DailyView: Day 192, Movie 274

Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant are involved in a mystery about stolen money and a group of men who were trying to recover that money under any circumstances. But how involved is Cary Grant? And did he kill to retrieve it?

The 1963 film spun a really good mystery with a group of characters and a good conclusion.

The film included Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Ned Glass, and Jacque Marin along with Grant and Hepburn. The strong cast made work the mystery component of the story.

A man is thrown from a train. The man turned out to be the husband of his unhappy wife, Regina Lampert (Audrey Hepburn). Turned out that the man had stolen a large sum of money from his collection of crooks and they wanted the money back, and they assumed that Mrs. Lampert had it. However, she was still reeling from the discovery that her husband was not whom he said he was.

Mrs. Lampert was approached by a man named Peter (Cary Grant) who turned out to be involved in the case somehow. He actually had several names, giving her a different one every time.

Honestly, the mystery was cool, but the whole Cary Grant-Audrey Hepburn romance within the mystery did not work as well for me. It painted Hepburn’s character in a fickle light. I know that the role would have been typical of Hollywood during the era, but it still did not make it great. Hepburn’s character was too into this liar and changed her mind about him multiple times. Every time he told her another fake name, she wound up playing it off as it were nothing.

I would have liked to have seen Hepburn more in control of the situation and not be a basic damsel in distress. I know the movies of the time did not have this type of heroine involved, but Audrey Hepburn was a huge name in the movies.

Still, the film worked more than it did not for me. I did enjoy the mystery (even though I had figured out the truth earlier). Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn are charming and entertaining with their bickering and their banter.