Stanley Donen’s Charade is one of those films I can watch repeatedly and never seem to quite tire of its celluloid magic. It has that delightful filmic quality reminiscent of Alfred Hicthcock’s best work, and it is not surprising that Charade is often described as “the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never directed.” This is probably true as choreographer turned director, Donen claimed he had:

“...always wanted to make a movie like one of my favorites, Hitchcock’s North by Northwest”

It’s fifty years since Charade opened at the box office, with its perfect star pairing of Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, pitting their wits against Walter Matthau, James Coburn and George Kennedy in scenic Paris. Grant was concerned that at the age of 59, he might look a tad lecherous chasing after the beautiful, 33-year-old Hepburn. Peter Stone’s script was therefore changed to accommodate Grant’s concerns.

Hepburn had no such qualms as she had already been courted on celluloid by several “older men,” Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday, both Humphrey Bogart and William Holden in Sabrina, Fred Astaire in Funny Face, Gary Cooper in Love in the Afternoon and Burt Lancaster in The Unforgiven. Hepburn also had a tempestuous affair with Holden that allegedly led the actor to have a vasectomy to stop Hepburn’s hopes to conceive his child.

Described as the most naturally beautiful woman in the world, Hepburn was a fascinating woman, a hard-drinking, chain-smoking, sexually-liberated Belgian, who lived her life by her own rules. President Kennedy was smitten by her (which actress didn’t he desire?) and he said his favorite film was Roman Holiday. It was Hepburn who sang “Happy Birthday” to the JFK the year of his assassination.

CyborgCity made this five-minute version of Charade for 90to5 Editing Challenge. It is kind-of-like today’s trailers, where the whole of the film is revealed/ruined in that three-minute teaser. So, if you haven’t seen Charade, someone posted the entire film here. If you have, well, here’s a Charade refresher course in just five minutes.
 

 
This issue of Uncensored magazine hit the newstands in August of 1968, nine years after Cary Grant had gone public with the fact that he had taken LSD and two months before it was made illegal.

Cary Grant never tried to keep his LSD use secret. In fact, he spoke glowingly about it in a 1959 interview with Look magazine, saying that it had brought him close to happiness for the first time in his life. He also said that LSD taught him immense compassion for other people, and had helped him conquer his own shyness and insecurity.

Chock full of scandal and gossip, Uncensored was a real bargain at 35 cents. Lesbians, homos, LSD and sex tips from Sean Connery!
 
Via Pulp International.

 
If you’ve seen the legendary 1940 screwball comedy His Girl Friday, you’ll know why this edit clocks in at only 8 minutes. If you haven’t seen it, just know that it’s one of the fastest paced and dialogue-heavy films ever made. Director Howard Hawks made sure that Cary Grant and Rosalind Russell spoke their lines over each other as much as they possibly could because, well, that’s what people do in reality.

But all that disappears in this cut by video pro Valentin Spirik. The dialogue is completely cut out, leaving an almost hypnotic quick-cut body of jerky scene sequences layered with incidental verbal and atmospheric noise. Check it out.
 

Excellent, excellent article on Cary Grant’s love affair with acid. This is rather heart-warming… how come we never hear THIS side of history?

It was 1943. Cary Grant was starring in the motion picture Destination Tokyo; an action-filled wartime drama co-starring John Garfield and a deluge of racial slurs. While America was embroiled in the intense fighting of World War Two, Axis powers had surrounded the neutral country of Switzerland. Deep within Nazi surrounded boundaries, Swiss chemist Albert Hoffman was busy toiling away in a dimly lit laboratory, about to study the properties of a synthesis he had abandoned five years earlier. Hoffman was trying to devise a chemical agent that could act as a circulatory and respiratory stimulant when he accidentally absorbed lysergic acid through his fingers. While Americans sat in darkened theaters enjoying Cary Grant’s portrayal of a submarine captain, Hoffman was experiencing accelerated thought patterns, polychromatic visions and an unbearable onslaught of intense emotion. This was the world’s first acid trip. The discovery was soon to transform the life of one of Hollywood’s most glamorous stars.

Cary Grant was the first mainstream celebrity to espouse the virtues of psychedelic drugs. Whereas novelist Aldous Huxley’s famous 1954 treatise The Doors of Perception recounted his remarkable experiences with mescaline, Huxley was hardly mainstream - a darling of intellectual circles to be sure, but a far cry from a matinee idol. Grant was one of the biggest stars Hollywood had to offer when he jumped headlong into Huxley’s Heaven and Hell. His endorsement of subconscious exploration, arguably, created more interest in LSD than Dr. Timothy Leary who was largely preaching to the converted.1 Grant on the other hand was the fantasy of countless Midwestern women. He convinced wholesome movie starlets like Esther Williams and Dyan Cannon to blow their minds. When Ladies Home Journal and Good Housekeeping interviewed him, the topic of conversation wasn’t Cary’s favorite recipe or “the problem with youth today.” Instead, Cary Grant was telling happy homemakers that LSD was the greatest thing in the world.

(Beware of the Blog: Cary Grant on Acid)

(Cary Grant: A Biography)