Charade. A corpse lies in a chapel. Suddenly a door bursts open and a leering menace strides up to the dead man, jabs a pin into his hand. "Good grief!" gasps the dead man's widow (Audrey Hepburn). "What next?" Another fiend, that's what. A pal of the malevolent mourner corners the widow and flips lighted matches into her lap. "Your late husband," he snarls viciously, "stole a quarter-million dollars from me an' my buddies. Where is it?" To the rescue rushes a handsome stranger (Gary Grant). "What's going on here?" he wants to know.
What's going on is sort of confused. Director Stanley Donen (Indiscreet) apparently started out with a sensible idea: with Grant and Hepburn on the payroll and Paris for a setting, why not tell a love story? But somewhere along the production line, he decided to make a thriller instead. Then he turned the thriller into a sophisticated comedy of murders. Then he let the comedy degenerate into a bloody awful farce, the sort of shaggy rat story in which the customers are the real victims—they are inexorably gagged to death. He: "Would you like to see where I was tattooed?" She: "Yes!" He: "All right. We can drive by the place."
But what the heck. The color is nice and Christmassy, especially in the murder scenes. Hepburn looks real crazy in those crazy Givenchy vines. Her costar, who is 59, looks a feisty 45 and gives out with some grand Grant. In one episode, confronting a buxom grandma with an orange tucked underneath her chin, he grapples hilariously with a problem of some physiological intricacy: how to transfer the orange from her chin to his—without using his hands. In another, pretending to be shy, he blushingly refuses to get undressed in front of Hepburn, steps firmly under a shower and starts soaping himself with all his clothes on. When Hepburn looks horrified, Grant makes a manly effort to reassure her. Fingering the material of his suit, he explains with an engaging grin: "Drip dry."