By Saul Austerlitz

Charade

Directed by Stanley Donen

Criterion

To see the spectacle of Hollywood in its last paroxysm of dipping, juking and twisting toward and away from its favorite subject—sex—see Stanley Donen's classy, somewhat ridiculous spy thriller-romance-sex comedy of 1963, Charade. Made a few short years before the floodgates of sexual explicitness were thrown wide open with films like Midnight Cowboy and Bonnie and Clyde, Charade sticks with the sexual allusiveness demanded by the strictures of the Hays Code. By the early 1960s, though, the code's power was beginning to wane, and filmmakers managed to get away with a greater degree of sexuality onscreen.

Case in point: a scene in Charade where Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn are in a Paris nightclub, playing a game that requires the participants to pass an orange from person to person without the use of hands. Grant is partnered with a heavy older woman, whom he is practically required to maul, facially exploring every twist and turn of her ample body in an effort to prevent the orange's touching ground. Once this is accomplished, Grant and Hepburn engage in a more sultry, sensual dance, a mock foreplay for their budding romance. This inspired silliness, courtesy of Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone, was the closest Hollywood got at the time to outright fucking onscreen.

Unable to commit itself entirely to a fully adult understanding of sex, Charade also contains Hepburn's horror at the notion of Grant's showering with the door open (he ends up showering with his suit on, facilitating a clever joke about its being drip-dry). Grant is lit like a Greek god throughout, perfectly tanned, coiffed, shaved and always dressed to the nines. Coming toward the end of his remarkable career, Grant is also adept here at conveying his being a bit worn-down, exhausted by a life of suave, dapper charm.

The plot is irrelevant, a whirlwind of CIA spooks, endless double-crosses and reversals, and laughably stereotypical criminals. Donen, always first and foremost a stylist, shows his cards with the pop-art-inspired credit sequence, all swirls, squiggles and bright, blocky pop colors. The movie doesn't even bother to build up the spy-film ambience it so relentlessly deflates. Instead, there's Hepburn in one of her most appealing roles as Regina Lampert, the newly hatched widow determined to get to the bottom of her husband's mysterious life and death, and into the pants of the new man of mystery in her life (Grant). When she purrs to him, "You know what's wrong with you?" then waits for his dutiful "What?" and coos "nothing," it is a reminder that while there is a whole lot more sex in the movies these days, there is also a whole lot less sensuality, which is a shame.

Saul Austerlitz

The Marx Brothers Collection

A Night at the opera, a day at the races, a night in casablanca, room service, at the circus, go west, the big store

Warner Home Video

t's bizarre to think of the Marx Brothers as anything less than monumental. They were vaudeville comedians whose family-built shtick was laced with the Algonquin witticisms and twisted linguistics of George S. Kaufman, Morrie Ryskind and Bert Kalmar; slovenly dressed, fast-talking heels (except for a honking, squeaking Harpo) whose ribald anarchy, authoritarian dismissiveness and high-toned double-speak would aid Hollywood in creating the screwball comedy.

What made the Marx Brothers and their ethnically wack caricatures—Chico's as a leering Italian with tight suits and pointy hats, Groucho's as a soliloquizing wiseass Jew, with grease-paint mustache and tattered tails—most effective throughout their televised revolution, at first, was that they were dangerous.

The haste of berating phrases and anxious motion, even at its slowest pace, guided you through the misanthropic eccentricity and anti-establishmentarian babble of their first five films—all made for Paramount. That last note is important. After Paramount, the wind left their sails. Perhaps the sight of a man with a fake mustache quoting from Eugene O'Neill's Strange Interlude or the prickly puppet regimes rife throughout their satirical comedies finally became unsettling to the mass public. So, it was "Hello, I Must be Going." Not really. Instead the dynasty that was MGM under wunderkind Irving Thalberg resuscitated the flagging careers of the vaudevillian duo by imbuing their anarchy with gentler, kindler musical bits (not of their own devising, as their previous comedies benefited greatly by songs like "Whatever It Is, I'm Against It") and easy-to-follow segues and young-love subplots of which Groucho, Chico and Harpo could approve rather than gangbang through.

The result of MGM's meddling (and Warner's and United Artists') is the comedies before you. The brilliant but tamed A Night at the Opera and A Day at the Races are blasts from veterans nearing their sunset—films still full of fire and wicked dialogue and the deliriously choreographed sight gags of yore. After that, the quality and the Marx's twisted sense of mayhem and rhythm was left to languish. Though the characters they created still shined throughout the occasionally barbed quips, it's as if the Rolling Stones decided to tour one last bad time, only using Goats Head Soup as a template.

Still, what the latter DVDs lack in spritzy comedy, they make up for in bawdy extras, like interviews with Groucho, a slew of documentaries and valuable shorts that prove that even as lions in winter, the Brothers could bite your head off.

A.D. Amorosi

The Reagans

Directed by Robert Allan Ackerman

Lions Gate

he liberal spam service MoveOn.org recently sent out an email concerning the new global warming disaster flick, The Day After Tomorrow. The group called it "the movie the White House doesn't want you to see." A week later, Lions Gate released a DVD of The Reagans, billing it as "the film they didn't want you to see."

You remember: CBS pulled it. Showtime ran it. Now it's available to those without premium cable. While lacking The Day After Tomorrow's cgi mojo, The Reagans will prove infinitely more satisfying for a select crowd: history junkies who groove on shot-in-Montreal, lo-fi, made-for-tv epics. For this audience, The Reagans will cackle with energy. Ron and Nancy share scenes with Joan Didion, Elie Wiesel and Barry Goldwater. The sets are gloriously chintzy—The Reagans is to the West Wing's White House what Plan 9 from Outer Space is to The Matrix—and the costumes are hilarious, especially Nancy's puke-colored 80s power suits. While the presentation may be objectionable to those who consider Reagan a deity, the facts presented are well-sourced. In the commentary, the producers and directors cite Nancy, Ron and Patti's official biographies.

So, who are "they"? And why didn't "they" want you to see this?

Let's examine the suspects. Ronnie was in no state to object to anything. In any case, James Brolin plays him as a charming, well-meaning dunderhead. The kids? Ron Jr. is too mellow to comment, Maureen's dead and Michael doesn't count—he was adopted. Patti Davis has already commented in Time, where she largely complained about one scene that depicts her as a young girl whacked out on tranquilizers stolen from her mother. (In the Time article, Patti emphasizes that while she stole tranquilizers, she never ingested them. Rather, she traded them for amphetamines.)

The current administration? If The Reagans included a scene where Donald Rumsfeld met with Saddam Hussein, or showed Dick Cheney in a similarly bad light, official opposition would make sense. But the gang is absent, as is George Sr., whose only mention comes when Nancy refuses to let him see the president after John Hinckley fails to impress Jodie Foster.

The lone remaining suspect is Nancy. Portrayed as a shrill Lady Macbeth, a horrible mother, a vicious politician and a total hypocrite, The Reagans' Nancy steals and runs the show. Even though she lacks the real Nancy's Charlie Brown-proportioned head and chemically abetted perma-smile, Judy Davis' let-them-eat-cake and just-say-no poses are utterly convincing and detestable. So it must have been that mean old Nancy after all. Not only did I watch The Reagans, but I'm going to see The Day After Tomorrow, too—and not at matinee prices. That'll show her.

Adam Bulger