William Wyler (1953)
Has there been another film-maker as successfully versatile as William Wyler? Take just one ten-year period – immediately after World War II – during his forty-year career as a director of talking pictures, which began in 1929 (he had made silent movies earlier in the decade): Wyler directed consecutively The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Heiress (1949), Detective Story (1951) and Carrie (1952). Two are period dramas, two highly contemporary ones; two are romantic tragedies, one is a crime story. All are excellent. Between Carrie and the first-rate noir thriller The Desperate Hours (1955), Wyler made Roman Holiday – a rightly celebrated romantic comedy, as enjoyable today as ever.
A beautiful young crown princess, nearing the end of a tour of European capitals, is fed up with her imprisoning schedule and the platitudes she repeatedly has to spout. Rome is the last stop on the tour: Princess Ann (Audrey Hepburn) escapes from her (unnamed) country’s embassy late one evening. Giving a false name (well, Anya anyway) and claiming to be playing truant from school, Ann spends the next twenty-four hours in the company of American journalist Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) and his compatriot, photographer Irving Radovich (Eddie Albert). They know who she is – and that they have a scoop – but don’t reveal to Ann their line of work. (Irving takes photos with a camera concealed in a cigarette lighter.) Ann and Joe fall in love but duty calls and she returns to the embassy. Next morning, at a necessarily delayed international press conference, Princess Ann proceeds down a long line of journalists that includes her two companions from the day before. Introduced to Joe, she says, ‘So happy, Mr Bradley’, with feeling, as she shakes his hand.
Roman Holiday‘s story and screenplay became famous because the main writer, Dalton Trumbo, was blacklisted in Hollywood at the time (see note on Trumbo). The script’s notoriety tends to obscure its merits – this neo-fairytale is satisfyingly nuanced. Princess Ann comes to realise she’s in a fairytale, as a kind of reverse-Cinderella whose temporary enchantment allows her to do commoner things: when she tells Joe she’d like to go dancing for the evening, she adds, ‘And at midnight I’ll turn into a pumpkin and drive away in my glass slipper’. It feels like a subtlety rather than an evasion that Joe doesn’t quite get round to coming clean to her about his job. Instead, he and his pal both eventually do the decent thing. Joe decides not to write the piece about the princess incognito that he’d planned; at the closing meeting with the press, Irving hands the princess an envelope: ‘May I present Your Highness with some commemorative photos of your visit to Rome?’ And this isn’t so decidedly a fairytale, or even a rom-com, that the principals live happily ever after.
In the role that made her a star, Audrey Hepburn is as delightful as she’s reputed to be; her acting’s very good into the bargain. Joe shows Ann ‘the Mouth of Truth’ on the portico wall at the Basilica of Saint Mary at Cosmedin and tells her the legend attached to it: if a liar puts his hand inside the Mouth, they’ll lose the hand. Ann tentatively puts her own hand in and withdraws it safely; Joe thrusts his hand in, then pretends it’s been bitten off – Hepburn’s horrified reaction followed by laughter seems completely spontaneous. Yet her line readings are pointed whenever they need to be. By showing us she believes in the princess’s situation, she makes us believe it for the duration of the film. Gregory Peck is so much better to watch as a Joe Bradley than when he’s playing, self-consciously, a moral hero. In Roman Holiday you still feel you’re in the presence of an essentially good guy but Peck’s rectitude, thanks to Joe’s dubious professional tactics, never gets in the way. He’s a much better comedian than you might expect, and clearly enjoying himself. The part of Irving involves plenty of pratfalls and broad comedy but Eddie Albert plays it with glorious exuberance.
One secret of William Wyler’s success, I think, is that his films, whatever the genre, are nearly always rewarding character studies. That’s certainly true of all six pictures he made between 1946 and 1955 inclusive; in the case of Roman Holiday, it pays dividends in more ways than one. The narrative is eventful enough but Wyler takes his time setting it in motion and, in particular, holds the more hectic comic action in reserve. The first time we see Princess Ann, she’s shaking hands with an endless queue of dignitaries from around the world, when she gets a tickly foot and surreptitiously removes a shoe to deal with the problem. This kind of little detail, which helps Audrey Hepburn build her characterisation, is just one instance of the quiet, gentle humour that allows more rambunctious episodes – like the clumsy attempts of government agents from Ann’s country to recapture her – to stand out.
The film was shot on location in Rome. It’s pleasant as a travelogue – the Spanish Steps, the Colosseum – but Wyler doesn’t push this aspect either. The same goes for the bit-part natives: a cab driver (Alfredo Rizzi), Joe’s landlord (Claudio Ermelli) and cleaning lady (Paola Borboni), a flower seller (Gildo Bocci) and, especially, a romantic hairdresser (Paolo Carlini). By rationing the irresistible what-a-card locals on display, William Wyler ensures that they’re genuinely likeable.
14 August 2024
