Ein Herz und eine Krone

Audrey Hepburn simply dazzles in this gem of a movie. Princess Ann (Hepburn) escapes the confines of her rarefied royal existence for a day, to be rescued by a reporter, Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck).

Bradley senses a scoop and seeks to inveigle the Princess into a story. However, this is a fairy tale, of the Princess and the commoner. Love blossoms, the beautiful Princess experiencing everyday things we might take for granted with a delight we cannot know. Sitting at a roadside café, getting a haircut, enjoying an ice cream, dancing on a riverboat. She soaks in these experiences in the company of her handsome saviour, not realising his intentions.

It's beautifully done. Hepburn is radiant, refined, beautiful, enchanting - things she went on to display in many movies. However, she was at her most perfect here, as the beautiful Princess needing love and wanting happiness. Peck is an ideal foil. Tall, dark, and handsome, his only thought being the scoop placed before him, his ambition wilting in the face of his developing love for a Princess he can't hope to attain. Both are ably supported by Eddie Albert as Irving Radovich, Bradley's photographer colleague. Indeed, Albert is involved in many of the funniest scenes.

It's a fairy tale, beautifully told. William Wyler makes the most of his location, showing us Rome in all it's splendour. The perfect backdrop to the perfect fairy tale.

However, this film belongs to Audrey Hepburn. She shines and dazzles, brightening nearly two hours of every viewers life. How could you hope for more than that.

As a college aged guy with several younger sisters, I'd seen far too many chick flicks as they were being watched and couldn't get over how bad they were. Even ones they claimed to be good were extremely lackluster and I was beginning to wonder what, if any, good romantic movies existed. Then one afternoon I randomly happened to catch Roman Holiday on TV just as it was starting. For some reason I cant really remember, I sat through and watched it and now am quite glad that I did.

Aside from the romance element, it's essentially the polar opposite of what I despised. Great acting, excellent script, and most importantly, an effective and beautiful story. I won't spoil a thing about the plot here, but it works. While the movie can be called a romantic comedy, the humorous elements aren't the cheesy kind of thing you might expect from recent entries in the genre. I All I can say to you is: coming from a guy, this is the first and so far the only romantic movie I have thoroughly enjoyed watching.

This charming comedy is justly famous as the film that made the whole world fall in love with Audrey Hepburn and half the world want to run out and buy a Vespa scooter. Hepburn was always beguiling, but in some of her later roles she tended to overplay the winsomeness. Here every note she hits is just about perfect.

And speaking of notes, pay special attention to the score by the great Georges Auric. If the film had been produced in the manner of modern romantic comedies, the sound track would have been larded with pop hits by Perry Como, Dinah Shore, and Frankie Laine, which would have done an awful lot to destroy the magic. Instead Auric's complex, vibrant, evocative music complements the story's inherent lyricism without upstaging it. In an era of bombastic film scoring, this seems a miracle.

Someone once said that Audrey Hepburn's was the beauty of possibility and transformation -- she was always in motion, always becoming something else. "Roman Holiday" is very much of a piece with that notion. On the surface, the film is about a princess who disguises herself as a "commoner". But in truth she's actually pretending to be a princess, at least at first. She finally becomes authentic -- is transformed and prepared to deal with her destiny -- only through the ennobling power of love and sacrifice. That's one heck of a mythic subtext and does a lot to explain "Roman Holiday's" enduring power.

A comment made by Emma Thompson made me want to see "Roman Holiday" again. Miss Thompson said about Audrey Hepburn "she has no bite" Implying that Miss Hepburn wasn't much of an actress. Well, I don't know what she was talking about or perhaps she doesn't either. To see "Roman Holiday" again in 2017 was a moving and wonderful experience. Audrey Hepburn's performance is as fresh and enchanting as I remembered. Perhaps even more. So I arrived to the conclusion that Miss Thompson is talking about a different kind of acting. When a performance travels in time with the same power, decade after decade, for me that's great film acting. In "Roman Holiday" she took me with her and convinced me, heart and mind, that she was that princess and I loved her. William Wyler, the wonderful director, knew what he was doing - he always did. By introducing us to Audrey Hepburn he reinforced and reinvigorated his own prodigious legacy. I love Emma Thompson as an actress but she's totally wrong about Audrey Hepburn.

After Trumbo we decided to watch one of the films of which Dalton Trumbo wrote the screenplay for. Roman Holiday is a 1953 American romantic comedy directed and produced by William Wyler. It stars Gregory Peck as a reporter and Audrey Hepburn as a royal princess out to see Rome on her own. Hepburn won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her performance; the screenplay and costume design also won. It was written by John Dighton and Dalton Trumbo, though with Trumbo on the Hollywood blacklist, he did not receive a credit; instead, Ian McLellan Hunter fronted for him. Trumbo's credit was reinstated when the film was released on DVD in 2003. On December 19, 2011, full credit for Trumbo's work was restored.

The DVD sat on my shelf for the longest time and I am so glad I took it out to watch. The screenplay is subtle, filled with nuances that Hepburn and Peck teased them out beautifully. I can hardly detect an air of pretension and emotional manipulation. This is as romantic as it gets between a princess and an everyday man. The ending in the big hall really hits the spot. So much is left unsaid but yet what is said speaks volumes. It never betrays the tone of what the film sets out to be but yet my heart was beating with the full desire of wanting to see the relationship go a certain more familiar way. This is an amazing date movie with oodles of intelligence.