Charade (Universal) (1963)

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General		Extras
Category	Thriller	None
Rating
Year Of Production	1963
Running Time	108:45
RSDL / Flipper	RSDL (49:28)	Cast & Crew
Start Up	Language Select Then Menu
Region Coding	2,4	Directed By	Stanley Donen
Studio Distributor	Universal Pictures Home Video	Starring	Cary Grant Audrey Hepburn Walter Matthau James Coburn George Kennedy
Case	?
RPI	Box	Music	Henry Mancini

Video		Audio
Pan & Scan/Full Frame	None	English Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) French Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) German Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Italian Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s) Spanish Dolby Digital 2.0 (192Kb/s)
Widescreen Aspect Ratio	1.85:1
16x9 Enhancement
Video Format	576i (PAL)
Original Aspect Ratio	1.85:1	Miscellaneous
Jacket Pictures	No
Subtitles	English for the Hearing Impaired French German Italian Spanish	Smoking	Yes
		Annoying Product Placement	No
		Action In or After Credits	No

    Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant made just one movie together: this one. That's a shame, because they have some real chemistry between them (despite reports that Cary Grant was nervous about playing the romantic lead to a girl young enough to be his daughter).

    A body falls from a train before the dizzying spirals of the opening credits. Then we see a woman eating, and a hand pointing a Luger at her head. This one happens to be a water pistol, but it's symbolic of what is to come. Then comes a chance meeting with a handsome stranger, who introduces himself as Peter Joshua (Cary Grant) to Regina Lampert (Audrey Hepburn). Both of them happen to be returning to Paris the following day. Regina opens her apartment door to discover the place empty save for scattered rubbish. Her first impulse is to check her wardrobes (empty). As she's rushing about, she bumps into a man who introduces himself as Inspector Édouard Grandpierre (Jacques Marin) of the Police Judiciare (he looks a lot like Hercules Poirot). He explains that her husband is dead, and that he had left home with a lot of money (a quarter million in US dollars), but the money was not to be found on his body or in the one bag he had with him. Strangely, there were four passports in that bag, and Regina discovers that she knew less about Charles than she thought.

    At the funeral a number of strangers appear, one by one, with some of them checking to see that Charles is really dead. One of them hands Regina a letter, inviting her to meet a Hamilton Bartholomew at the US embassy. She goes, and Mr Batholomew (Walter Matthau) shows her a photograph featuring Charles, and three men (all of whom showed up at the funeral): Tex Panhallow (James Coburn), Leopold Gideon (Ned Glass) and Herman Scobie (George Kennedy). He tells her that Charles was wanted by the US government for stealing the $250,000 from them. He also tells her that the three men will be looking for her to get the money. She turns to Peter Joshua for help, but soon discovers that that is not his real name.

    The men find her quickly, and start menacing her to get the money. Will she find the money? Who can she trust?

    This is a good thriller, with plenty of twists and turns, the occasional throw-away one-liner, and a couple of running gags. It has its flaws (mostly holes in the plot), but it's quite entertaining.

Video

    The original theatrical aspect of this film was 1.85:1. This DVD is presented in an aspect ratio of 1.85:1, and is 16x9 enhanced. We can hardly complain about that, now can we?

    The image is a little soft, due to light film grain. Shadow detail is limited, but adequate. Low-level noise is absent.

    Colour is fairly well-rendered, but not marvellous; there is a bit of inconsistency in skin tones and red clothes — not too surprising in an older Technicolor film. There is a bit of colour bleed on Audrey Hepburn's red outfit, but it's minor

    There are somewhat infrequent spots and flecks, but remarkably few for a film that's 40 years old. There are none worth mentioning.

    There's more than a little aliasing, such as at 6:51 on the car grille, and a bit of moiré (on fabrics), but both are sufficiently minor as to be untroubling. There are no MPEG artefacts other than a fairly frequent light touch of shimmer.

    There are subtitles in five languages, including English. I watched the English subtitles — they are easy to read, well-timed, and fairly accurate, albeit a little abbreviated.

    The disc is single sided and dual layered, formatted RSDL. The layer change is at 49:28. It's fairly obvious, but not disturbing.

Video Ratings Summary

Sharpness
Shadow Detail
Colour
Grain/Pixelization
Film-To-Video Artefacts
Film Artefacts
Overall

Audio

    The soundtrack is provided in five languages, all in Dolby Digital 2.0, not surround-encoded, at 192kbps. I only listened to the English.

    The dialogue is clear and comprehensible. There are no obvious audio sync problems, although there's a scene or two where the sync looks very slightly out (perhaps slightly sloppy ADR?).

    This film has a Henry Mancini score, but I'm not thrilled by it. Still, it does the job fairly well.

    The surrounds and subwoofer are not used by this soundtrack.

Audio Ratings Summary

Dialogue
Audio Sync
Clicks/Pops/Dropouts
Surround Channel Use
Subwoofer
Overall

    There are no extras on this disc. Nothing at all.

Menu

    The menu is static and silent, but perfectly functional.

    The Region 1 version of this disc sounds identical to this one (even down to having a similarly good transfer), excepting only that the R4 disc is PAL, and the R1 is NTSC. Oh, and unlike this one, it's stuck on the reverse of their version of The Truth About Charlie — ours is a separate disc included in the same box. I prefer having the discs separate, and I dislike double-sided DVDs — single-sided are easier to handle.

    There are several other versions of this movie in Region 1, including a Criterion Collection version that is reported to be rather good. Others are from Delta Entertainment, Madacy Entertainment, Koch Vision Entertainment, VCI/FFI, Laserlight Video, Diamond Entertainment, Gotham Distribution, Unicorn Video, Ventura Distribution, and United American Video — do we get the impression that the copyright has lapsed? I get the impression that most of these opportunistic releases are not very good (they are full-screen).

    I'm definitely in favour of the R4 disc this time. If you were looking for the best copy of this movie, the Criterion Collection disc might be worth a look — it includes a commentary by the director and screen-writer, amongst other extras; the one drawback is that it is not 16x9 enhanced (and it's apparently out-of-print).

    A classic movie on a rather good DVD. This is the best version available of this film, and it is amusing that you have to buy The Truth About Charlie to get it.

    The video quality is good.

    The audio quality is good.

    The extras are completely absent.

Video
Audio
Extras
Plot
Overall