I just had the opportunity to see Roman Holiday on the big screen and wanted to share my thoughts on
this romantic masterpiece. Audrey
Hepburn is perhaps more often respected for her elegant fashions than for her versatility
as an actress, but this movie proves how good she could be. She shows us a girlish princess on the brink
of a mental breakdown, a drugged and half-asleep but still poetry-spouting
would-be seductress, an innocent but somewhat mischievous young woman exploring
Rome, and a broken-hearted royal bound by duty.
It’s a remarkable performance, and all the more so because Hepburn plays
it with such apparent effortlessness.
The movie has a fabulous script, but Hepburn and Gregory Peck bring it
to life with every word, glance, and gesture.
It’s easy to look at films with a certain alienation and
cynicism. We might be eager to immerse
ourselves in a special-effects extravaganza or a fairy tale comedy, but we
still know these things are not real life.
Roman Holiday doesn’t need
special effects, and so human appearance and human relationships become
special. It is a kind of fairy tale, but ends with a heart-breaking reality.
Hepburn and Peck just feel so authentic. The two of them aren’t posturing for their
own mythology – they're sharing moments with one another, living and breathing
and laughing together. That’s partly a
matter of chemistry between the co-stars, but also, I think, of Hepburn’s
personality, of her ability to exist in a moment without artificiality. One of her biographers, Barry Paris, quotes a
Cosmopolitan article in which the
reporter comments “When she reads, she reads; when she fits, she fits; when she
talks clothes, she talks clothes; when she sits under a drier, she simply sits
and dries.” Her son, Sean Ferrer,
recalled how Ms. Hepburn used to say “Boil it all down to what counts the most:
What is the essence of what you are trying to do, what is the most important
thing?” Ferrer writes, “She lived her
life believing in the power of simplicity.”
Was it her simple but focused immersion in the world that
made it so difficult for her to cry on cue?
Peck recalled that Hepburn was “good at everything except shedding
tears.” Or was sadness something too
deep, too personal to readily produce simply for the sake of a movie? The director, William Wyler, had to shout out
her – to make her cry as a person, not an actress – before he got the needed
teardrops for a crucial scene. Maybe
that’s a sign of a limited or inexperienced actress. But it’s that sincerity that shoots through
the screen like an arrow into your heart, that makes you see in a fictional story
an authentic image of your soul.
The film doesn’t end in a single climax, but in a series
of heart-wrenching encounters. The kiss
after an escape through the river. The solemn
car ride as they are about to part.
Another desperate kiss. Silence
and separation. Then comes the press
briefing where the two would-be lovers can only stare at one another, so close
and yet too far away. Was bitter-sweet romance
ever done with such confident reserve?
Watch Hepburn’s giddy, trembling smile at the recollection of joyful
memories – then watch it fade away as she prepares to leave. It’s a love story made for an actress who
once declared “I think sex is overrated.”
Joe Bradley’s motives are selfish at the start, but
gradually change. So, too, do those of
Princess Ann. I’m not a big fan of the
arbitrary aristocratic “duty” to which the princess sacrifices herself and her
relationship with Joe, but the final scene makes an important statement about
love. Their love is real even when it is
thwarted and unspoken. It shapes them,
defines them – it ennobles them in ways that birthright or wealth could never
achieve. Love is expressed in and
through the self but reaches beyond it.
Joe Bradley goes to the press conference partly to reassure the princess
that he won’t betray her secrets.
Gregory Peck is so awesome here.
He somehow conveys both his joy at seeing her – even now, even in these
torturous circumstances – and his pain at losing her. His final long walk through the ornate yet
meaningless building is stunning cinema – and that brief moment when he turns
to look back is just one of the small but vital touches that makes this such an
astonishing film.
Oh, Roman Holiday. You’re a film that proves the truth of what
Charles Dickens wrote in Great
Expectations: “Heaven knows we need never be ashamed of our tears…”
Image: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/6/65/Audrey_Hepburn_and_Gregory_Peck_on_Vespa_in_Roman_Holiday_trailer.jpg
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