Charade 4K 1963 Ultra HD 2160p

The charming American Reggie Lambert, having filed for divorce, heads to a resort, where she meets an attractive stranger named Peter Joshua. Upon her return to Paris, she is met with terrible news: her husband has been killed under mysterious circumstances, and all the family’s savings have been withdrawn from their bank account and have vanished without a trace. And now, her recent acquaintance reappears in her life for the second time under a different name, followed by a whole crowd of her late husband’s “comrades-in-arms,” eager to get their hands on the hefty sum her husband stole during World War II. All of her pursuers are convinced that she must surely know the whereabouts of the ill-fated inheritance. As the hunters of this “war trophy” begin to die off one by one, it becomes increasingly difficult for Regina to figure out whom she can trust.

User Review

So, a wealthy Frenchwoman returns home from a ski resort and discovers that some changes have taken place in her absence. Namely: someone killed her husband and threw him off a speeding train; all her property has been sold; there’s no money left; all that remains is a bag with some odds and ends. And then some rough-and-tumble types start harassing the woman, demanding a quarter of a million dollars.

The beginning, where we’re brought up to speed on the situation at rather great length, is quite tedious. But soon the film’s atmosphere begins to take hold. The key theme: emptiness. The heroine enters an empty room and opens the closets, which are completely empty. Then she attends a memorial service in a completely empty church.

But soon the emptiness disappears from the film, while the feeling remains. A strange plot unfolds before us, and an equally strange and terrifying world emerges—a world where no one can be trusted. Not a single word. Every mystery solved is followed by a new one. Just when it seems the picture has cleared up, it plunges back into darkness.

Toward the end, the film is filled to the brim with people (the subway), but even there, there is no salvation. And then—boom!—the emptiness with which it all began reappears. An empty colonnade. An empty theater. By the way, the film’s ending is quite unexpected—I, at least, didn’t see it coming.

As for the actors. Audrey Hepburn is absolutely in her element. She looks as if she were made for a thriller. She’s equally natural in every situation: as a weary lady at a resort, in the somewhat gloomy Freudian scene where she hands over the orange, and in the comical episode of showering in a jacket (which, as I understand it, is where Ryazanov borrowed this scene from).

Cary Grant, on the other hand, is completely off the mark—he inspires neither trust nor sympathy. That’s why the entire melodramatic subplot looks so unnatural.

The villains are simply magnificent—they’re both sinister and comical at the same time. The same can be said of the police inspector.

Info Video

Codec: HEVC / H.265 (94.0 Mb/s)
Resolution: Native 4K (2160p)
Aspect ratio: 1.85:1
Original aspect ratio: 1.85:1

Info Audio

#English: FLAC 1.0 (Unrestored)
#English: FLAC 1.0 (Restored)
#English: FLAC 1.0 (Commentary by director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone (1999))
#English: FLAC 1.0 (Commentary by film historian Ken Barnes, with archival excerpts from Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer (2001))

Info Subtitles

English SDH (PGS), Chinese (Simplified) (PGS), Chinese (Traditional) (PGS), Czech, Danish, Dutch, Estonian, Finnish, French (PGS), German (PGS), Greek, Hindi, Hungarian, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean (PGS), Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese (Brazilian), Portuguese (European), Romanian, Russian, Spanish (Latin American), Spanish (Castilian), Swedish, Thai, Turkish.