Charade

Stanley Donen bought a 1961 story by Marc Behm and Peter Stone, The Unsuspecting Wife, and filmed it, Stone writing the script. Shooting began in Paris in October 1962, interiors went up at Studios de Boulogne, and the Alpine meeting of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn was shot at Megève in January 1963. Grant turned 59 during the shoot, uneasy about the 25 years between him and Hepburn. The fix was written in: his character remarks on his own age, and Regina does the chasing. Hepburn won the BAFTA for Best British Actress; Grant was nominated for Best Foreign Actor. The film’s one Oscar nomination was the Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer song, which lost. Which copy you open matters. The copyright line in the credits carried neither the word copyright nor the symbol, so the film passed into the public domain in the United States on release. After the Kennedy assassination, Hepburn’s line about being assassinated was redubbed to being eliminated. Official releases restored the original, yet some public domain copies still carry the altered take. A good fit if you want the same man returning under a new name every half hour, played as a game rather than a puzzle. Not for anyone after a measured procedural that counts bodies; the killings here are built into the flirting.