Margaret Rawlings | Through the Shattered Lens

The 1953 film Roman Holiday is one that I’ve watched quite a few times. If you know anything about the film and/or me, you won’t be surprised by that. I love Audrey Hepburn. I love Rome. I love romance. And I love bittersweet endings. And Roman Holiday has all four of those!

Speaking of Audrey Hepburn, I’ve shared this picture before but I’m going to share it again:

That is Audrey Hepburn, the morning after she won the Best Actress Oscar for Roman Holiday. Roman Holiday was Audrey Hepburn’s motion picture debut and it continues to hold up as one of the greatest film debuts of all time. Watching how easily she controls and dominates the screen in Roman Holiday, you would think that she had made over a 100 films previously.

The film tells a simple story, really. Audrey plays Ann, the crown princess of an unnamed country. Princess Ann is touring the world. The press is following her every move. Her royal handlers are carefully choreographing every event. Her ever-present bodyguards are always present to make sure that no one gets too close to her. In public, Ann is the epitome of royal discretion, smiling politely and always being careful to say exactly the right thing. But, in private, Ann is restless. Ann knows that she has never been allowed to see the real world and yearns to escape, if just for one night, and live a normal life. So far, her handlers have managed to keep her under control but then she arrives in Rome and…

…well, who can resist Rome?

Despite having been given a sedative earlier, Ann stays awake long enough to sneak out of her hotel room and see the enchanting Rome night life. Of course, the sedative does eventually kick in and she ends up falling asleep on a bench. It’s there that she’s discovered by an American, a cynical reporter named Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck). Not realizing who she is and, instead, assuming she’s just a tourist who has been overwhelmed by Rome, Joe allows her to spend the night at his apartment.

The next morning, Joe finds out who Ann actually is. Realizing that getting an exclusive interview with Ann could be his ticket to the big time, Joe and his photographer, Irving (Eddie Albert), rush back to Joe’s apartment. Joe doesn’t tell her that he’s a reporter. He just offers to take her on a tour of Rome. Ann, however, wants to experience Rome on her own.

What follows is a wonderful and romantic travelogue of the glory of Rome. Though Ann does explore on her own for a while, she eventually does meet back up with Joe and Irving. Whenever I watch Roman Holiday, I always try to put myself in the shoes of someone in 1953, sitting in the audience during the film’s first week of release. For many of them, this film may have been their first chance to ever see Rome. (The opening credits of Roman Holiday proudly announce that the entire film was shot on location, properly acknowledging the Rome is as much a star of this film as Hepburn, Peck, and Albert.) If you’re not already in love with Rome (and I fell in love with the city — and really, the entire country of Italy — the summer after I graduated high school), you will be after watching Roman Holiday.

(If you truly want to have a wonderful double feature, follow-up Roman Holiday with La Dolce Vita.)

The film’s most famous scene occurs at the Mouth of Truth and… well, just watch…

This scene was improvised, on the spot, by Gregory Peck. Audrey Hepburn’s scream was very much real as Peck didn’t tell her what he was planning on doing. As great as this scene is, it’s even better after you’ve actually been to Rome and put your own hand in the Mouth of Truth.

It’s a very sweet movie, one that stands as both a tribute to romance but also proof of what pure movie star charisma can accomplish. It’s not just that Audrey Hepburn gives a great performance as Princess Ann. It’s that Gregory Peck gives one of his most natural and surprisingly playful performance as well. It’s that Peck and Hepburn have an amazing chemistry. By the end of the film, you know that they deserve Rome and Rome deserves them.

And then there’s that ending, that bittersweet ending that always brings tears my mismatched eyes. It’s a sad (though not depressing) little ending but somehow, it’s also the only ending that would work.

Roman Holiday was nominated for best picture but it lost to From Here To Eternity.

That’s right — Roman Holiday and From Here To Eternity were released one after another.

1953 was a very good year.

The 1971 Hammer film Hands of the Ripper tells the story of Anna (Angharad Rees), a woman living in Victorian England who has a few issues.

What type of issues, you may wonder? Well, first off, she’s the daughter of the infamous serial killer known as Jack The Ripper. When she was just a baby, her father killed her mother while Anna watched from her crib. Now, years later, the teenage Anna is working for a fake medium named Mrs. Golding (Dora Bryan). It’s Anna’s job to stand behind the curtain and provide the ghostly voices whenever Mrs. Golding is holding one of her fake seances.

One such séance is attended by both a sleazy member of Parliament named Dysart (Derek Godfrey) and a progressive psychiatrist named Dr. John Pritchard (Eric Porter). When Mrs. Golding’s ruse is discovered, she decides to “give” Anna to Dysart. However, this plan falls apart when Anna suddenly goes crazy, grabs a fireplace poker, and murders Mrs. Golding. Dysart flees the scene, leaving Anna, who claims to have no memory of attacking anyone, with John. Assuming that he can cure her, John takes Anna in and set her up at his house.

Well, it turns out that curing Anna will not be quite as easy as John assumed. For one thing, Anna is extremely repressed and often refuses to open up to him. Also, there’s the fact that Anna keeps killing people. Whenever anyone stands to close to Anna or kisses her on the cheek, Anna goes into a trance and hears her father’s voice demanding that she kill. John, convinced that he can save Anna, continues to cover up every murder.

I really wasn’t expecting much from Hands of the Ripper. In fact, I have to admit that the main reason I dvred it off of TCM was because I thought this might be the film in which Klaus Kinski played Jack the Ripper. I was wrong, of course. The Kinski Jack the Ripper film was called Jack the Ripper and it was directed by Jess Franco. Hands of the Ripper, on the other hand, is a Hammer film that was released in 1971, at a time when Hammer was struggling to stay relevant in an ever-changing cinematic landscape. Perhaps that’s why the murders in Hands of the Ripper were gory, even be the bloody standards of Hammer Films.

Interestingly enough, though the film was made over 40 years ago, the murders themselves remain quite shocking. I can only imagine how audiences in 1971 reacted to them. The scene where Anna suddenly attacks a housekeeper made me flinch, as did a later scene in which one of Anna’s victims stumbled out onto a crowded street, minus an eye. Angharad Rees gave a good performance as Anna, one that keeps you guessing as to whether or not she’s just crazy or if maybe she really is possessed by the spirit of her father.

Hands of the Ripper is a good Hammer film, one that combines the usual Hammer tropes with a bit more psychological depth than one might expect. This is one to keep an eye out for.