Este post foi escrito para a série Hit Me With Your Best Shot do blogue The Film Experience de NathanielR, sendo que é aqui apresentado em inglês, ao invés do que é usual neste blogue.
This double
feature episode of Hit Me With Your Best Shot is meant to be, I believe, a sort
of celebration of Gregory Peck, today being his centennial. I must confess I’m
not a particularly ardent fan of Mr. Peck as an actor, with some special
exceptions (one of which is in this double-feature). To me, he belongs with
Gary Cooper in the list of Old Hollywood stars who were as astonishingly
handsome as they were dull. Also like Cooper, despite his often tedious acting,
Gregory Peck had an undeniable star quality that permitted him to have a strong
onscreen presence, even when he seems to be impersonating a sermonizing
cardboard picture.
Having
already established my agnosticism regarding Gregory Peck, the actor, I must
confess I was thrilled with this week’s assignment, for it gave me the
opportunity to revisit one of Hollywood’s most frothy and endearingly silly
fairy tales, Roman Holiday, the story of a European princess that during a
visit to the Italian capital, escapes for a day of adventure in the city,
accompanied by a mysterious man, Joe, that rescued her from a night slept on
the streets.
While I can
objectively recognize the problems of the film, with its exoticization or
complete ignorance of the Italian population, its weird central romantic
relationship, its clichéd story that bears no resemblance to any sort of
reality any human has ever lived in, some peculiarly rough editing choices, and
a sort of mindless romanticism that can be easily grating, I just love it.
To me,
Roman Holiday, in all of its touristy postcard glory, is the pinnacle of
Hollywood escapism in the 1950s, and I can’t help falling into its simplistic love
spell every time I watch it. Despite this love, I have to point out that, regardless
of his charm, Gregory Peck is not one of the main reasons I’m so helpless to the
film’s romantic allure. If we’re speaking of actors, Miss Audrey Hepburn’s
debut Hollywood performance, for which she won an Academy Award, is much more
to blame for my love. Do I think she deserved an Oscar for what is one of the
most bidimensional efforts ever rewarded with that particular Best Actress
statuette? No. Do I love her in it? Yes.
Love her!
It’s, in a
way, the perfect introduction for Hepburn. Princess Ann is a role that
showcases her youthful, almost childish, naiveté with moments of chilly
elegance, all while allowing the filmmakers to alternately use her as a
mannequin for fashionable ensembles or a little burst of uncomplicated joyful
energy, with almost no shadow of psychological complexity or complication.
Trust me, that this is not a backhanded way of complementing her, for I dearly
admire Audrey Hepburn, and not just as a movie star (I defy anyone to watch The
Nun’s Story and still believe she had no acting chops).
With all of
that said, let’s take look at some of my runner-up choices:
Runners-up
While it
was not unheard of to shoot a big studio picture on location, William Wyler’s
decision to shoot Roman Holiday in the titular city itself, was quite unusual.
As a consequence of this directorial choice, the film has a unique look mixing
Hollywood romanticism with a strangely authentic sense of place and time. The
specific city of Rome was, at the time, the great capital of cinematic realism,
with the city being the background, and almost the protagonist, of many Italian
masterpieces of neorealism. To see such a place being used as a setting for one
of the frothiest and most joyfully inconsequential of all Hollywood romantic
stories, is decidedly weird. In many scenes, we see our protagonists walking
around the city, acting out the fairy tale pageantry of Dalton Trumbo’s script,
while, in the background, Rome’s life goes on, with a disquieting sense of
authenticity that is in direct conflict with the escapist artifice in the narrative
foreground. In these runner-up shots, that strange relationship is quite
inescapable, and while I agree that this stylistic conflict doesn’t always work
in benefit of the film, it’s still fascinating to observe.
