Just Because They Show It on Thanksgiving Doesn't Mean It's a Turkey

I don't know what inspired my local public television station to show the 1963 movie Charade on Thanksgiving night and I know even less about the reasons why my mother and my youngest brother chose to tune into it. I do know that it proved to be a remarkably good movie that even people who aren't as ardently dedicated to old movies as yours truly can appreciate -- which might explain why my mother and my youngest sibling could not help but watch it all the way through. Some critics have called it the "best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made" and some may argue that it's actually a lot better than some of Hitchcock's lesser films. (For example, Hitchcock's The Trouble with Harry could have learned a lot about suspense from this flick.)

On paper, this movie should have been a failure. After all, there was a huge age gap between the two romantic leads and it's not a big coincidence that the male lead -- Cary Grant -- retired from movies two films after this one was released. (In his last movie, Walk, Don't Run, Grant didn't even pretend to be romantically interested in that movie's female lead and in the one before that, he was matched for some odd reason with younger actress Leslie Caron, perhaps in the vain hope of capturing the same chemistry found between Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn in this flick.) Moreover, Charade itself is a mixture of romance, comedy and suspense that could have easily proved tasteless in the hands of a lesser filmmaker than director Stanley Donen.

And yet it doesn't. I actually found myself laughing at lines of dialogue I never expected to find all that funny and being amused at the actors' reactions as often as their actions. The plot, for those unfamiliar with it, involved a young widow named Regina "Reggie" Lambert whose husband was discovered by the side of a French railroad track at the beginning of the movie. Not only did she have much reason to suspect her husband was murdered, but she soon discovered that he was also suspected of being a crook. One of his last actions involved stripping the apartment that he and Reggie had shared and selling the furnishings without leaving a single clue as to what he did with all the cash he got for them.

Moreover, Mrs. Lambert found herself being pursued by three thugs who were certain she knew where her late husband hid a fortune in stolen loot. Add to that a mysterious CIA agent who claimed to have been investigating her late husband and an equally mysterious person -- played by Cary Grant -- who might or might not be another government agent and poor Mrs. Lambert had her hands full trying to get herself free of a sticky situation.

I could say more but the movie is too good to spoil. Suffice to say that Hepburn and Grant make a great team and even if you don't particularly care for May-October romances like the one in this movie, you will probably still enjoy it. I would like to think that Cary Grant stopped making movies three years afterwards because he knew deep down that he would never top this movie. But I'm sure Grant's autobiography would have you believe something else. C'est la vie!