Charade is a 1963 American romantic screwball comedy[1] mystery film produced and directed by Stanley Donen,[5] written by Peter Stone and Marc Behm, and starring Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn.

The cast also features Walter Matthau, James Coburn, George Kennedy, Dominique Minot, Ned Glass and Jacques Marin.

[8] While on holiday in the French Alps, Regina "Reggie" Lampert, an American expatriate working as a simultaneous interpreter, tells her friend Sylvie that she is divorcing her husband Charles.

Reggie is given Charles's small travel bag containing a letter addressed to her, a ship ticket to Venezuela, four passports in multiple names and nationalities, and miscellaneous personal items.

During World War II, they, Charles, and Carson Dyle were assigned by the OSS to deliver $250,000 ($4.3 million in current dollars) in gold to the French Resistance, but instead stole it.

At the stamp-selling booths, Adam and Tex each realize that Charles bought some extremely valuable stamps and affixed them to the envelope in his travel bag.

Inside, Reggie discovers that Adam is Brian Cruikshank, a U.S. Treasury agent responsible for recovering stolen government property.

When screenwriters Peter Stone and Marc Behm submitted their script The Unsuspecting Wife around Hollywood, they were unable to sell it.

Stone then wrote the final shooting script, tailored to Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn, with Behm receiving story co-credit.

To address his concerns, the filmmakers agreed to add dialogue that has Grant's character comment on his age and Regina being portrayed as the pursuer.

The film was slated for a Christmas release, but Universal consented to a one-time advance screening at the Palace Theatre in Washington, D.C., which was a benefit to raise money to help low-income children stay in school.

The consensus reads: "A globetrotting caper that prizes its idiosyncratic pieces over the general puzzle, Charade is a delightful romp with Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn's sparkling chemistry at the center of some perfectly orchestrated mayhem.

[11] In a review published on January 6, 1964, in The New York Times, Bosley Crowther criticized the film for its "grisly touches" and "gruesome violence", but also praised it for its screenplay, with its "sudden twists, shocking gags, eccentric arrangements, and occasionally bright and brittle lines", as well as Donen's direction,[12] said to be halfway between the 1930s screwball comedy and North by Northwest by Alfred Hitchcock, which also starred Grant.

[12] In a Time Out review, the film was rated positively, with the assertion that it is a "mammoth audience teaser [...] Grant imparts his ineffable charm, Kennedy (with metal hand) provides comic brutality, while Hepburn is elegantly fraught".

[13] While reviewing the Blu-ray version of the film, Chris Cabin of Slant Magazine gave the film a three-and-a-half rating out of five, calling it a "high-end, kitschy whodunit"[14] and writing that it is a "riotous and chaotic take on the spy thriller, essentially, but it structurally resembles Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None", as well as describing it as "some sort of miraculous entertainment".

[20][21][22] Because Universal failed to properly display the copyright notice, the film entered into the public domain in the United States immediately upon its release.