunity to see a Paris that has disappeared: that of the metro with its punchers, its wooden benches and its “No smoking and spitting” sign, the main courtyard of the Palais-Royal before the Buren columns. Note, an anthology chase scene in the Comédie-Française.
Cary Grant thought he was too old
The seducer of American cinema was approaching sixty and could not see himself playing lovers with an actress 25 years his junior. So he initially said no to the film, as he had refused Sabrina in 1954 and Ariane in 1957 for the same reasons. But he finally relented, asking that a few lines be added to emphasize the age difference. However, he refused one thing: the shower scene. Out of vanity, he didn’t want to show his chest. So it was decided that he would shower fully clothed. This turned out to be one of the funniest scenes in the film.
Audrey Hepburn, class in Givenchy
A formidable actress who is both deep and charming, Audrey Hepburn is the last star of Hollywood’s legendary era. The most beloved, too, since the actress has made the fight for abused childhood her own. We cannot dissociate Audrey Hepburn from her elegant silhouette magnified by the outfits tailor-made for her by the French couturier Hubert de Givenchy. With Charadethey celebrate their ten years of complicity. The little black dress and the big hat Diamonds on sofait’s him. Here, Audrey Hepburn goes through outfit changes scene after scene even though her apartment has been robbed and her cupboards emptied at the start of the film. No matter the credibility, the style is there!
