November 18, 2024

hot takes

on a 61-year-old movie

one of my absolute favorite movies of all time (and perhaps my very favorite cary grant movie—top three¹ for sure, with notorious and bringing up baby) is charade. grant was fifty-nine when it came out, and he had initially turned down the role because he felt he was far too old to play the romantic lead opposite audrey hepburn, who was thirty-four. hollywood lore says that she convinced him and they got director stanley donen and writer peter stone to change the script so that her character pursued his, and never the other way around. 

(i am also moderately obsessed with the screenplay’s story: when the original spec script, co-written by peter stone and marc behm, failed to sell, stone wrote the story as a novel. it was serialized in redbook, and hollywood producers came knocking to option it. lord, i see what you have done for other people…)

my husband and i recently caught up on only murders in the building (omitb). the titular building, the fictional arconia, is an idealized microcosm of a very particular, upper west side version of new york. you may be familiar with this new york from the nora ephron film you’ve got mail; ephron lived in the apthorp, an upper west side mainstay apartment building that is very like the arconia. 

charade is set almost entirely in paris, a city i have never been to. (i’ve said for years that if i ever do visit, i’ll take myself on a charade locations tour.) i assume it is as realistically paris as omitb is realistically new york, which is to say the vibes are accurate to a specific experience but it’s still the movies—much the same way i feel about the eighties version of new york² in susan seidelman’s desperately seeking susan or mike nichols’s working girl, which portray a version of the city that i (who lived there at the time) recognize intimately. 

charade is a thriller that’s shot like a screwball comedy, or maybe vice versa; a spy movie without a spy (other than a single CIA agent). reggie (hepburn) is a woman to whom things keep happening, but she is never passive. it’s a movie in which it’s difficult to know who to trust (although there are several characters it’s easy to know not to trust), and that confusion is used against the audience in delightful ways; we root for the romance between reggie and peter/adam/etc (grant) while not trusting him in the slightest. we are just as clueless about the location of the missing-in-plain-sight quarter of a million dollars as the characters (the only person who knows where it is dies in the opening shot of the movie, pushed off a train).

and oh, reggie’s clothes. as always, givenchy designed the costumes (i believe it was in hepburn’s contract). the last time i watched charade, i wondered to myself where the modern day equivalent of reggie was—and immediately answered myself: it’s mabel on omitb. 

omitb is absolutely a screwball comedy in the framework of a mystery. like reggie, mabel is not a screwball, but also like reggie she is on the edge of socially acceptable. 

actually, let me real quick define screwball. the earliest romantic comedies were screwball comedies, in which the primary female character existed outside of societal norms—she was a wacky free spirit (unmarried) in a way where society needed her to end up tamed (married) by the end of the movie. katharine hepburn, the ultimate screwball, starred in an awful lot of these movies, and in more modern times the screwball was replaced by the manic pixie dream girl.

mabel is not a screwball by most modern standards (although it is arguable that she is by conservative standards), but both charles and oliver might be. the trio get themselves into all sorts of wacky shenanigans, often bordering on french farce, all while in real danger.

i don’t have a good wrap-up for this meandering email. i love watching and reading mysteries (I haven’t even mentioned rex stout’s nero wolfe mysteries, or the A&E television series, but they’re my other faves). i love the idea of writing one, but i probably never will because i am truly dreadful at solving them. that is, i’m okay at guessing when someone else hands me the clues on tv or in the pages of a book, but there is very little chance i could work out whodunnit and all the clues.