Some call it “the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made.” Certainly, “Charade” has almost all the elements the Master of Suspense ever incorporated in his films, including mystery, romance, baffling plot twists, characters who aren’t who they seem to be, action, sudden jolts, gallows humor and, of course, suspense, all set against an exotic locale.

The 1963 thriller even has animated opening credits that strongly resemble the titles Saul Bass designed for “Psycho,” and a musical score that underlines the moments of tension and deadly peril with pulse-quickening effectiveness. And, hey, there’s even Cary Grant, veteran of four of Hitchcock’s best, in the lead role.

But that’s Maurice Binder’s (the early James Bond films) handiwork on the credits, and instead of Bernard Herrmann supplying the musical moodiness, we have the jazzier, more rhythmic and (at the time) more contemporary touches of Henry Mancini on the soundtrack.

And that’s Stanley Donen in the director’s chair, best known for such lighthearted musical fare as “Singin’ in the Rain” and “Seven Brides for Seven Brothers.” So Cary gets to throw in a little of the screwball shtick he’s so good at but that Hitch would never allow, such as taking a shower wearing suit and tie, or pulling a goofy face — although such stuff is kept to a minimum here.

Grant and Audrey Hepburn are a perfect match, despite a 25-year age difference that almost caused Grant to turn down the part (he insisted on a rewrite having Hepburn’s character romantically pursue his, instead of the reverse, which seemed to him more dignified), and Peter Stone’s screenplay provides them with loads of witty and sophisticated repartee.

Hepburn is Reggie, a frustrated wife who’s about to divorce her mysterious husband when he turns up murdered, and she finds herself stalked all over Paris by three very shady characters (James Coburn, George Kennedy and Ned Glass) who think she’s in possession of money her late husband stole from them. Slovenly CIA agent Hamilton Bartholomew (Walter Matthau at his slouching, deadpan best) also believes she’s in possession of the loot, even if she doesn’t know it. And Grant is the suave, charming stranger whose motives for coming to her aid are unclear and increasingly suspect. Still, Reggie is hopelessly smitten with him. The story keeps you guessing right up to the very last scene. Delicious.

The Grant-Hepburn chemistry was so perfect it seemed they’d been working together for years, although this was their only teaming, and the film is still great fun to watch nearly 50 years later, especially for Hitchcock fans — even though Hitch had nothing to do with it, except maybe by way of influence.

Extras include two short “100 Years of Universal” featurettes: “The Carl Laemmle Years” and “The Lew Wasserman Years.”

— Gene Triplett

Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess

Loads of romantic melodramas in cinema have revolved around Feb. 14th, St. Valentine’s Day, but true to the appealingly quirky nature of its oddly matched young lovers, “One Day” takes its erratic romantic cues from July 15th, St. Swithin’s Day.

That’s the day which holds, according to British folklore, that if it rains it will then rain for the next 40 days; if the sun shines that day the weather will be beautiful for 40 days.

It’s a fitting metaphor for author David Nicholls’ offbeat romantic novel – and the screen adaptation he also penned – about two young people whose lives are tracked on that date over two decades. They are working class Yorkshire girl Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and upper-crust playboy Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess of “Across the Universe”), who meet on college graduation day, July 15th, and form a platonic-romantic bond that will profoundly inform the next 20 years of their lives.

After Emma and Dex make an awkward, tipsy attempt at a one-night stand, they tentatively agree to remain friends, even though their backgrounds and aspirations couldn’t be more different.

Emma is an earnest lass from the provinces who yearns to do good work and make a difference in the world. As played by Hathaway in stringy hair, boho outfits and owlish, Harry Potter eyeglasses, she’s a plucky, sardonic and very smart Eliza Doolittle figure who is certain to transform from ugly duckling to radiant swan in due time.

Dexter, played by the likable Sturgess with a dash of roguish, rich-boy petulance and a saving dollop of good-hearted warmth, is a son of privilege who views the world as his playground and seems bound to break the hearts of his well-to-do parents – disapproving dad Steven (Ken Stott) and loving but gravely ill mum Alison (Patricia Clarkson).

As Emma takes a dead-end job waitressing at a Mexican restaurant and longs to become a teacher, and maybe even a writer, she and Dex dance around the obvious – that she fancies him but he’s too callow to reciprocate. As Dex rises to dubious fame as the obnoxious host of a late-night TV party show and sinks into an abyss of sex, drugs and rock ‘‘n’ roll, he and Emma remain friends – she perhaps the only sane and stable influence in his wastrel life.

The narrative checks in on the two each July 15th (with clever graphics cues) as their relationship evolves through stages of disgust and acceptance, estrangement and bonding, denial and inevitable love. The evolution of the relationship is suggestive of Stanley Donen’s 1967 “Two for the Road” which followed the ups and downs of Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney’s rocky love affair.

Former Dogma 95 director Lone Scherfig (“Italian for Beginners,” “An Education”) employs jaunty cultural cues to keep things visually interesting. But Nicholls’ script points up the daunting problems of adapting a full-bodied, era-spanning novel into a primarily visual narrative. The leaps in time often feel like lurches, important incidents and key elements of character development fall to the cutting-room floor and the story ends up feeling elliptical.

Fans of the novel can fill in the blanks themselves, but those who haven’t absorbed the full measure of Emma and Dex’s journey on page might well sense the film as a sketchy postcard album of a love story in which too much happens off screen.

Even so, Hathaway and Sturgess are such deft and appealing performers, and they stir up such lovely, compelling chemistry that on the “One Day” when the story turns truly, stunningly heartbreaking, only the most literal-minded and hard-hearted cynics will fail to be touched.

- Dennis King

“One Day”

PG-13
1:48
3 stars
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess, Ken Stott, Patricia Clarkson
(Sexual content, partial nudity, language, some violence and substance abuse)

BY GENE TRIPLETT

Why spend half of your Valentine’s evening waiting for a table and then standing in a boxoffice line when you can pitch a couple of  TV trays in the living room and have your dinner-and-a-movie date in the comfort and privacy of your own love shack?  Simply grab some takeout, fire up some candles, draw the shades and pop open your favorite beverage.

See? You’re free to play slap and tickle all you want, talk back to the screen, whatever. And there’s that handy “pause” button if you’re suddenly inspired to indulge in some other activity.

So here, in no particular order, are a few suggestions for your Valentine’s viewing, designed to enhance your romance:

“You’ve Got Mail” (1998), Nora Ephron’s computer-age version of “The Shop Around the Corner,” stars Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan as e-mail pen pals who become infatuated with one another through their correspondence, not realizing they already know and dislike each other as competing book shop owners. A real charmer, and the new Blu-ray edition includes a bonus — the original 1940 classic starring James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan.

Oklahoma’s own Blake Edwards created one of the greatest midlife crisis movies of them all with “10” (1979), showcasing the comedic talents of Dudley Moore and at the same time elevating him to leading-man status in the role of a successful songwriter who jeopardizes his long-standing relationship with a beautiful singing star (Julie Andrews, aka Mrs. Edwards) when he becomes obsessed with a sexy young blond newlywed (Bo Derek) who blithely encourages his advances.

The “bells and the banjos ring” between Natalie Wood and Steve McQueen in “Love With the Proper Stranger” (1963), but only after a really rocky start. The two meet at a wild New York City party, tumble into a drunken one-night stand, then face the consequences of an unwanted pregnancy in the cold light of day. Great supporting cast includes Edie Adams, Herschel Bernardi and Tom Bosley. Directed by Robert Mulligan (“To Kill a Mockingbird”), this one is pretty mature, sharp and bold for its day.

Ever seen that smoldering scene between Bette Davis and Paul Henreid, in which they stand there with all their clothes on in misty black and white shadow, and he places two cigarettes betweem his lips, lights them both and hands one to her as they gaze desirously at one another? That’s from “Now, Voyager” (1942), about a seemingly hopeless spinster (Davis) who’s brought around by her shrink (Claude Rains) and blossoms when she meets the suave (but married) Henreid. Directed by Irving Rapper (“Rhapsody in Blue”), this forbidden-love melodrama made movie smoking sexy, a trend later perfected by Bogie and Bacall.

In “Heaven Knows, Mr. Allison” (1957), tough Marine lifer Robert Mitchum and wise but delicate nun Deborah Kerr find themselves in a potential Adam-and-Eve situation on a Pacific island taken over by Japanese troops during World War II. They have to hide and survive together in a small, primitive world teeming with deadly enemies. One of the great bittersweet war love stories, an uplifting heartbreaker directed with great care by John Huston.

“Breakfast at Tiffany’s” (1961), another Blake Edwards-directed comedy-drama, based on a Truman Capote story with a wonderful score by Henry Mancini that includes the classic “Moon River,” stars Audrey Hepburn as a Manhattan party girl and George Peppard as a sardonic young writer who meet, fall in love and find a chance to save each other from their self-demeaning lifestyles. Hepburn and Peppard boil up the perfect chemistry, with a supporting cast that includes Buddy Ebsen (TV’s Jed Clampett) in a heart-melting turn as Hepburn’s deserted country-bumpkin husband.

In “The Bridges of Madison County” (1995), flinty-eyed Clint Eastwood shows his sentimental side as director and star, turning a second-rate romance novel by Robert James Waller into a film of quiet yet powerful beauty about two people — a worldly photographer and a neglected farmer’s wife (Meryl Streep) — who meet in the visually mesmerizing Iowa countryside, fall deeply in love, then face the harsh realities of their situation after four days of illicit romantic bliss. No blood spilled here, just plenty of tears.

The silly but sweet “There’s Something About Mary” (1998) is an uproariously funny tale of a hopeless nerd (Ben Stiller) who almost makes it to the prom with the queen of everyone’s dreams (Cameron Diaz), only to lose his chance in a disastrous bathroom mishap. He finds a second chance years later, although there are several sleazy adversaries (Matt Dillon, Chris Elliott) working against him. Lots of lowbrow jokes and deliberate politically incorrect humor, but there’s a warm heart at its center. It was co-written and directed by Bobby and Peter Farrelly (“Dumb & Dumber,” “Me, Myself & Irene”).

“Somewhere in Time” (1980) is an old-fashioned romantic fantasy in the tradition of “Laura” and “Portrait of Jennie” about a disillusioned modern-day playwright (Christopher Reeve) who falls in love with a painting of a 19th-century actress (Jane Seymour) and finds a way to overcome the barrier of time to meet and court her. Richard Matheson, best known for penning some of the classic ’60s “Twilight Zone” episodes as well as the more recent feature “What Dreams May Come,” sends a major candygram to the heart. Shot against the beautiful green backdrop of Mackinac Island by director Jeannot Szwarc (“Enigma,” “Jaws 2”), it features a memorable love theme by John Barry, played by Roger Williams.

Then there’s the king of the torch-carriers, Humphrey Bogart’s cynical Rick, who gets one last shot at holding the woman he thought he’d lost (Ingrid Bergman at her most radiant), only to make the ultimate lover’s sacrifice for conscience and the wartime cause in “Casablanca” (1942). Play it again, Sam.

Finally, there’s “Annie Hall” (1977), Woody Allen’s hilarious examination of why fools like all of us fall in and out of love. It’s one of the smartest and most touching romantic comedies ever made, mainly because it’s a painfully honest semi-autobiographical account of his affair with co-star Diane Keaton. He sums it all up in the end when he tells an old joke about a guy who tells a psychiatrist, “Doc, my brother’s crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.” And the doc says, “Well, why don’t you turn him in?” And the guy says, “I would, but I need the eggs.”

“Well, I guess that’s pretty much how I feel about relationships,” Woody concludes. “You know, they’re totally irrational and crazy and absurd, but I guess we keep goin’ through it because, uh, most of us need the eggs.”
Happy egg hunting, lovers.

It was a film that forever altered the nation’s collective sense of fashion, film and sexual mores – not to mention the brittle, squeaky clean image of actress Audrey Hepburn. “Breakfast at Tiffany’s,” drawn from Truman Capote’s translucent novella that most Hollywood producers deemed “unadaptable,” became a film that defined a profound sea change in Hollywood and in America at the dawning of the 1960s.

Just how this wispy tale of a spirited Manhattan good-time girl came to be such a potent cinematic emblem of glamour, sexual politics and the new morality is told in Sam Wasson’s delightful book, “Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.” (HarperStudio, $19.99), a pithy behind-the-scenes look at the messy making of an era-defining classic.

Wasson, who previously surveyed the works of Tulsa-born director Blake Edwards in the witty, wide-ranging “A Splurch on the Kisser,” sharply pulls his focus here to chronicle Edwards’ trials and tribulations in bringing Capote’s light-as-a-bubble story to the screen. The challenge was considerable: the book lacked a second act and forceful dramatic motivations, it featured a nameless gay protagonist and an unhappy ending. Not exactly the stuff of feel-good Hollywood fantasy.

One early producer’s coverage report cited by Wasson predicted dim prospects for the book’s adaptation to the screen. “In any event this is more of a character sketch than a story,” the reader noted. “NOT RECOMMENDED.”

Wasson lays out the disagreements, stumbling blocks, misjudgments, on-set feuds and near disasters in the making of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” with a novelist’s eye for telling detail and narrative tension and a refreshing irreverence. In fact, the story reads like gripping fiction yet falls neatly into the factual confines of the “nonfiction novel” that Capote so brazenly claimed to invent with “In Cold Blood.”

“Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.” is packed with juicy tidbits that will surprise even avid film buffs. For instance:

- Capote was against casting Hepburn – who was defined in the American mind by wholesome roles in “Roman Holiday” and “Sabrina” – as Holly Golightly and instead lobbied vigorously for Marilyn Monroe.

- Hepburn herself was reluctant to take a role that played so starkly against her lily-white screen image. Yet, as Wasson lays out the story, Hepburn emerges as a smart, thoroughly modern woman, more cunning and complex than her ingénue image would imply.

- Producers resisted having Henry Mancini contribute a song for the film, and Johnny Mercer’s original lyric for the eventual signature tune was “Blue River.” One unimpressed Paramount exec famously remarked on “Moon River” that “the song should go.”

- Two endings for the film were shot – one romantic, the other melancholy.

- George Peppard, as Holly’s heterosexual soulmate Paul Varjak, was widely disliked on the set and almost got into a fistfight with Edwards.

- The guest list for the post-premiere party was a hodge-podge of who’s whos and has-beens, including Dennis Hopper, Jane Mansfield, Buster Keaton and Charles Laughton.

- Capote himself was dismissive of the finished film, archly characterizing it as “a mawkish valentine to New York City.”

All this and more is fit into Wasson’s slim volume, as trim and neatly tailored as Givenchy’s little black dress. “Fifth Avenue, 5 A.M.” is sparkling storytelling, as bubbly and bracing as the film it chronicles and also as filled with deep and timeless cultural resonance.

- Dennis King

That Tom Cruise’s new big-boom summer action vehicle is a chop-shop contraption cobbled together from parts, premises and personalities of other movies is as obvious as, well, “Knight and Day.”

Summer hype aside, when producers of this derivative blockbuster boast that their movie springs from an original spec script – not one based on a comic book franchise or recycled from an old TV series or retrofitted from a previous summer juggernaut – you might naively expect some smidgeon of originality.

But “Knight and Day,” scripted by first-timer Patrick O’Neill and co-written and directed by jack-of-all-trades James Mangold (“Girl, Interrupted,” “Walk the Line”), seems to exist solely to give Cruise a summer project in which to flash his toothy grin, trot out his frat-boy swagger and romp around cutely with Cameron Diaz. It is a cut-and-paste enterprise in which originality doesn’t figure into the equation.

While the producers allow that they were aiming for a sophisticated mixture of action, intrigue and worldly romantic comedy of the “Charade” kind, they seem to have modeled their movie on much more than just the 1963 Audrey Hepburn-Cary Grant romp.

The story features Cruise as Roy Miller, a lethal, on-the-run spy, and Diaz as June Havens, an ordinary gal with a penchant for restoring vintage street rods. It plays around with a classic Hitchcock McGuffin – in this case a revolutionary perpetual energy battery capable of powering a nuclear submarine or a small city or a rabid army of Energizer bunnies.

Naturally, a sinister Spanish arms dealer (smug Jordi Molla) and a rogue FBI agent (a very bland Peter Sarsgaard) seek to obtain it for nefarious purposes. So Miller and June are thrown together in a globe-hopping adventure to safeguard the battery and its youthful inventor, bring the bad guys to justice, and, of course, fall in love.

More than “Charade,” “Knight and Day” seems a stylistic cousin to the Michael Douglas-Kathleen Turner gambol, “Romancing the Stone,” in which a naïve damsel is thrown together with a suave man of the world, whose motives are vaguely sinister, and sets off on a hair-raising, bullet-riddled, chase-filled duel with international villains.

There are also touches of “The Jewel of the Nile,” with a gifted innocent – in this case nerdy teenage physics prodigy Simon Fleck (Paul Dano) – who possesses a world-altering secret.

And there are in Cruise’s swift, muscular performance obvious flashes of Robert Ludlum’s hyper-kinetic Jason Bourne, a deep-cover operative with lightning quick, death-dealing skills whose All-American past has been erased by government spooks. (Miller’s quaint parents, thinking he died in combat, keep his Eagle Scout picture over their homey hearth.)

On top of all that, the frantic pacing, action mechanics and elaborate stunt sequences seem drawn straight from the “Mission: Impossible” playbook, with breakneck car chases, a revving motorcycle pursuit, and even a scene in which Cruise plays limbo with the hurtling steel hulk of a flying car.

“Knight and Day” is dumb summer fun, even though most of the fun is in counting all the other movies it mimics.

– Dennis King

MOVIE REVIEW

“Knight and Day”

PG-13

1:50

 2 stars

Starring: Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, Peter Sarsgaard, Jordi Molla.

(Sequences of action violence throughout, and brief strong language)

Movies are all about moving images, but advertising graphics in the form of posters and glossy stills offer an artful subset to the glamour side of films that is well worth celebrating.

And that’s just what takes place in a lovely new coffee-table book titled “Starstruck: Vintage Movie Posters From Classic Hollywood” (Abbeville Press), a celebration of graphic arts by noted film historian and collector Ira M. Resnick. The glossy tome hits bookstore shelves on Feb. 9.

Boasting vivid color reproductions of 250 posters and 40 stills from Hollywood’s Golden Age (1912-1962), the book offers not just stunning artwork but also a valuable insider’s perspective on cinema history beginning in the silent era and running up to the release of “Breakfast at Tiffany’s.”

Resnick, founder of the Motion Picture Arts Gallery in Rutherford, N.J., the first gallery devoted exclusively to the art of the movies, holds a rare personal collection of 2,000 posters and more than 1,500 stills, many rarely seen outside pricy collectors’ circles.            He’s a professional photographer and serves as a trustee of the Film Society of Lincoln Center and the International Center for Photography.

Along with the artwork, Resnick offers insights and anecdotes about his collecting history and his encounters with Hollywood elite. Arranging the posters to highlight the careers of such stars as Lillian Gish, the Marx Brothers, Marilyn Monroe, John Barrymore and Audrey Hepburn, Resnick neatly manages to chart evolutionary courses in several stars’ careers. The book also provides an insightful forward by director Martin Scorsese.

Bonus materials in the book include a glossary of terms and poster sizes, helpful tips for collectors and a list of Resnick’s 50 favorites one-sheets.

The oversized book in hardcover is set to retail for $65.

– Dennis King