It's really incredible that I have never used a quote from this movie when I still did the quotes of the week because it is one of my all time favorites.
Cary Grant? Audrey Hepburn? Excitement, mystery, love, and wit? I'm in, thank you very much.
I'm of course talking about Charade from 1963, and if you have never seen that movie, but still want to, you should stop reading or looking. Spoiler alert!
In short, Audrey Hepburn - Reggie - discovers that her husband, whom she has decided to divorce because it's always secrecy and lies with him, is not only dead, but has also left her nothing but an empty flat and a few things in a small bag.
He also happens to have been a thief who stole from his accomplices, and now those are chasing after her because they are convinced that she has the stolen money or at least knows where it is. Throw in a fake agent and Cary Grant as the suspicious helper, whom she can never be sure about although she has fallen in love with him, put them all in 1960s Paris, and you're in for a wild ride - "the best Hitchcock movie that Hitchcock never made".
For a "movie showcase" in one of my Facebook sales groups, we were supposed to design pieces inspired by movies, and Charade was the second one to pop into my mind (the first one was Jaws, and maybe I'll do another post about what I made based on that).
All I could think was "stamps" and "Eiffel Tower", and without planning exactly how I wanted to put those two together, I got myself some Eiffel Tower charms and pulled out the family's old stamp collection.
You see, Reggie's husband used the gold to buy three very rare and valuable stamps which are on an envelope for everyone to see, but it takes them the whole movie through to realize it.
By then, Reggie has given the stamps to her friend's little son who is a collector (just like my siblings and I used to be as kids), and he has traded them with a stamp dealer. It's one of my favorite scenes of the movie how they go to the shop and the dealer describes each stamp lovingly before he gives them back saying that he had already waited for them because he knew it had to be a mistake.
When Reggie says that she's sorry, he says: "Oh no. For a few minutes, they were mine. That's enough."
My collector's heart is really feeling these words, every time again.
I had thought it would be easier to pick stamps from the collection that would go well together in color and design for the right feel, but not only didn't I want to break up some of the series, I also thought huge and colorful stamps with astronauts or exotic animals wouldn't quite work in this design ;-)
I finally picked three stamps, and after a failed first attempt, which made me do a few things a little differently the second time, it was really fun to work on this pendant. It's one of the pieces that is not just an ordinary design to me, but something very personal. If you have watched a movie often, do you also have memories of the circumstances when watching it or of the emotions?
If the pendant stays with me, which it probably will as I doubt that it evokes the same feelings in others, it will still be useful to remember what I learned from making it - how to seal the stamps, how to attach them, and more.
By the way, here's an article about the wonderful scene with the stamp dealer. I'm not the only one who loves it.
And here's another one explaining a bit about the stamps they used in the movie which is actually very interesting.
