Reeling Backward: "Charade" (1963)

"Charade" has sometimes been described as "the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock didn't direct," but I'm not sure if that's really fair. Hitch often included bits of puckish and morbid humor in his films, but when it came time for scaring people, he was deadly serious about his craft.

This 1963 romantic thriller, by contrast, is fizzy and fun. Though there are a few moments where Audrey Hepburn, as wan heroine Regina Lampert, aka "Reggie," is imperiled, they are fleeting and frightening only in that sort of way you know everything is going to be alright. After all, she's the star of the picture, and if anything really dire happened to her, the show would be over.

When I say Hepburn is the star, I mean truly that: she far outshines co-star Carey Grant, but she's meant to. He is the moon who basks in her reflected light; he reacts to her rather than the other way around. Romantically, she is clearly the pursuer and he the pursued prey, wielding the shield of propriety to fend off her advances: 'Come into your room? Alone? At this time of night? Heavens!'

In this way director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone essentially made a proto-feminist feature film. In some sense Hollywood has backpedaled since then -- nowadays it's almost unthinkable to have a star of Grant's stature in a movie in which he plays second fiddle to an actress.

The basic plot is that she's a widow whose husband was murdered, and now three strangers are chasing her around Paris, claiming she has $250,000 that belongs to them. (That's about $2 million in today's dollars.) Grant shows up as Peter Joshua, a dashing stranger who gets embroiled in the intrigue. She falls for him hard, even when it turns out he's in cahoots with the criminals... sort of. It gets more complicated from there.

The film has an interesting progeny and legacy. Stone and Marc Behm wrote the spec screenplay, but no studio was interested. So Stone turned it into a book, and suddenly everyone in Hollywood wanted it. Thus he turned it back into a screenplay. (Behm got a story credit.)

When they released the film, Universal Pictures improperly copyrighted the movie, so "Charade" became part of the public domain immediately. The fact that anyone could release their own version of it on video, or play it on television, probably helped the film remain popular over the years. It didn't even get an "official" video release by Universal until the awful, unnecessary remake starring Mark Whalberg came out in 2002, when the original was tacked on to the DVD as a bonus feature.

There was also a brouhaha over Hepburn's utterance of the word "assassinated," which was changed to "eliminated" in the wake of JFK's murder.

The movie is a total lark, more comedy than anything else. But I adored the cartoonish villains, the Parisian locales and the genuine romantic chemistry between Hepburn and Grant.

"Do you know what's wrong with you?" she asks as they part at the end of their night. "No, what?" he responds, setting up endless possibilities of Hollywood riffs. Instead, she looks at him pensively and exhales, "...nothing!" A beautiful line, and again usually the sort of thing the guy says to the dame, not vice-versa.

Grant was 59 when the movie was made to Hepburn's 33, though as I've noted before he seemed to stop aging at 38, looking much the same until he was deep into his 60s. Still, he felt self-conscious about the age difference and had the filmmakers add in several self-deprecating references by his character.

Unlike most older stars who fade away or segue into crotchety grampa roles, Grant had a daughter, his only child, at the age of 62 and decided to retire from acting to become a full-time daddy. Apparently he was just as magical in his final role as all his onscreen ones; Jennifer Grant wrote a loving tribute.

The bad guys are:

• James Coburn as Tex, a tall, preening showboat with a Southern drawl and a mean disposition.
• George Kennedy as Scobie, who's even bigger and even meaner than Tex, plus he has hook/weapon prosthetic hand.
• Ned Glass as Neopold Gideon, an older intellectual type, a turncoat who tends to have sneezing fits when he's nervous or endangered.
• Walter Matthau as Hamilton Bartholomew, a shady CIA man who claims to be helping out Reggie but is actually after the money himself. I'm not really giving anything away here, since Matthau practically smokes with suspicion from his very first scene. Not to mention, despite ostensibly being the Paris bureau chief of a federal government division, he's never able to muster up any actual resources to assist her.

The trio of chase men are introduced in a terrific scene: they each show up to Reggie's husband's funeral, and make close inspections of the body to ensure he's really dead. Scobie even sticks a pin in it -- literally.

In another rarity of mainstream Hollywood films, it's actually Tex, rather than Peter or Reggie, who has a flash of insight and figures out what her husband did with the money.  

But then the bad guys start showing up dead one by one, so suspicion falls on Peter, whose real name turns out to be Alex Dyle... or is it Adam Canfield ... or maybe Brian Cruikshank. One of the cleverest lines of dialogue is the very end, when Reggie and ... her man have gotten engaged, and she proposes they have lots of boys, "so we can name them all after you."

"Charade" also marked the first collaboration between Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, earning an Oscar nomination for original song.

Part screwball comedy, part spy thriller, and a whole lot romantic, "Charade" is what nowadays we would call the perfect date movie. A lot of these movies are forgettable, but not this one.

Reeling Backward: "My Favorite Wife" (1940)

I admit I did not much care for "My Favorite Wife," and it may not even be the movie's fault.

I read the description of the plot -- a woman is shipwrecked on an island for seven years and returns home to find her husband remarried -- and thought this 1940 screwball comedy starring Irene Dunne and Cary Grant would be more of a dramatic film along the lines of "Cast Away" with Tom Hanks. How neat to see the gender roles reversed, I thought, with the woman persevering to survive and the man having emotionally moved on.

Alas, it's more of a slamming-door farce than anything even remotely serious. Grant and Dunne are a likable pair, making cooing eyes and sniping at each other lovingly. But it's one of those movies whose entire plot rests on the conceit of people not being able to tell the unpleasant truth. One uncomfortable moment and the entire situation is resolved, but no, our protagonists must continue the charade on and on -- otherwise there wouldn't be a movie.

Nowadays we would call this the purview of a low-rent TV sitcom. Watching it play out 70 years earlier with top-flight stars doesn't make it any more palatable.

The film was actually based on a tragic poem by Lord Tennyson, "Enoch Arden," from which Grant's character takes his name. It's directed by Garson Kanin from a screenplay by Leo McCarey, which actually got an Oscar nomination, if you can believe it. "Wife" also got Academy nods for musical score and art direction.

The story opens with Nick Arden (Grant), who's an attorney, appearing in court to have his wife Ellen (Dunne) declared legally dead after being lost at sea seven years earlier. Moments after the cantankerous old judge (Granville Bates) rules her dead, Nick has him preside over his marriage to Bianca, an uncouth woman played by Gail Patrick, who actually bears a striking resemblance to Dunne.

The biggest hole in the story is why Nick wants to marry Bianca. She has no real affinity with his two children, Nick's mother doesn't care for her, and even he later admits he never really loved her. It's never made clear why he's in such a hurry to get hitched, and the movie suffers for it.

Hours after Nick is remarried, Ellen is dropped off at their home by a truck driver. Dressed in sailor's garb, we're expected to believe that she was picked up off the island by a Portuguese merchant ship, and somehow she made her way from the Pacific Rim to Los Angeles without ever thinking of writing a letter, sending a telegram or making a phone call.

Long story short, Ellen trails Nick and Bianca to their honeymoon and presents herself to Nick just in time to foil the consummation of his nuptials. They resolve to tell Bianca that his first wife is alive and well ... eventually.

As I say, events keep transpiring to prevent Nick from blurbling out those words. At one point Bianca even hires a psychologist to diagnose why Nick seems so uninterested in his new bride, and there's a goofy scene where the doc comes across Nick posing with some of Ellen's clothes. The subtext, of course, being that he's homosexual.

To add to the mix, it turns out Ellen was not alone on the island all those years, but had a fellow castaway, Stephen Burkett. Although they remained chaste, Nick is understandably suspicious -- especially when he tracks Burkett down and discovers him to be a tall, handsome athlete played by Randolph Scott. (After observing him do an acrobatic leap into a country club swimming pool, and woman asks Nick if the diver is Johnny Weismuller, best known for playing Tarzan.)

The rest of the movie is a blase mix of suspicion, one-upmanship between Nick and Burkett and pretend feuding between Nick and Ellen, with their eventual reconciliation never in doubt.

My biggest regret about seeing "My Favorite Wife" is that we never see Ellen (and Burkett) on the island. She just shows up rescued, and without even the benefit of a suntan. Maybe I'd have liked it more if the film wasn't so different from my expectations ... but I expect not. It's a mid-century comedy star vehicle, and not a very good one.

1.5 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Alice in Wonderland" (1933)

To bone up for this Friday's release of Tim Burton's "Alice in Wonderland," I figured it would be a good idea to do a little research on previous film versions and the source material. As a boy, I didn't have much contact with the original book by Lewis Carroll, so I felt I needed some education.

I'm glad I did.

First of all, I hadn't realized that Lewis Carroll was a pseudonym for Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, who reputedly came up with the basis for the story while on a boat trip with a friend and his three daughters.

The other thing I didn't know is that there was more than one book. The 1865 "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" was followed seven years later by "Through the Looking-Glass." In the many film adaptations, characters and story elements from both books are usually mashed up together. This isn't as hard as it sounds, since the novels were part of the literary nonsense movement that loved to play around with reality and perceptions.

So the Red Queen, Humpty Dumpty, Tweedledum and Tweedledee, and the White Knight all came from the second book, and have been shoe-horned into the movies.

The first Alice story begins when she chases the White Rabbit down his hole, while the second began when Alice becomes convinced there's a whole other world on the other side of the large mirror in her drawing room, and passes through it. The 1933 film version directed by Norman Z. McLeod from a screenplay by Joseph L. Mankiewicz contains both entries: First she goes through the looking glass, then she falls down the rabbit hole.

There have been many film versions of the Alice stories -- including a Disney animated version and at least three silent films -- and none of them are really definitive. The 1933 is probably best known, mostly because it starred then-fledgling actors Gary Cooper and Cary Grant in small roles. (The photo accompanying this column is a publicity still of Grant with the costume he wore to play the Mock Turtle.)

The film hasn't been available on video until now, but a new DVD is being released in conjunction with the opening of Tim Burton's version, which I have no doubt will be a distinctive departure.

I guess the thing that most struck me while watching the 77-minute film (cut down from the original 90) is how easily it could have fit into the oeuvre of surrealists like Salvador Dali and Luis Bunuel, or even the acid-induced fantasias of the 1960s and '70s.

I suppose small children would enjoy the ridiculous nature of the goings-on, but I have to say I found the film rather tedious. It's a mash-up of Victorian etiquette and absurdist imagery -- such as Grant's Mock Turtle, a play on mock turtle soup. He's made up of different animal parts, with a cow's head, and isn't very happy about it.

My favorite scene was the introduction of the Red Queen, ordering "Off with their heads" for virtually everyone she meets. I did like the game of croquet played with flamingos as mallets.

Charlotte Henry plays Alice, and W.C. Fields turns up as Humpty Dumpty, and a very grumpy version, too. A young Billy Barty had small roles as two different babies, even though he was 9 years old at the time. It wouldn't do to have the Duchess tossing a real baby up into the area, so a Little Person was cast instead.

Gary Cooper's role as the very aged White Knight appears near the end of the film, with Alice calling him the nicest person she's met on her strange journey -- even though he keeps falling out of his saddle.

The Mad Hatter has only a small appearance in the book and movie, so it'll be interesting to see him turned into the main character in Burton's version, with Johnny Depp tackling the role. With all the twisting, changing and amalgamation of Lewis Carroll's stories in the 1933 and other film versions, I can't imagine that the new one will somehow be more offensive than the others.

1.5 stars



(Apologies for the video; since it hasn't been available on video before, all I could find were clips someone got from filming their TV when it played on Turner Classic Movies.)

Reeling Backward: "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House"

One of the things that drives me crazy about movies is how circumspect everyone always is about money.

Characters in films almost never mention exact dollar amounts, as if doing so would throw off the audience. Maybe it's because the orders of scale are so crazy in Hollywood, and filmmakers just don't have an idea how an average family making $50,000 or so gets by. Even on an inexpensive movie, that amount is probably less than the catering budget.

That's probably also why movie homes are so huge. Even in cinematic families that are presented as middle-class, the children will have bedrooms that are larger than most real homes' master suites. I guess they just can't fit the cameras into a 10' x 9' suburban bedroom.

So one of the things I really liked about "Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" -- other than the fact it's a top-notch comedy -- is that it's very specific about money. Since it's the story of a New York family that gets in over their heads while trying to procure their ideal domicile, figures are quoted exactly and frequently. Watching Cary Grant as the put-upon title character, you can practically see the dollar figures flying before his eyes.

Compare that with "The Money Pit," a more modern film with a similar theme. My memory may be fuzzy, but I don't recall a dollar amount ever being stated in that movie. Wonder how you can characterize anything as a "pit" when you don't even know exactly how much money is being dumped into it.

Right off the start Mr. Blandings' lawyer/best friend/narrator, Bill Cole (Melvyn Douglas) says that Blandings is an insurance executive who does pretty well, making $15,000 a year. Using the U.S. Labor Bureau's handy-dandy inflation calculator, I learn that equals nearly $135,000 in today's dollars. So Mr. Blandings is upper-middle class, but not what most people would call wealthy.

(Keep in mind that even in 1948, when the film was made, New York's cost of living was astronomical. By today's numbers, that $135,000 salary works out to only about $61,000 in Indianapolis.)

The film (directed by Henry Potter) opens with a neat scene in which the Blandings go about their normal morning routine. Jim Blandings is assaulted by boxes falling off the closet shelf when he goes to fetch his robe, and by bottles careening out of the medicine cabinet when he's trying to brush his teeth. That's after he's finished waiting for his daughters (Sharyn Moffett and Connie Marshall) to get finished in the bathroom. Then he must duck around the head of his wife Muriel (Myrna Loy) to see in the mirror to shave. They can barely squeeze the whole family into the tiny dining room for breakfast. Clearly, the Blandings are boxed in.

However, they do have their own maid, Gussie, which begs a lot of questions. If Gussie cooks and cleans, and the Blandings girls (about age 12) can mostly take care of themselves, what exactly is it that Mrs. Blandings does all day?

After shooting down a proposal to redo their apartment for $7,000, Mr. Blandings hatches on a scheme to buy a Connecticut spread. His idea is to spend a few bucks more than they would have unloaded on the apartment to buy a whole big place with plenty of room for everyone. Of course, everything goes wrong from the get-go.

They spend $11,500 on a run-down old place that every engineer they talk to says must be torn down. They hire an architect (Reginald Denny) with the proviso not to spend more than $10K building a new place. But their dreams of the perfect place run amok, with demands for private baths for each bedroom, a study, flower room and so forth. The shocked look on Cary Grant's face when they get the final estimates -- the lowest is $21,000 -- is priceless.

The story continues with various snafus and foul-ups making the construction more frustrating and costly. The funniest bit is their hiring an old-timer to drill a well. He drills down 227 feet -- at $4.50 a foot -- before the construction crew discovers a natural spring six feet below the basement floor.

There's also some subplots about Mr. Blandings suspecting his wife of having an affair with Bill Cole, and Jim's unsuccessful attempt to come up with a new sales slogan for his biggest account, Wham, a meat-like product with a more than passing resemblance to Spam.

"Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House" is a thoroughly entertaining family comedy, with some riffs on the American dream/obsession about getting ahead. And when it comes to dollars and cents, it's right on the money.

3.5 stars

Reeling Backward: "Notorious"

In many ways, "Notorious" is the most quintessentially Hitchcock film.

The voyeurism that marked Alfred Hitchcock's movies is in clear evidence, with the many extreme close-ups and tracking shots, which were highly unusual in 1946 American cinema. There's one shot of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman embracing, and the camera slowly rotates around their heads -- a trick Hitchcock would use again, for example in his masterpiece "Vertigo." The overall effect in this movie is of following a subject, or being followed. Since it's a movie about espionage, it gives the audiences an unsettled, borderline paranoid mood.

There's also the classic use of the MacGuffin -- an object or other plot device that is used to drive the story, but which remains ill-defined or whose importance is never really made clear. It doesn't really matter what it is, in other words, only that everyone wants it. Hitchcock's films were replete with microfilm or sinister powders or such things that had the main character being chased around nilly-willy. In "Notorious" the MacGuffin is bottles of wines that turn out to contain a mysterious black sand.

And the misogyny that was often part and parcel of Hitchcock's work was never stronger than in "Notorious." Bergman plays Alicia Huberman, a German-American playgirl who is used as a Mata Hari by intelligence agent Devlin (Grant) to infiltrate a Nazi cel in Rio De Janeiro. Devlin, who recruits her after her father is convicted as a traitor, is at first repulsed by her constant boozing and loose morals. But he eventually falls for, only to learn that his assignment is to use Alicia as bait to lure out Alex Sebastian (Claude Rains), one of the Nazi co-conspirators.

Grant's performance is particularly icy and cruel, as opposed to his usual cocksure charm. At one point he admits that he's always been afraid of girls -- something feminist film theorists have had a field day with.

There's one great scene where Alicia is meeting with Devlin at a horse race to update him on her snooping, and she playfully tells him, "You can add Sebastian's name to my list of playmates" -- a not-at-all subtle indication that she has slept with him. The look that comes over Grant's face, one of anger and humiliation, quickly sours into an image of pure contempt.

Devlin's associates (the redoubtable Louis Calhern plays Devlin's boss) also speak contemptuously of Alicia, even though she's supplying them with invaluable intelligence about their enemies, because she's using sex to get what she wants. It goes without saying that these gentlemen would not be so quick to disparage one of their own employing the same tactics. When Alicia agrees to marry Sebastian to further the ruse, they view it only as an opportunity for them to dig up dirt on their foes.

Claude Rains had one of those truly magnificent film careers, nearly always as a supporting man (he was nominated for the Oscar four times, including this film, never winning) but occasionally in the lead. His portrayal of Sebastian is most interesting -- he is never shown committing an overtly evil act, even after he discovers Alicia's role as a spy. He and his iron maiden of a mother begin to slowly poison her, but it's the old lady who actually does the deed. Sebastian is shown as a decent guy who just happens to be working with his fellow Nazis. He also seems to truly love Alicia -- they previously had a fling years ago, which was what helped make Alicia the perfect mole.

It's interesting to think what it would be like to remake this movie from the perspective of the Claude Rains character, with an overbearing mother and a mysterious stranger who keeps showing up in an attempt to steal your wife away.

Leopoldine Konstantin plays Sebastian's mother, in a memorable performance. Since Sebastian is seen as such a nice guy, even something of a wuss, she represents the most villainous figure in the film.

One of my favorite games is spotting mother-son cinematic pairings in which the actors portraying them are actually about the same age. Claude Rains was 57 when this film came out, while Konstantin was but three years older. There's one scene where they're interacting in a close two-shot (i.e., both their heads are visible in the frame) and you can see how smooth and unlined her face is, compared to Rains' elegant but craggy features.

3.5 stars

Reeling Backward: "Destination Tokyo"

There was a moment watching "Destination Tokyo" that was so cheesy, so unbelievably lame that I actually burst out laughing.

This movie came out in 1943, as the campaign against the Japanese in the Pacific was still very much a tenuous affair, and it's hard to see it today as anything other than a blatant piece of wartime propaganda.

The direction by first-timer Delmer Daves is quite ham-handed in my opinion, but he was no hack. He went on to helm many well-regarded classics, including "Dark Passage" and "3:10 to Yuma."

Daves also did the screenplay, which seems to have been dictated by the war department. The Americans are a colorful diaspora of swell guys who smile, share photos of their girls and gently tease one another in a good-natured way. There's a rakish ladies' man, a crotchety old cook, a doe-eyed kid getting his first taste of war, an atheist who finds a little faith, and so on. Stock characters, one-two-three.

The Japanese, or "Japs" as they're generally called in the movie, are faceless and impersonal. Cary Grant, as the absolutely perfect captain, has a monologue where he talks about how screwed up Japanese culture is because it's so militaristic and lacking in freedom, like the U.S. enjoys. Although as films like this make clear, during WWII we all enjoyed the freedom to think exactly the same way.

On an aside, I'm not one of those people who considers "Japs" a derogatory term. It is, after all, merely a shortening of the proper term of Japanese. Do people consider "Yanks" an insulting term for American soldiers, short for "Yankees"? Plus it's a long-standing tradition of American soldiers to give their enemies nicknames -- Germans were "Jerrys" or "Krauts," Soviets were "Commies" or "Rooskies." The most common term for our soldiers currently serving in Iraq and Afghanistan is to call the general populace "hajjis," which ironically is an honorific in Muslim culture. So I don't get too worked about this sort of terminology being thrown around in war movies, since it reflects how the grunts actually talk. Although I do hold the line against blatantly racial terms, such as calling the Vietnamese "gooks."

The set-up is that Grant's sub, the Copperfin, is supposed to sneak into Tokyo Bay and put some spies ashore to gather intel for an impending bombing run. There are, of course, some battle scenes toward the end, because you can't have a submarine movie without torpedoes slamming into an enemy ship or three, plus the ubiquitous depth-charge sequence of men holding onto the bulkheads as the entire ship shakes with the pounding explosions.

The special effects are not very special, even by 1943 standards. There's a ton of grainy stock footage cut into the movie, and it stands out like a sore thumb from the rest of the production, which appears to have been shot entirely in a studio. They lifted some submarine footage from other movies, and most of the rest is done with models that look cheap and flimsy. There's one bit showing Japanese planes taking off from a carrier, and I swear it was done with children's toys.

That's not the part that got me laughing, though. The unintentionally hilarious bit comes when they first surface in the enemy bay, and Grant looks through the periscope and sees Mount Fujiyama looming on the horizon, and there's this big, sudden musical cue. It's like, "DA-DUUUUHHHH!!!" Corny enough, but then he tells his executive officer to take a look, and he grabs the periscope, and we get the exact same mountain shot again with the exact same wallop of music. "DA-DUUUUUHHHH!!!" Hilarious.

Generally I don't review classic movies that I genuinely didn't like, since I see my role as better suited to recommending old flicks people may not have seen, but I thought there were a few interesting things to say about "Destination Tokyo." It's bad enough that it could make for an entertaining rental with your friends, doing the Mystery Science Theater 3000 thing. Enjoy!

1.5 stars out of four

Reeling backward: "Arsenic and Old Lace"

Cary Grant was such a controlled performer. He was the Barack Obama of his time -- Mr. Cool, whose feathers never got ruffled. He tended to work with small gestures and modest changes of facial expression. He played it close to the vest.

That's why it was such a shock to see him mugging and doing pratfalls and double-takes and other big, theatrical tricks in "Arsenic and Old Lace." Frank Capra directed it based on the classic stage play by Joseph Kesselring, and I'm guessing he instructed Grant and the rest of his actors to "go big." Stage acting is very different from film acting, of course, because as they say you have to be bold enough so the people in the back seat of the theater can react.

It's an amusing farce, with lots of slamming doors and people overhearing each other and so forth. Grant plays a drama critic who learns his kindly old aunts have been poisoning elderly gentlemen to put them out of their misery. This discovery happens, of course, on his wedding day. And the same day his criminally insane brother Jonathan returns home after 20 years. And his other brother is a nutcase who thinks he's Teddy Roosevelt.

There are plenty of close-ups of Grant reacting to all the shenanigans, something I'd never seen from him before. Grant did plenty of comedies, of course, but never played so directly to the audience.

One moment I just absolutely loved. Peter Lorre plays a plastic surgeon who is Jonathan's partner in crime, and keeps rearranging his face to keep the cops off their trail. (His most recent effort makes Jonathan a dead ringer for Boris Karloff, which sends him into a murderous rage whenever someone comments on the resemblance.) Anyway, Jonathan has been caught be a trio of cops, and the police captain is on the phone reading aloud a description of the wanted suspects just as the good doctor is trying to slink unnoticed out the front door.

The description goes something like this: "About 40 years old, 5-foot-3, 140 pounds, speaks with a German accent, pop eyes..." Right when they get to the "pop eyes" part, Lorre -- whose signature feature, of course, was those big, googly eyes -- sags noticeably, like a man who's already heaving a bad day when his hat blows into a sewer.

I tend to love little non-dialogue comedic moments like that. Laughed so hard I had to stop the video.

"Arsenic" is somewhat dated, of course, but was still a hoot. I've never seen it staged live; after watching this movie, I'll have to check our local theaters in case somebody stages it.