Takin’ A ROMAN HOLIDAY: Audrey Hepburn Month Begins!
Hi! You might have noticed some changes around here.
I finally did it. I updated the blog to (almost) resemble a real website. The Blogger template served me well when I decided to actually use it over the last decade, but now that I'm writing more regularly and people are actually starting to read it, it seemed time to try to make it look nice. Whether or not I've succeeded, I'll leave up to you. But changes have been made!
Sooooo, welcome! I've moved the other articles from this year over already, so the three 70's New Hollywood and three French New Wave reviews are already safe at home here. Oh, and my wife and I's tribute to the Gary Marshall ensemble holiday masterpiece VALENTINE'S DAY is here, too. I'll move over other stuff eventually, assuming there's interest in either revisiting them or checking them out for the first time. Anybody interested in the A STAR IS BORN articles, or the Scorsese/Kubrick director series?
Otherwise, this is it! Hopefully, you guys and gals like it. I'm open to suggestions on things to improve usability, by the way. The point is to make this a good experience for you, actual writing ability notwithstanding.
Okay, on to the actual article for this week. Ready to class this place up a little bit?
Audrey Hepburn.
Just saying her name kind of puts you at ease just a little bit, doesn't it?
But what else would you expect when invoking the shorter-than-you-think career one of the most startlingly effortless screen presences maybe ever? Ranked by the American Film Institute as the third-greatest female screen legend, ahead of Elizabeth Taylor (#7), Judy Garland (#8), Barbara Stanwyck (#11) and behind only Bette Davis and another Hepburn (Katharine), she also is one of the still relatively few EGOT winners. You know, that relatively arbitrary club made up of people who have won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar and Tony. By the way, when you have time, pull up the EGOT list sometime; it's quite the wild ride (John Legend is an EGOT winner? When did this happen? I like him, but why doesn't that feel possible?)
More or less hanging it up after a run in the 50's and 60's (she only appeared in four films after 1967), Hepburn dedicated the second half of her life doing humanitarian work with UNICEF and earning the Presidential Medal of Freedom before passing away at the shockingly young age of 63. Her life was relatively short, but she made the most of it. Tapping into that life for a few weeks seems like a nice way to bring in the warmer weather months.
Because this is a purely solipsistic space, the four movies we'll be taking a look at this month will be ones I personally hadn't seen before. This means if you were hoping to catch up on BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY'S, ONE FOR THE ROAD, MY FAIR LADY, HOW TO STEAL A MILLION or CHARADE , you'll have to do that on your own time (and you absolutely must; all have something to offer and/or are great in their own right).
However, if you're hoping to watch ROMAN HOLIDAY, SABRINA, FUNNY FACE and WAIT UNTIL DARK, well gosh-darn-it, you're in luck!
Although she had popped in small things prior to ROMAN HOLIDAY, as well a full theater career in England and New York, this William Wyler film served as her real introduction to the world. And it was quite a first impression; the role won her a BAFTA, a Golden Globe and an Oscar, the first woman to ever do it. With such credentials, it's reasonable to ask, "seventy years on, does the performance hold up?". After all, how many times have you watched a film performance that has been critically lauded and profusely awarded, only to wind up scratching your head wondering what the big deal was (or, conversely, being blown away by a performance, only to learn it was never recognized or nominated at all)?
So, to kick off Audrey Hepburn Month here, let's start at the beginning, more or less. Let's figure out together whether her royal performance lives up to the hype, as well as whether the movie surrounding it is any good.
ROMAN HOLIDAY (1953)
Directed by: William Wyler
Written by: Dalton Trumbo (originally uncredited), Ian McLellan Hunter, John Dighton
Starring: Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert
Released: August 27, 1953
Length: 118 minutes
ROMAN HOLIDAY is the story of Princess Ann (Hepburn), a key piece of royalty from an unspecified European nation, who is currently on a scheduled trip to Rome. Ann is young and full of ambition and, thus, fully unsuited for royal life. We get a glimpse into her personality very early on, as we see her in full royal regalia, floor-length dress and all, standing in the middle of a hall being greeted by various heads of state. Underneath her dress, she keeps fidgeting with her high heels, slipping her feet in and out as she tries not to distract from the long procession of strangers in front of her.
Ann just wants to take her shoes off.
Every pushback she gives to the schedule laid out for her (and every single second is planned out to the second) is treated as irrational, and she's eventually given a strong, late-acting sedative to calm her mind. This deters her not at all, and she eventually slips out of her room at night, finally free to see the city. Until, of course, the sedative kicks in and she passes out on a park bench.
It's on this park bench that she meets Joe Bradley (Peck, playing a character with the most 1950's movie character name ever), an American reporter in town to cover the Princess' press conference. Thinking she's drunk, Joe does the right thing and takes her home. Not really knowing where she lives (and with her drowsy insistence that she lives at the Coliseum nearly getting them kicked out of their taxi), he takes her back to his apartment.
The next morning, after unconvincingly bullshitting his way to his editor about the press conference he didn't attend (hitting a road block when his editor informs him the conference was cancelled due to the princess' sudden illness), Joe learns that the woman in his apartment is in fact Princess Ann. He then promises his editor that he could snag an exclusive interview with her, who promptly bets him $500 he can't do it.
From there, it's a series of sequences where both of our primary characters are not exactly being straight with the other (who wants to bet they're going to fall in love with each other anyway? ). The concept of "truth" is weaved into ROMAN HOLIDAY's fabric, as Joe keeps trying to conceal the fact that he's a member of the media and Ann thinks she's hiding the fact that she's royalty, even insisting her name is Anya. As a result, there's a minor tension to the otherwise light and breezy Mouth of Truth sequence, where the two and Irving visit the very real statue of an open-mouthed face, famous for allegedly biting the hand of anyone who dares lie when placing their hand in its gaping maw.
To be honest, ROMAN HOLIDAY as a whole is pretty good, but not particularly transcendent (although its decidedly melancholy conclusion came as a surprise). It's lovely, simple and to-the-point, as much a travelogue as it is a character piece; the movie immediately and quite literally advertises the fact that the film was shot on location in Rome, and whole sections of the film are there to take advantage (it turns out that the movie was made smack-dab in the middle of a period in the 50's and 60's known as "Hollywood on the Tiber", where studios were falling all over themselves to shoot their movies on location specifically in Rome, which started after the success of MGM's 1951 epic QUO VADIS.
. And, look, there is absolutely nothing wrong with an on-location romantic comedy that frequently turns into a hang-out romp, especially when they're shot this well. One of the best scenes in the whole feature is just Joe and Ann riding around on scooters while Joe's photographer friend Irving (Eddie Albert) secretly snaps pics. It's just that there are a lot of movies out there that can fill that need, so that in and of itself isn't notable. Even if many of them are nowhere near as good, I could see someone describing the movie to someone else and getting the response of, "that sounds like a million other rom-coms, so what?"
The "so what" is that it's Hepburn that turns ROMAN HOLIDAY into high-class entertainment. Looping back around to the question at the top of this article, "does her performance hold up?", I would say, absolutely, it does. It's just that the reasons why it holds up can be a little tricky to define.
When you think, "Best (blank) Award", we've been trained to interpret that as "Most (blank) Award". Think big crying scenes, or maybe even big yelling scenes or, if you're really lucky, big crying and yelling scenes. Audrey Hepburn does not provide any of these, nor does she provide any large swelling monologues or histrionics. If potential Oscar-winning performances are now built around "the clip" (i.e. the twenty or so seconds of the movie that will play when the nominations are being read), you'd be hard-pressed to figure out which half-minute you would pull from ROMAN HOLIDAY to showcase.
What Hepburn actually provides is mostly God-given charisma, presence and comfort. For reasons that seem imperceptible, whenever she's onscreen, you just notice. Your eyes glide over to the screen and lock in for as long as she's there. When she's not there, part of your brain is just biding time until she comes back.
It's easy to chalk that up to her just being gorgeous, which, look, she absolutely is. It feels insanely reductive to boil people's legacies to something as fleeting and arbitrary as their physical appearance, but it absolutely matters in the argument of "what's the big deal" that Audrey was maybe a top-ten beauty ever. But it's not the whole story. It's also the way she carries herself in front of a camera. There's just this natural comfort and poise to her at all moments in ROMAN HOLIDAY, which totally sells her as European royalty. But it also makes us comfortable as a result. Coupled with all of that is this perfect accent in just the perfect timbre, so every line out of her mouth just seems to flow out of her like red wine.
Thus, even though there's no one moment you could point to in order to say, "That's where she earned her Oscar", it becomes clear once you finish ROMAN HOLIDAY that the achievement is one in totality. Because Princess Ann is not exactly a subtly drawn character. She is not a character of interiority; Ann is clear from the very beginning that she's not happy doing her royal duties and yearns for more beyond her gilded cage. She wants to live. The second she's truly on her own in Rome, she quickly goes to get her hair cut into, a moment that feels like a turning point. And Hepburn embodies this longing for freedom in full, with seemingly little effort.
Let's talk for a second about that word, effort. We've talked in this space before about actors and actresses who feel like they're doing almost nothing at all and how effective that can truly be; for a recent example, see Alana Haim's just beautiful performance in LICORICE PIZZA. But it still takes effort, maybe more effort than wearing your emotions on your sleeve and giving teary performances (which, to be perfectly honest, is also really hard and not something everybody can do).
To be this controlled and this purposeful and still be this comfortable? And seeming to do it without even trying? That's maybe the hardest thing in the world for a performer to do, especially when you again consider this is a film performance, in front of one of the most unforgiving audiences you could have: a camera.
And that's the magic of acting. And movies themselves.
So, to this writer, it didn't come as a big surprise that voting academies fell all over themselves to reward her. As mentioned, the role earned Hepburn an Oscar, a Golden Globe and a BAFTA. However, it also earned her a New York Film Critics Circle Award, as well as a nomination for a German award known as the Bambi. ROMAN HOLIDAY would constitute her only Oscar win, although she would be nominated four times further. Quite the debut.
It helps that her leading man is Gregory Peck, a dude who would probably have chemistry with a dishrag. He is a steady presence in this, and honestly in his own way is just as effortless as Hepburn. Joe is a character that could come off kind of skeevy if not handled with charm, especially considering there's an age gap of about a decade and a half here between he and Ann. But Peck makes him great! He had a knack for being undeniably masculine in that mid-century Hollywood way, while still opening himself up to be somewhat vulnerable (which is why the ending of ROMAN HOLIDAY hits so interestingly). This isn't a Peck retrospective, but it might be worth keeping tabs on Audrey's various leading men as we come across them this month anyway, as it will cover the gamut of Hollywood stars.
After such a successful debut, the ever-eternal question is raised: "What next?" And the answer is that she would join the cast of another popular romantic film starring two huge names; one of them perhaps the most interesting star of the time, and the other soon to be her partner in a very famous, highly publicized relationship.
Next week: SABRINA!