Suspicion (1941)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, starring Cary Grant, Joan Fontaine, Nigel Bruce. Fontaine won the Academy Award for this one, though I’m darned if I know why (she was up against Bette Davis and Barbara Stanwick, among others) since I found her acting a bit over. But it was the ‘40s, there was a war and melodrama was all the rage. Bruce is comic relief and he and Grant seem to have more chemistry than Grant and Fontaine. The question of whether Grant’s character is just a cad or a criminal … well, it’s hard to think of Grant as a murderer, which made Hitchcock’s task all the harder and for one of the few times in his career, the balance isn’t struck as well as a viewer might like. Not one of Hitch’s best, though serviceable.
Charade (1963)
Directed by Stanley Donan, starring Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy and Ned Glass. Grant only made three more movies after this, and this is one of his best. The producers of the Bond movies had originally wanted Grant as James Bond, and this gives pretty good indication of why since he’s smooth and charming, but also capable of carrying off the action requirements – he has a fight with George Kennedy in this that is well choreographed for the time. Hepburn’s husband is killed. She’s away with her friend and her friend’s son and meets Grant. When Hepburn returns home she learns of her husband’s death and finds their apartment gutted, all furniture and paintings gone. Grant shows up having read of the death in the newspapers to see if he can help. And that starts a grand chase to find the money Hepburn’s husband stole from the U.S. government during the war. Coburn, Kennedy and Glass were his confederates who he cheated out of their shares; Matthau is an embassy bureaucrat trying to locate the money to return it to the U.S. government. But Grant and someone else aren’t exactly what they seem to be, and Hepburn has to negotiate their duplicity to find the money and save her life. A romantic comedy thriller, with a terrific score by Henry Mancini, and one of my favorite movies from the early '60s, and often called the best Hitchcock movie not directed by Hitchcock.
Randy M.