Just perfect...

From my favorite movies..

Excellent, Without a doubt!!

A brilliant film that helped define a genre

One of the greatest openings of any movie. Sophisticated humour, score, stars. Grant and Hepburn perfect. Watch out for Grant's pass-the-orange and clothed-shower routines. Despite its deceptions, plot is probably a little thin for today's audience. Kudos for any thriller that mixes humour and adventure so well (as the best of James Bond does)

After the wonderful fun and colourful opening credits we have to wait until the final quarter of an hour for the film to equal it. For the most part this is a rather drawn out and ridiculous and unfunny caper with a few amusing moments. Cary Grant is as good as he usually is at this period of the sixties (only okay) and Audrey Hepburn, who many love and I struggle with as much as she does her parts. Here she about half Grant's age and is presumably asked to play it like a silly schoolgirl. Meanwhile she is asked to display all this haute couture stuff and whoever thought it was a good idea to display clothes on that body must be having a laugh. Sad and cringe making at times there are just enough moments, especially those with Walter Matthau to keep this going until the delirious last section. Why, oh why couldn't we have had more of this? Instead of a motley collection of gents in hotel rooms we could have been out in the sunny streets of Paris. There is colour, there is suspense, there is even romance as we race and chase in full on colour, including a scene at the stamp fair and a fantastic sequence down in the glistening metro passage ways and on the trains. A glorious ending to a very average film.

With a whopping 8.0 rating, I expected it to be a fun 60's ride similar perhaps to "Penelope" or "Pink Panther". Turns out to be nothing like these. It's slow and talky. The mystery is barely there, the romance is unbelievable and the comedy and thriller bits get tired quickly because of poor script and heavy-handed direction. Rather than charming and feminine female character I always turn to older movies for, Hepburn is cold and hysterical. No help comes from unmotivated Grant, and Matthau, Coburn and Kennedy are all underused. The most dumbfounding disappointment though is the location: despite being shot in Paris, the movie stays mostly inside seedy hotel rooms and offices, and even when the action takes us outside, we're treated to process shots and fake backgrounds. This gives the film the hopeless, depressing feel of a Disney sitcom, where you know nothing exciting is going to happen as the plot won't escape the constrains of the 5 rooms it's trapped within.Pros: Henry Mancini score, some witty dialogue in the first actCons: Boring, contrived, claustrophobic

Audrey, Audrey--can't get (by now ancient) Cary to return her advances. He's obviously too embarrassed to get into a convo with her about the sexual inadequacies of elderly men. Cary looks like he's just doing a read through with the script around a table. He's not committed. He's relying on his humor to help him survive the filming. He's so tired looking--in fact, for most of the film he has a wan, grey pallor to his skin. Poor Audrey is flitting between murderers after her lost treasure while the audience waits for something to happen. The best actor is the little kid ("I berrcccchhhied it in zee gahden!"). Kennedy's fake hook hangs way too long for his body and he is prone to overacting. I like Coburn's cords. Between Audrey's breath (she was a chain smoker) and Grant's Polident odor, the kissing is rather bland and I'd say must've been tasteless. It's difficult to deep kiss a person with dentures. The scenery is great though. Aaaaaah, Paree!