Experiment in Terror (Blake Edwards, 1962

Lee Remick and Ross Martin in Experiment in Terror

Cast: Lee Remick, Glenn Ford, Ross Martin, Stefanie Powers, Roy Poole, Ned Glass, Anita Loo, Patricia Huston, Gilbert Green, Clifton James, Al Avalon, William Bryant, Dick Crockett, James Lanphier. Screenplay: Gordon Gordon, Mildred Gordon, based on their novel. Cinematography: Philip H. Lathrop. Art direction: Robert Peterson. Film editing: Patrick McCormack. Music: Henry Mancini.

Experiment in Terror is a moody but slackly paced thriller that was the first film directed by Blake Edwards after his smash hit Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961). He would follow it up with another dark but more successful movie, Days of Wine and Roses (1962), also starring Lee Remick, but he became best known for his lighter work, especially the series of Peter Sellers comedies that began with The Pink Panther in 1963. Experiment in Terror begins well, with Kelly Sherwood (Remick) arriving home from her job in a San Francisco bank only to be trapped in her garage by a man who threatens to kill her or her sister if she doesn't help him steal $100,000 from the bank. It's an intense, well-played scene, filmed with some harrowing long-take closeups of Remick and the shadowy figure of the man, who speaks with a kind of raspy wheeze. This is all she can really tell the FBI when she defies the man's order not to contact the police. The agent who takes her call, John Ripley (Glenn Ford), immediately sets in motion an attempt to identify and trap the man, whose identity becomes clearer to us only as it becomes clearer to the G-men. He's "Red" Lynch, played very creepily by Ross Martin, a character actor familiar from TV, on which he had a recurring role in a series created by Edwards, Mr. Lucky, in 1959 and 1960, and would later gain more fame as Artemus Gordon on the late '60s series The Wild Wild West. In the course of the film, Red terrorizes and murders another woman before finally getting shot down on the pitcher's mound after a Giants-Dodgers game at the late, unlamented Candlestick Park in San Francisco, one of several locations used to good effect in the film. Unfortunately, a lot of the burden of the film falls on Ford, who gives a bland, colorless performance as Ripley, and Edwards doesn't build suspense effectively. Some of the fault of the film may lie in its screenplay by the married writing couple known as The Gordons, adapting their own novel. What life the film has comes from Remick and Martin, from Philip H. Lathrop's views of San Francisco, and from a score by Edwards's frequent collaborator, Henry Mancini.

Charade (Stanley Donen, 1963)

Walter Matthau and Audrey Hepburn in Charade

Peter Joshua: Cary Grant
Regina Lampert: Audrey Hepburn
Hamilton Bartholomew: Walter Matthau
Tex Panthollow: James Coburn
Herman Scobie: George Kennedy
Leopold W. Gideon: Ned Glass
Sylvie Gaudet: Dominique Minot
Inspector Grandpierre; Jacques Marin

Director: Stanley Donen
Screenplay: Peter Stone, Marc Behm
Cinematography: Charles Lang
Art direction: Jean d'Eaubonne
Music: Henry Mancini

Charade was dismissed in its day as a pleasant but derivative entertainment, with touches of Hitchcock and a bit of James Bond in the mix, a film that would be nothing without its star teaming of Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant. It would also inspire other star-teamed romantic adventures with one-word titles, like Warren Beatty and Susannah York in Kaleidoscope (Jack Smight, 1966) and Shirley MacLaine and Michael Caine in Gambit (Ronald Neame, 1966), and Charade's director, Stanley Donen, would even repeat the formula with Gregory Peck and Sophia Loren in Arabesque (1966). But Charade has survived today as a classic when the others have mostly been forgotten. The star teaming has a lot to do with it, of course: Who doesn't want to see the two most charming people in the world together? Owing to Grant's genetic gift for looking much younger than he was, even the 25-year age difference between Grant and Hepburn only slightly tests the limits of what one can accept in a romantic pairing.* But the film also makes sly references to the difference in their ages, and wisely makes Hepburn's character into the more active one in initiating a relationship. Charade also has an exceptionally witty screenplay, with Peter Stone largely responsible for the final script from the story he and Mark Behm had been unable to sell to the studios until they turned it into a novel that was serialized in Redbook magazine. And it has a near-perfect supporting cast, including three actors at turning points in their careers: Walter Matthau, James Coburn, and George Kennedy. All of them would move out of television and into the movies after Charade, and all three would win Oscars for their work. And in Stanley Donen it had a director whose lightness of touch had been honed in MGM musicals, including the greatest of them all, Singin' in the Rain (1952).

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*Compare, for example, the similar age gap between James Stewart and Kim Novak in Bell, Book and Candle (Richard Quine, 1958). After that film, Stewart gave up playing romantic leads. Grant made much the same choice: Charade was his antepenultimate film: Although he would make one more, Father Goose (Ralph Nelson, 1964), that paired him with a younger actress, Leslie Caron, in his final film, Walk, Don't Run (Charles Walters, 1966), he was the older man who serves as matchmaker to young lovers -- a role that was based on the part played by Charles Coburn in The More the Merrier (George Stevens, 1943).

Days of Wine and Roses (Blake Edwards, 1962)

This melodrama about alcoholic codependency threatens to fall into didacticism, becoming a latter-day temperance lecture, but is rescued by the fine performances of Jack Lemmon and Lee Remick as Joe and Kirsten Clay. He's a ladder-climbing public relations man and she's the secretary to one of his clients; they fall in love, get married, have a child, and turn into self-destructive lushes. Eventually, with the help of Alcoholics Anonymous, and after a couple of harrowing relapses, he climbs out of it, but she refuses to admit that she has a problem that can't be solved with "will power." The film is unexpectedly bleak for one made with a solid Hollywood budget and two big stars -- both of whom received Oscar nominations -- directed by a man more famous for the Pink Panther movies and for his marriage to (and films with) Julie Andrews than for a serious problem drama. Fortunately, the film has a point to make: that alcoholism is a disease that manifests itself differently in each person who suffers from it. Joe, being a sociable type whose job has always involved drinking with clients, is the kind of person who benefits from the sense of community that AA provides. Kirsten, on the other hand, is a loner: an only child with a doting father (Charles Bickford), who when we first see her doesn't drink at all and is given to taking long walks alone on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf. It's Joe who introduces her to alcohol, which softens the rough edges of life -- without it, she says, everything looks "dirty." She feels comfortable denying her problem, even when it affects her marriage and her child so severely: At one point, she sets fire to their apartment in an alcoholic haze. They love each other, but she's unable to express her love for Joe unless he drinks with her. The screenplay by JP Miller is a reworking of his TV drama that appeared on Playhouse 90 in 1958, starring Cliff Robertson and Piper Laurie. There is a bit too much Hollywood gloss on the film, including an Oscar-winning title song by Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, but the thoughtful core of the narrative manages to surface because everyone resisted the tendency to paste an easy resolution of the Clays' problems on the end of the film.