BEFORE: See, I'm back on romance films, I figured it wouldn't take that long. Audrey Hepburn carries over from "Wait Until Dark", this is the role that won her a Best Actress Oscar.
THE PLOT: A bored and sheltered princess escapes her guardians and falls in love with an American newsman in Rome.
AFTER: Jeez Louise, if this isn't a classic film, then I just don't know what is. The story is timeless, pairing a newspaper man with the heir to a throne - film-wise it stretches back to 30's comedies like "It Happened One Night", and you can see it echoed in more modern romances like "Notting Hill". Actually, it seems like "Notting Hill" borrowed quite a bit from this film, right down to the press conference at the end. OK, so it substituted Hollywood royalty for princess-style royalty, but the concept is the same, only with a different ending. Princess Ann was just a girl, standing in front of a boy, asking him to love her...
OK, maybe it wasn't like that. I can also view this as sort of a reverse "Sabrina" - in the version I saw (and, I assume in the Hepburn version as well), Sabrina was a commoner, the chauffeur's daughter, who saw the rich people dancing and partying and wished that she could join them. Here Hepburn plays a princess, but she sees the commoners in Rome dancing and partying, and she also wished that she could join them. Hmm, that's weird, the poor people think the rich people have it made, and the rich people wish they could enjoy the simple pleasures of life. It almost seems like nobody is happy right where they are.
Of course, being a princess isn't all it's cracked up to be. There's all those ceremonies, and the traveling, and the incessant shaking of hands and being all polite - why, it's enough to drive a poor, I mean rich, girl mad! So Princess Ann sneaks out of the, umm, embassy (?) and goes walkabout, only she'd been given a sedative to help her sleep, so a reporter mistakes her for a young girl who's had too much to drink. Since she won't (or can't) reveal her name or address, he takes her back to his apartment (it's not as sordid as it sounds) and she gets to sleep in, perhaps for the first time in a very long time.
Meanwhile, he checks in with his editor and learns that the visiting Princess (from, which country again? They never really say...) has come down with a mystery ailment and has cancelled all appearances and interviews. But when he sees her picture in the paper - why, it's the girl who's sleeping back at his flat! What are the odds of that happening? (In a Hollywood film, pretty good, I think...) Probably about the same odds of the two of them falling in love.
Once again, there's deception in romance, but tonight there's a double dose. She pretends to be a college girl, and never lets on to him (or his photographer buddy) that she's really a princess - and he takes her out on the town, never revealing that he already knows who she is, and he's researching an exclusive about royalty, what they're really like, what are their secret hopes and dreams? Turns out some of them just want to hang out with regular people, have a gelato, buy some shoes and get a haircut, maybe bust a guitar over a guy's head in a bar fight. You know, if there's time.
Things haven't changed all that much since the 1950's, the public is still fascinated with royals and their private lives - look at Prince William and Kate Middleton, only now there's much more of a bias against paparazzi. Apparently in the 1950's you could use a tiny spy camera to catch a photo of a princess smoking a cigarette, and still live with yourself, and people wouldn't crucify you for doing that. Go figure.
This was Hepburn first major motion picture, if you don't count "The Lavender Hill Mob", and it seems like she was really good at playing naive and innocent - she's practically like a china doll in this one. Even in "Wait Until Dark", because she had been recently blinded, that naive feeling came through, in the form of her helplessness. I think the only time I've seen her play someone worldly and in control was in "Breakfast at Tiffany's".
According to the IMDB, this film was quite successful due to news events of 1953, when Britain's Princess Margaret was dating a commoner named Peter Townsend. He was also divorced, so to avoid scandal she was forced to renounce him and marry someone else. There was also a surge in Vespa scooter sales after this film was released, but I bet a lot of men were disappointed that they didn't come with pretty princesses to drive them into sidewalk café tables.
NITPICK POINT: Joe gives the princess 1000 lire, and says it amounts to about "a dollar and a half". Then he watches her in the market as she buys shoes, enjoys some gelato and gets a haircut. Even at 1953 prices, that seems unlikely. Either the princess really knew how to stretch $1.50 or Joe was wrong about the conversion rate. As it is, the prices don't seem to add up right. Maybe she was so beautiful that people just gave her stuff for free?
Also starring Gregory Peck (last seen in "The Snows of Kilimanjaro"), Eddie Albert (last seen in "The Heartbreak Kid"), Hartley Power.
RATING: 6 out of 10 ambassadors
No comments:
Post a Comment