BEFORE: I find myself unable to think clearly if I post after working a shift - it doesn't matter if I've been at the theater or at the stadium, there's something about working next to a big crowd of people that focuses me on the task at hand, but also robs me of my thought process that's in charge of writing reviews. So once I'm home I have to take a while and decompress before I write my thoughts on last night's movie, which is another thing that is making me post later and later - I'm a full day behind on posting now, but I catch up very easily just by calling for another skip day, I'm trying to put this off as long as possible, perhaps the birthdays of famous people will signal the need to skip a day and make the chain line up with them, and that could work out in my favor. We'll see.
Tonight's "Get to Know a State" profile, #39 in a series, will focus on COLORADO - because of Audrey Hepburn's final film, "Always", which was a 1989 movie about pilots in Colorado who were aerial forest-fire fighters. She played an angel or a ghost or a spirit-guide of some kind, and I'm not sure that she ever went to Colorado for this film or any other reason, but it's honestly the only film on my list I could make a Colorado connection to. So here we go:
Date admitted to the U.S.: August 1, 1876 (Happy 150th Birthday, Colorado, a bit late)
Claim to fame: Rocky Mountains, Coors beer and the future home of the Sundance Film Festival
Nickname: "The Centennial State", right, I see that.
State Motto: "Nil sine Numine", which means "Nothing without providence"
State Flower: Rocky mountain columbine
State Bird: Lark bunting
State Fish: Greenback cutthroat trout
State Animal: Rocky Mountain bighorn sheep
State Reptile: Western painted turtle
State Amphibian: Western tiger salamander
State Mushroom: The Emperor
State Cactus: Claret cup cactus
State Tree: Colorado blue spruce
State Gemstone: Aquamarine
Notable Sports Teams: Denver Broncos in the NFL and the Rockies in the MLB, also the Denver Nuggets in the NBA and the Colorado Avalanche in the NHL. I guess they have a soccer team too, the Rapids, but we've already proven nobody cares.
Fun Facts: The U.S. acquired Colorado in the Louisiana Purchase from France in 1803, but in 1806 Colonel Zebulon Pike led a U.S. Army expedition into the region, and he and his troops were arrested by Spanish Cavalrymen the following year and were taken to Mexico. The Spanish apparently did not get the memo about who bought Colorado three years before. Colorado spent 33 years as an unorganized territory just because of the slavery issue, I guess 50% of the people didn't want it to be a slave state and 50% of the people didn't want it to be a free state, so they were at an impasse. But it's kind of funny how when gold or silver gets discovered somewhere then there's a sudden rush to make that territory a state, right?
I've never been to Colorado, so I'm still at 24 states visited out of 39 profiled. Rex Harrison carries over from "Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes" and so do 2 other people.
THE PLOT: Examines the remarkable life and career of actress, fashion icon and humanitarian Audrey Hepburn.
AFTER: There are so many other things to talk about, I forgot to note that this is another "Century" film, film #5,400 since I started this crazy thing. That means Movie Year 18 is officially 2/3 over, so I really really need to start thinking about what horror films I'm going to watch in October and how I'm going to wrap up this crazy, wonderful but also occasionally horrible and no-good year. Let me get through all these 11 remaining docs and I'll figure it out.
I definitely have Documentary Burn-out though, which makes it very easy to adopt a "Who Cares?" attitude about a number of things. OK, sorry you had seven marriages that didn't work out, Liz Taylor, but I suspect that just maybe your actions and/or personality had something to do with that. It is possible to look inside yourself or maybe have a talk with the mirror and admit that you have faults and that you're maybe not the easiest person to be in a relationship with. Audrey Hepburn was married twice, to Mel Ferrer and Andrea Dotti, and then in a long-term relationship with actor Robert Wolders, and she had two children, one with Ferrer and one with Dotti. I mean, she seemed like a very nice person so sometimes we just have to shrug and say, you know, it happens, people tire of each other or change over time, or sometimes they just NEED a change in their lives. These days it's very hard to find someone who's 60 or 70 that hasn't been married at least twice, I mean you can't beat the power of entropy over time.
"Hepburn" isn't even her real last name, like many Hollywood stars she changed it when she got cast in a film, what many people don't know about her is that she came from an aristocratic family in Belgium, but then World War II happened and being an aristocrat kind of fell out of favor, especially when Nazis invaded and started killing them. Her original last name was Ruston, and during World War II she hid out in the Netherlands and went by the name of "Edda van Heemstra" which sounded a little less English than "Audrey". Her original first name wasn't "Audrey" either, it was "Adriaantje", so now I don't even know how she even knew who she was anymore when she became a ballet dancer and then an actress. A couple of her uncles were executed by Germans, but then her father supported the Nazis for some reason and not just because they were in power, because when he moved to Britain he supported the Fascist Party there, too. Anyway he kind of abandoned the family, so I guess good riddance to bad Nazis.
Adriaatie, or Edda, or Audrey or whoever, endured famine and malnutrition and several illnesses during World War II, and she survived by delivering messages, volunteering at a hospital and performing in "underground concerts" to raise money for the Dutch resistance. Meanwhile, somewhere else, Marcel Marceau was working with the French resistance to save Jewish children from going to concentration camps, it's true. After D-Day things kind of got worse, because as the Germans started losing the living conditions got worse in occupied countries, hence the Dutch Famine of 1944-45. This led to widespread malnutrition, which led to diseases like jaundice and anemia.
But eventually the war did end, and Audrey was able to resume her studies of ballet in Holland and then London. She did get a small role in a movie, playing a stewardess in an educational travel film, but did not consider herself an actress until she was cast in minor roles in films like "The Lavender Hill Mob" and "Secret People", in the latter she played a ballerina, then her big break came while making a movie in a Paris Hotel, where she was spotted by Colette, the infamous French novelist and sexual freedom advocate, who right away wanted to cast her in the Broadway version of "Gigi". Even though critics said the stage play was much worse than the French film version of "Gigi", Audrey still stood out and won a Theatre World Award, then went on tour with the play in 1951-52.
The next year she was noticed by William Wyler and cast in "Roman Holiday" with Gregory Peck, and by then the giant snowball was really rolling down the mountain and picking up speed. She won the Golden Globe, the BAFTA and the Academy Award for that role, and was signed to a seven-picture contract with Paramount, that included the films "Sabrina", "War and Peace", "Funny Face" and "Love in the Afternoon". All that AND "The Nun's Story" led up to her starring in "Breakfast at Tiffany's", really her most successful and perhaps career-defining film. That was also the start of her collaborations with Hubert Givenchy, the French designer who made that "little black dress" she wore at the start of that film, and for years she and Givenchy were synonymous, much like Bob Mackie and Cher, later on.
"The Children's Hour", "Charade", "Paris When It Sizzles", leading up to "My Fair Lady", she never really made a BAD film, they were all very different of course, but she had like a 100% success rate for a very long time. Sure, only John Cazale had a perfect record - five films, five films nominated for Best Picture", but Audrey Hepburn also did better than all right. And she was so bankable when it came time to film "My Fair Lady" that Julie Andrews, who had played the character on stage and was considered a shoo-in for the movie, was bumped in favor of Audrey getting cast as the movie's Eliza Doolittle. How many career-defining movies can one actress have? I guess as many as it takes, right?
"How to Steal a Million" with Peter O'Toole, "Two for the Road" with Albert Finney and then "Wait Until Dark", which we saw clips of in "Film Geek". "Robin and Marian" with Sean Connery, and then after that, honestly, a bunch of quite forgettable movies, until that cameo in "Always". But sure, she's an EGOT winner, the Emmy for "Gardens of the World", the Grammy for Best Spoken Word Album in 1994, the Oscar for "Roman Holiday" and the Tony for "Ondine". Since she's got BAFTAs too I guess that makes her a BEGOT winner.
Lucky in awards, unlucky in love, I guess - she was married to Mel Ferrer and they co-starred in "War and Peace", they were together 14 years and had a son, but Ferrer was allegedly "too controlling" and so she moved to Switzerland in 1960 to raise their son. She married an Italian psychiatrist, Andrea Dotti, in 1968, and they had a son, too, but Dotti apparently liked the club life and had numerous affairs, while Audrey had an affair with Ben Gazzara while working on the film "Bloodline". She and Dotti were together 12 years, and then Audrey was in a long-term relationship with a Dutch actor, Robert Wolders, and though she was retired from acting at that point, she spent her time working as an ambassador for UNICEF in war-torn and impoverished nations. Good for her.
I didn't really care for all the ballet dancing here, they cast three actresses to play Hepburn at different ages, and then filmed them all doing ballet. I mean, it's fine if you like ballet, I just don't see the point of it, and then all three of the actresses danced together at the end of the film, like what the heck did that even mean? You can't dance with your younger or older self, it's just not possible, and if it's a metaphor, what for? Also the last 10 minutes of the film is due to making the same points over and over about Audrey's life, really really stretching things out, as if the editor was getting paid by the minute.
Directed by Helena Coan
Also starring Robin Ager, Michael Avedon, Peter Bogdanovich (last seen in "Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop Cinema"), Clemence Boulouque, Anna Cataldi, Richard Dreyfuss (last seen in "Film Geek"), Emma Hepburn Ferrer, Sean Hepburn Ferrer, Alessandra Ferri, Molly Haskell, Francesca Hayward, Clare Waight Keller, Edith Lederer, John Loring, Keira Moore, Pierluigi Christophe Oronesu, Marlena Pilat, Mita Ungaro, Lucia Valentini-Terrani, Andrew Wald,
with archive footage of Audrey Hepburn (also last seen in "Film Geek"), Julie Andrews (ditto), Fred Astaire (ditto), Truman Capote (ditto), Alec Guinness (ditto), Richard Avedon, Johnny Carson (last seen in "John Candy: I Like Me"), Colette, Doris Day (also carrying over from "Elizabeth Taylor: The Lost Tapes"), Marilyn Monroe (ditto), Andrea Dotti, Mel Ferrer (last seen in "Paris When It Sizzles"), Hubert Givenchy, Adolf Hitler (last seen in "Mel Brooks: The 99 Year Old Man!"), William Holden (last seen in "Blake Edwards: A Love Story in 24 Frames"), George Peppard (ditto), Wilfrid Hyde-White (last seen in "Ten Little Indians"), Merle Oberon, Gregory Peck (also last seen in "Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop Cinema"), Joseph Victor Anthony Ruston, Jack L. Warner (last seen in "Sid & Judy"), Billy Wilder (last seen in "Stan Lee"), Robert Wolders, William Wyler,
RATING: 5 out of 10 romantic films made with older male co-stars
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