Charade



A 1963 Thriller starring Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant and featuring Walter Matthau. Regina "Reggie" Lambert (Hepburn) is getting ready for life as a divorcee when she finds out that she's a widow instead. When the police question her, she finds that her late husband had multiple passports each with different aliases. During the funeral, three suspicious people she's never seen before come to visit the body. She is then called to the embassy, where she finds out that her husband was part of a group of soldiers chosen to deliver some gold across enemy lines. Instead of delivering the gold as planned, the soldiers hid it somewhere, with plans to come back after the war and have it for themselves. Her husband, however, got greedy and came back early, taking all the gold, some $250,000 worth, for himself. Now the other three soldiers will do anything to get it back.

While this is happening, she also meets Peter Joshua (Grant), with whom she enters into a romance.

Remade in 2002 by Jonathan Demme (The Silence of the Lambs) as The Truth About Charlie, with Mark Wahlberg and Thandie Newton.


 * Alas, Poor Villain:
 * And There Was Much Rejoicing: Most of the people showing up at Charles's funeral are there to make sure he's really dead.
 * Balcony Escape
 * Break the Cutie: Reggie
 * Deadpan Snarker: Cary Grant, of course.
 * Faux Affably Evil: Tex Panthollow
 * Fingertip Drug Analysis: Reggie and Peter are going through her late husband's luggage to see if they can find something valuable enough for him to have been murdered for. They find a tin of what appears to be tooth powder, but she suspects might be heroin; at her urging, he does the test... and concludes that either it's peppermint-flavored heroin or it really is tooth powder.
 * Fourth Date Marriage:
 * Freudian Trio: of the villainous variety:
 * Id: Scobie
 * Ego: Tex
 * Superego: Gideon
 * Hidden in Plain Sight: The $250,000 turned out to have been
 * I Have Many Names: Grant's character
 * Insistent Terminology: Played with. Whenever Reggie makes reference to "spies", Bartholomew corrects her with "agents". But at the same time, whenever Bartholomew says "spies", Reggie corrects him with "agents".
 * Jerkass : Herman Scobie
 * MacGuffin:
 * May-December Romance: Cary Grant was 59 when he made the film, 25 years older than Audrey Hepburn. He only took the role after the writer gave all the romantically aggressive lines to Hepburn's character, so he wouldn't look like a predator.
 * Movie Twist List: Is it any surprise?
 * Double Agent
 * The Mole
 * Reverse Mole
 * Purely Aesthetic Glasses: Subverted when Regina accuses Peter of not needing the reading glasses he puts on. She pulls them from his face and dons them herself — then gets a shocked expression and quickly hands them back, saying quietly, "You need them." The degree of correction in those lenses must've been something fierce.
 * Quick Nip
 * The Reveal:
 * Roaring Rampage of Revenge:
 * Running Gag: Grant's character constantly changing names.
 * And when he produces a new name, Reggie asks, "Is there a Mrs. __?" and he replies, "Yes, but we're divorced." By the third time, she's saying it along with him.
 * Also Reggie or Bartholomew saying "spies" and the other correcting "agents."
 * Not to mention every suit Cary Grant's character seems to wear gets damaged in some way.
 * Spiritual Licensee: Dubbed the best Hitchcock film that Hitchcock never made.
 * Split Screen: In the last scene
 * Woobie, Destroyer of Worlds: