Playing Old Time Charades

Opening this weekend is director Jonathan Demme’s The Truth About Charlie, a remake of Stanley Donen’s 1963 classic romantic thriller Charade. Starring Thandie Newton, Mark Wahlberg and Tim Robbins, the film marks Demme’s return to his quirkier, Something Wild days, without completely forsaking the dramatic cache of his better-known and more critically-acclaimed films (The Silence of the Lambs, Philadelphia).

But successful remakes are few and far between. Charade starred two of the most popular actors from the Golden Age of Hollywood: the luminous Audrey Hepburn and the debonair, adorably-cleft chinned Cary Grant. And as Sydney Pollock learned from his remake of Sabrina in 1997, even today’s stars tend to pale against the luster of yesteryear’s celebrities.

Charade was a play on the Hitchcockian theme of embroiling an ordinary person, in this case, Hepburn’s bored socialite Reggie Lampert, in extraordinary circumstances beyond her control. At the start of the film, Reggie has just decided to divorce her secretive husband Charles when she finds him dead and herself the target of his old war-time criminal cohorts who suspect her of hiding a stolen fortune. Complicating the situation is Reggie’s complete unawareness of her husband’s past illegal activities, as well as ample aid from two strangers: the stringent government official Mr. Bartholomew, deftly played by then unknown actor Walter Matthau, and the enigmatic Joshua (Grant), who claims to be a long lost friend of her husband’s.

The earlier film succeeds because Grant and Hepburn sparkle under Donen’s playful directing. Although he filmed in Paris alongside French New Wavers Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard in the early 1960s, Donen largely ignored the experimental techniques of his European colleagues and instead channeled his skills as an MGM musicals maestro into crafting a highly stylized and clever thriller scored by Henry Mancini and interlaced with a deadpan humor and snappy script. In one scene, as Grant’s character is forced atop the roof of a Parisian American Express building where he presumably will be shot, he deadpans, “All right, but the view better be worth it.” Once outside, he pauses to put on his glasses and assesses, “Mmm...very pretty.”

At one point, Reggie saunters up to Joshua and smugly asks, “You know what’s wrong with you? Absolutely nothing.” Given its predecessor, it’s hard to tell if Demme’s stand-ins for Hepburn and Grant, his lovely Beloved star Newton and the hard-edged Wahlberg, can respond in the affirmative in The Truth About Charlie.