CHARADES

CHARADE (1963)
dir: Stanley Donen

CHARADES
MAD #88, July 1964
w: Larry Siegel
a: Mort Drucker

A dead body is thrown off a train. We don't know why.

Peter Joshua (Cary Grant) and Reggie Lambert (Audrey Hepburn) meet. Peter is just divorced, and Reggie is just about to be (and both are twenty-five years apart in age) and meet at a ski resort. (Missing from the parody are her friend and her son)

Reggie arrives back home and finds her apartment bare. Peter is there and notices it too. There is a funeral for her husband, which is sparsely attended, and three criminals, Leopold Gideon (Ned Glass), Herman Scobie (George Kennedy), and Tex Panthollow (James Coburn) barge in and attack his body to make sure it's really dead.

She goes to the embassy and meets the ambassador (Walter Matthau) who tells her the criminals and her husband stole $250,000 from the government and they want it back. That night at a party, everyone is playing a game involving passing an orange from person to person without using their hands.

The next person on line after Reggie happens to be Gideon, who demands to know where the money is. She runs to a phone booth to call the embassy and encounters Tex, also asking for the money. He threatens her by lighting matches and throwing them at her. When she escapes to her hotel room, Scobie is there asking for the money. Peter shows up and beats him, then goes out the fire escape and into the room of the crooks. It turns out he's one of them. His real name is Alexander Dyle. He tells them he needed to gain her confidence and he'll be the one to get the money. Then he tells her he's actually gaining their confidence and he's really her husband's brother. His protecting her turns to flirting. He takes a shower in her room.

The hunt for the money continues, Scobie and Gideon are found murdered (Tex is only murdered in the parody). The ambassador tells Reggie there is no Alexander. She confronts him, he tells her he's really Adam Canfield, professional thief. Despite repeatedly changing identities and her not knowing what side he's really on, she finds herself falling for him.

(Missing: While the thieves are all shadowing each other there is a stamp fair in the park and they come to the same realization. The money was a valuable set of stamps on a letter all along. It's now gone because Reggie gave them to her son and he traded them with a dealer at the fair. She's also in the park at the market and comes to the same realization, rushes to find her son, and finds the dealer, who happily returns them knowing they couldn't have belonged to him.)



(Reggie finds Tex dead with the name “Dyle” scrawled out. Convinced 'Adam' is the murderer, she calls the ambassador and has him come to the subway station. Matthau's character is not really the ambassador after all, he was the fourth person and wanted to claim all the money for himself. Reggie returns the stamps to the embassy to find the ambassador was always Peter/Adam/Alex/Joshua and he proposes marriage.)
MAD parodies the constant identity-switching of all the characters, and revealing the similarities between this movie and the work of Alfred Hitchcock.