On Thursday, May 5, 2016 at 5:08:44 PM UTC-7,
wlah...@gmail.com wrote:
Hey,
In the spirit of full disclosure, I should mention that my love affair with the golden age of Hollywood began to erode after seeing Michelangelo Antonioni's L'Avventura on a hooky-playing afternoon in lower Manhattan when I was in high school. Some
Hollywood films will never lose their luster for me and one of them is William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Life that I consider the best film to ever come out of any US studio. Wyler's reputation has been tarnished for some by the writings of Andrew
Sarris and others and now the pendulum is swinging back toward Wyler and away from unsupportable constructs such as a pantheon and the auteur theory.
With the recent birthday celebration of Aubrey Hepburn and all the chatter coming from the bio-pic of Dalton Trumbo - who co-wrote the screenplay - I decided to re-see Roman Holiday, a film I hadn't seen in decades and was pleasantly surprised in how
the script and direction cleverly re-imagines the usual Hollywood drivel. (If Wyler was considered an auteur, he would have "subverted the genre" or some other nonsense like that.)
The story is of a young princess (Audrey Hepburn) on a European tour who goes out for a lark in Rome after being given sleeping medication and ends up asleep on a street bench and being helped by a newspaper reporter (Gregory Peck) who doesn't realize
who she is. What makes the story work is what Sarris describes as "a lack of feeling" on the part of Wyler as if the angst-ridden postures of Nicholas Ray or Sam Fuller would bring some meaning or clarity to the film. Neither Peck or Hepburn are
favorites of mine and what saves this film from being the usual Hollywood hokum is - among others things - a wonderful and credible ending. Really good stuff.
Directed by William Wyler from a screenplay by John Dighton and Dalton Trumbo. Cinematography by Henri Alekan and Franz Planer. Starring Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn, Eddie Albert, Hartley Power, and Margaret Rawlings, among other.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ4ZU-FA5XA
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