My all-time favorite movie is "Charade".
I couldn't tell you why.
It's something I tried to explain to Ms. Applebaum once, on a day-long road trip from Spokane to Seattle. I failed.
It's something my old friend Sporgersi and I have tried to get a handle on, individually and collectively, for close to 50 years. No luck there, either.
Dr. Sporgersi and I first saw "Charade" at the Orpheum Theater in Madison in 1963. Our m.o. back then, when we could afford it, was to grab lunch at a hole-in-the-wall burger joint off State Street called the Red & White, and then buy bags of doughnuts at the Federal Bake Shop and sneak them into the theater for the one-o'clock matinee.
The doughnuts were crucial, because we were 16 and always hungry, and because they'd keep us going in case we really liked the movie and decided to stay and see it twice. (This was before theaters ritually emptied out between shows. For the price of a ticket, you could sit in the dark all day if you wanted to, and we sometimes did. Imagine.)
I'm pretty sure the day we saw "Charade" was a day we bought doughnuts. It was definitely a day we stayed to see the movie twice.
What made us do that? What compelled us to spend not two, but four hours that day in the cavernous old Orpheum with its stale popcorn smell and sticky floor? What makes me go to the video shelf now and reach for "Charade" more often than any other film? Why "Charade"?
Maybe it was a case of all the elements lining up and coming together in a way that to us at the time seemed perfect: the script (Peter Stone), the direction (Stanley Donen), the leads (Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant), the location (Paris), the supporting cast (Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Ned Glass and Jacques Marin), the music (Henry Mancini), even the eye-popping, protopsychedelic opening credits. Everything clicked. Everything worked.
Maybe it was because we were young, would-be romantics who both had a thing for Audrey Hepburn. Or because we were still in the process of finding out how much we loved films, and this was the picture, at the right time and place, that put us both over the top. Or maybe the cinema gods were just fooling around that day, laughing, smoking some weed, and deciding, just for the hell of it, let's fuck with these guys.
Whatever it was, it stuck.
"Charade" is still my all-time favorite movie.
And I still couldn't tell you why.
