While Cary Grant passed on this follow-up to CHARADE/’63, its director Stanley Donen took it on, bringing back Peter Stone (writing as Pierre Marton) for a script polish to bring out the same stylish Hitchcock-Lite suspense he’d given the earlier film. But a bit of wordplay can’t save the mishmash storyline that has Egyptologist Prof. Gregory Peck (in the Cary Grant spot) meeting cute with Sophia Loren’s woman of mystery to decipher a mini-scroll of hieroglyphs and stop an international assassination plot. Pleasant enough, when it’s not being twee & tedious, the fun’s forced in this one. Yet what a ravishing thing simply to look at with Donen and cinematographer Christopher Challis (in the first of three collaborations) dazzling the eye with a spit-shine polish, reflective surfaces and cantered angles, as they try to fill in narrative chasms with empty bravura style. A lost cause, if not without visual appeal, the true payoff came when they found worthy use for these tricks on their next film, the masterful Hollywood meets New Wave marital dramedy TWO FOR THE ROAD/’67.
DOUBLE-BILL: Hollywood vet Charles Lang shot CHARADE, beautifully, too, making for a fascinating comparison with Challis’s work for Donen.
ATTENTION MUST BE PAID: *Peck knew very well he was no Cary Grant at this sort of thing. Telling Donen when he couldn’t find the laugh in a line, ‘Well, there’s only one Cary Grant!’
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