Classic

What do you get when Bringing Up Baby meets North By Northwest? You get Charade is what you get; one of the most perfectly crafted and executed movies ever made. Directed by the brilliant Stanley Donen with a brilliant screenplay by Peter Stone from an original story ("The Unsuspecting Wife") by Stone and Marc Behm, and with the lead roles played brilliantly by the ever-urbane Gary Grant and the ever-elegant Audrey Hepburn, Charade is quite simply, um, brilliant. With but a single, brief exception (which brief exception we decline pointing out as it was almost certainly missed by just about everyone), the movie is virtually flawless throughout. Every line, every gesture, every clever twist of plot, every scene, every camera shot is all it could be, and precisely what it should be.

We make off-message note of the above for no better reason than that we had occasion to view this 1963 movie this past Saturday, and marveled at its perfection and undiminished charm even after numerous viewings over the years — a very definition of that overused (and much misused) term, classic.