Audrey Hepburn and William Holden in Paris When It Sizzles

Wikipedia says this was filmed back-to-back with Charade, and the two movies share more than some sets. Both of them worship at the altar of snappy dialogue and head-spinning switcheroos.

But in Charade, as befits its aspiration to be the best Hitchcock film Hitchcock never made, the dazzling repartee and narrative reverses are all placed in service of a plot and two sharply realized characters. Here the snappy dialogue and switcheroos are quite explicitly ends in themselves.

In short, Charade, for all its chaos, was really about order, as any good thriller is. Paris When It Sizzles is anarchic in spirit.

It's also metafictional enough to please Donald Kaufman, and almost shockingly cynical about the whole idea of film, balancing vicious swipes at French New Wave directors and method actors with wicked commentary on traditional Hollywood moviemaking. Delicious, and it's amazing to realize that this was made in 1964. It feels quite contemporary.

But of course the movie's chief pleasure, in age-old Hollywood fashion, is watching two actors with great chemistry. Never mind the rumors, Holden and Hepburn really sparkle here. Holden hits every mark as the washed-up screenwriter in love with his own charm (and also as the international jewel thief, the spy, the monster, etc.): he does an excellent job of showing us a character who's primarily acting to himself, to his reflection in a glass of whiskey, and only intermittently connecting with the other person in the room.

Hepburn, meanwhile, turns in one of her best comic performances. She's so charming that you tend to forget how gifted a comedienne she was - she sneaks up on you. Then she'll employ that gangly body in a bit of slapstick - the way she leaps when Holden surprises her on the balcony at the movie studio, a perfect cartoon leap, kicking her heels up behind her. Or she'll modify her timing so that she's transformed herself into a hard-bitten French jailbird, insisting on her "professionalism." And she'll have you squealing with delight. She's good. And she's great here.

Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant in Charade

And if that don't bring a smile to your face you might be dead.

Watched this with Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki this evening; part of Christmas with Audrey. This one of my favorite movies. Hepburn at her best, Grant at his best, both effortlessly charming, and with so much chemistry that you forget he was twenty-five years older than her. This is snappy dialogue, Hollywood pizzazz, star power.

As the Wikipedia entry says, it's the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock never made; it does have that tight, suspenseful plotting, but of course it doesn't have the darkness that you usually find in even the lightest of Hitchcock's films. It has its melancholy moments, though - and they're surprisingly moody for such a frothy film. Hepburn standing forlorn in her empty Paris apartment, or sitting on the veranda of the ski lodge dressed in black and contemplating divorce.

These of course are more than balanced by the humor - Grant showering in his suit ("drip dry," he says) and making faces at Hepburn - and the real sexual tension Hepburn and Grant generate. As I say, this is Hepburn at her most irresistible, her patented balance of womanly sensuality and girlish cuteness; I think she does it here better than she does it in Breakfast at Tiffany's even.

All this plus a Henry Mancini score and Maurice Binder titles. What more can you ask for?

Peter Bogdanovich's They All Laughed

So we ended up with a copy of this on DVD this Christmas. Santa brought Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki a bunch of Audrey Hepburn movies, because Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki loves Audrey Hepburn; mostly they were classics like Charade, How To Steal A Million, Sabrina, My Fair Lady. But Santa Tanuki also found this one on a certain riverine webmerchant and got it. Knew nothing about it.

This is the first of Bogdanovich's films I've seen; somehow he's been a blind spot in my exploration of '70s cinema, and his Sopranos cameos are about all I know of his work. This is probably not the best one of his to start with - imagine One From The Heart being your first Coppola.

Enough preamble. This turned out to be a weird film, but I enjoyed it. It's trying to be a semi-screwball romantic comedy in the style of the classic ones Audrey Hepburn starred in in her prime, but with a thoroughly 1981 cast and vernacular. So, snappy dialogue, but delivered with spaciness rather than sparkle. Which sounds disastrous, right? But somehow it's not.

The thing this film lacks that something like, say, Roman Holiday or Charade had is focus. Those films were tightly centered around the story, even if it was a convoluted story; in classic Hollywood fashion every scene and every character supported the story. They All Laughed works in a different way: half the time you're really not sure what the story is, and every character seems to come from a different movie universe entirely. It's a New York romance with a country music soundtrack and private eyes that seem drawn equally from Bogey and Cheech & Chong; John Ritter doing his best Peter Sellers, a hard-boiled female taxi driver, Audrey Hepburn looking like Yoko Ono; Colleen Camp talking like Katharine Hepburn but singing like Joan Baez; frustrating pacing; precocious kids, roller skating, and did I mention lots of country music?

Despite that, and only if you surrender and take the movie on its own terms, it works. All the performances are good, entertaining, memorable, and the dialogue really does have a certain snappiness to it, if you can match its frequency. Some nice camera work (such as the series of shots when Ritter runs up and in to the courthouse; Wes Anderson notes this sequence, too, in his conversation with Bogdanovich on the DVD, so I'm not original here; but it is a nice sequence). You may not know what's going on half the time, but it's not an unpleasant feeling here.

As an Audrey Hepburn movie, on the other hand...let's just say Mrs. Sgt. Tanuki was disappointed.