Roman Holiday

Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) The legend has it that when Gregory Peck returned from filming Roman Holiday with Audrey Hepburn on location in Rome, he advised someone at Paramount that they might have to change the billing and put her name above the title—"that girl's going to win an Academy Award!"

But, getting to that point was a long, involved road. It originated with Dalton Trumbo, who, following a year-long stint in prison for contempt of Congress for not "naming names" to the House Un-American Activities Committee, was living in Mexico City. He was in financial straits, not being able to sell scripts to Hollywood—who'd provided a good income to him since 1935—owing to being "blacklisted" by the industry. He still wrote, producing 10 screenplays, and forwarded them to "fronts" who would sell the ideas to the studios for a cut of the proceeds. Trumbo's reverse-Cinderella story, Roman Holiday, was sold to Frank Capra's Liberty Films by one such front, Ian McLellan Hunter for $50,000 (all of which he paid to Trumbo), and Hunter was hired by the studio to work on the script.

 

The first director attached to it was Frank Capra himself, who wanted Cary Grant and Elizabeth Taylor for the parts of the deceptive reporter and princess, respectively. Taylor was unavailable and Grant, after reading the script, decided his part would be overshadowed by the part of the princess. Capra left the project when his budget demands would not be met, and he sold the script back to Paramount.

George Stevens was briefly attached, but it ended up with director William Wyler, who had some stipulations: a larger budget, Jean Simmons and Cary Grant to star, and filming to be done totally in Rome. Grant—again—wouldn't do it and Simmons was under contract to RKO and its owner Howard Hughes wouldn't loan her out except for a sizable fee. So, Wyler opted to cut his losses—he insisted on filming in Rome (and Paramount had some frozen funds that could be utilized and Rome's studio Cinecittà was back up and running). Gregory Peck—who was looking for lighter roles than he was being offered—was signed (although he, too, was worried about being overshadowed by the female lead), and Wyler decided to look for an unknown actress, which is when he heard about a new European actress, who was doing theater in small parts in movies.

 

Wyler left instructions to keep the camera rolling after the screen test—so the story goes—and the young actress was asked questions about her background, including her time growing up in Belgium during World War II. Everyone who saw the test was charmed by it. Hepburn got the role. But, first, she had a commitment to a Broadway role starring in "Gigi"—she had been picked by Collette herself for the role—and as Peck was held up in over-runs shooting The Snows of Kilimanjaro, the production was delayed.

In the meantime, many writers' hands worked on Roman Holiday besides Hunter, including Ben Hecht, Preston Sturges, Valentine Davies, and—when in Rome—John Dighton, who was there to punch up scenes whenever a location found by Wyler would peak his interest. Cast and crew were not afraid to make changes or make suggestions.

The film begins with a Paramount Newsreel examining Princess Ann (Hepburn) from "one of Europe's oldest ruling families" (although they never mention of what country*) on a tour to "improve trade relations" and although she projects a serene calmness publicly she's starting to crack. She's 19, royally supervised and expected to amiably meet and greet hundreds of dignitaries, all of whom seem to belie the term. And although this is a reverse-Cinderella story, she does have one thing in common with her fairy-tale predecessor—she has shoe problems. There's only so much time you can spend standing in the damn things! Plus, although she is touring Europe, she sees very little of it, cloistered in luxurious quarters with her only bed-time reading her full itinerary for the next day. And yet outside her window, life is happening, people are partying and enjoying life. And Rome, even though it's the Eternal City, can't wait forever.

 

She melts down. to the point where she has to be sedated to get some sleep so she can keep up the busy tour. And maybe it's the sleep-drug talking, but the princess gets it in her crowned head to escape her gilded dignitary's cage and go out into the night, un-escorted, unchaperoned, and unceremoniously. Where Cinderella wanted to see how the other 2% lived, Ann wants the 98% of possibility the world just within her regal wave can offer. She sneaks out of her embassy and finds her way into town.

And then, the sedative kicks in. 

 

Lucky for her, Joe Bradley (Peck), a reporter for a Rome-based wire service is late coming home from an evening poker game among colleagues and happens upon her. Thinking her drunk, he tries to get her on her feet, then pours her into a cab and, with no place else to put her, takes her to his apartment ("Is this the elevator?" she bleerily asks when they get there) to sleep it off. There is some chaste teasing about sleeping arrangements that ends up with Bradley being late for his day's assignment—an interview with Princess Ann—only to discover...she's been sleeping in his bed. And suddenly he concocts a scheme to get a big story, given his special "access."

Her government has put out a cover story to explain her mysterious disappearance has had to cancel all activities due to a "sudden illness"...so Joe makes a bet with his boss that he can get an exclusive with the princess. All well and not exactly good. A lot of subterfuge has to be done to get that story. The princess wants to have her adventure but not let on that she's at any way royal. Joe conspires to get his story without letting on that he's a reporter—and he wants pictures, which he gets with the third wheel of the adventure, bohemian photographer Irving Radovich (an ebullient and funny Eddie Albert), who is constantly taking photographs with camera concealed in a lighter.

The production was, basically, a working holiday for cast and crew, and the incidents on the princess' "day off" center on aspects and sights of an elaborate tour of Rome with the Colosseum, the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, with stops for gelato, vespa-hopping, dinner and dancing and, ironically, "the Mouth of Truth" which might prove to be daunting to two people who spend the day under false identities.

Peck has rarely been allowed to be this light—and he's surprisingly subtle and slyly humorous playing a roguish Prince Charming, and Hepburn is perpetually adorable as a princess with the crown off. As Pauline Kael remarked "when she smiles, we're all goners," but leavened somewhat by eyes that always have a shade of melancholy—her wartime childhood probably had something to do with that—and it comes in handy for her scenes as a princess trying to escape the weight of her heritage while knowing that she'll never be able to get away with it...or from it.

Just as Cinderella had to return from the ball and back to the ashes, Princess Ann's fantasy has to come to an end and she must return to her origins. But, Cinderella got to have a happy ending. For Princess Ann, no ending can be completely happy. But, Roman Holiday does, at least, provide a modicum of satisfaction where the lies fall away along with the fantasies. If someone can only acknowledge the truth...however painful it might be...one can at least admit that they're being true...to themself.

 

And that's the lovely thing about Trumbo's story. It's not a sad ending (although not a happy one), but there is a level of satisfaction in the warm glow of memory, free of fairy tales, despite all the pomp and circumstances getting in the way. And the memory of Roman Holiday always brings an admiring smile to my face.

Dalton Trumbo was finally acknowledged to have written the story that won the 1953 Academy Award and in 1993 an Oscar was given to his widow. Trumbo died in 1976. 

"...She has us all in thrall, and when she smiles we're all goners."

Pauline Kael

* The film never says, but one can assume that it isn't any of the stops on the tour which include London, Amsterdam, Paris or Rome. Although I did find an example of a script excerpt, which names the country as "Coravia" (wherever that is).

Lonely Are The Brave

Lonely are the Brave (David Miller, 1960) A shot of a sand-blasted scrubby desert landscape—nothing but a clean horizon and no obstacles in sight—begins Lonely are the Brave. The camera heaves from that unbroken horizon to examine the ground and the first indication of interference—a small camp-fire and the toe of a boot belonging to the soul that started it. He's enjoying the last drag of a cigarette before we hear a sound. The man cocks his hat back and squints into the sun. Jets. Military. Three of them, leaving contrails in the sky. A horse snorts. The man looks over at his horse (in the next couple of sentences we'll know its name is "Whiskey") and the man responds, "Time we took off, too."

There's enough time for a last slug of coffee, then he throws the rest on the ground, dousing the fire, and he gets up to saddle his horse. Blanket goes on first. But, as he turns to heft the saddle, the horse reaches over and pulls the blanket off its back. There's a little back and forth of mutual protesting, but eventually the saddle goes on and is cinched. He mounts and the horse rears in protest, but a little useless galloping will burn some of the energy, so man and horse prance around aimlessly for a bit, but they have places to go. Time to take off.

There is some travel time but eventually, they come across a fence. An arbitrary wire thing put on some chart by somebody from the Water and Power Company. But it's in the way. So, he dismounts, takes some clippers out of his saddle-bag and cuts—one, two, three—three violations of an authority he doesn't recognize, nor have use for. And they ride on.

John W.(call him "Jack") Burns (Kirk Douglas) is a cowboy out of time in the 1960's...or just ahead of his time given the era. 

He's a rider on the range. A tumbling tumbleweed. His home is the prairie and his roof is the open sky. He hasn't bought a house, or even bought into the Suburban American Dream. His Dream is older, less expensive, and offers far more freedom. In today's terms, you could call him homeless, but he wouldn't self-identify with that (he'd look at you, amused, with the term "self-identified"—"What's the point of that?") He doesn't want a house—too restrictive. Hell, a fence is too restrictive. 

He rambles...between jobs (he's been herding sheep lately, a bit of a come-down for him), friends, towns. He doesn't use banks. He carries his money. Has no driver's license—he doesn't drive—and no I.D. 

"I don't need a card to tell me who I am. I already know."

But, he has a mission...and a destination. Awhile back, he got 'hold of a newspaper and saw the name of a friend heading for two years in the penitentiary for helping immigrants after they came over the border, giving them food, water, opportunity. He didn't help 'em over, mind you, just helped 'em once they got over. Fences again. Borders.

He and Whiskey cross the freeway into town, past the junkyard with the graveyard on the other side of the path—relics of the past—to pay a call on Jerry Bondi (Gena Rowlands), his pal's wife and it's clear that she and Burns have a past, but how deep a one is never made too clear. But she's another man's wife now and that other man is his friend, so...there's a boundary there, but a mutually agreed upon one. Jerry is frustrated with husband Paul because he's decided to go to the penitentiary than cooperating, choosing prison life over his family. Jack tries to explain that she's an Easterner, not a Westerner, so she puts up with borders as a fact of life, but for him and Jerry that's just not reality, and he implies that she's jealous of "the other woman" whose name is "Do-What-You-Want-And-Hang-'Em-All." She's not amused.

She's glad to see Jack and all, but it's been a long time and why visit now. Jack's a little circumspect, but the implication is he wants to go into town and have a good drunk. Maybe get into some trouble. Maybe get arrested. Maybe see Paul...in prison. "Visiting days are Wednesday," she reminds him. He takes a little bit of his money, gives the rest to her and he skips off into town.

Doesn't take much to get into trouble in a bar there.  First, place he goes there's a belligerent patron (Bill Raisch, a couple years before he played the murderer of Mrs. Richard Kimble on "The Fugitive") who throws a beer stein at him and a fight breaks out. The police come and arrest him, and when he's being booked, he finds out that they'll let him out of the lock-up for 30 days. Not good enough. Jack hauls off and belts a deputy and gets a year in the penitentiary. Good enough.

He eventually gets to Paul (Michael Kane), a writer and activist, and they share old times, but it becomes quite clear to Jack that Paul is going to do his time and not join him in a break-out that Jack has already planned for himself (he's smuggled in hacksaws in his boots—nice search procedures, coppers). Just the thought of being cooped up for a year gives Jack the willies—"my guts get all tied up in knots just thinkin' 'bout it."

But  once they've sawed through one bar of the jail-cell and Jack has shimmied through, Paul tells him why he'll stay: his wife and his son. "I don't want him growing up like we did. I don't want them running away from anything." "Ya grew up on me, didn't ya?" Jack smiles broadly at Paul. "I just changed," he says simply. "That's all." And Jack is gone. He's got 'til sun-up to make it across the mountains and maybe into Mexico. And he stops back at the Bondi's to grab his mare and say good-bye. And leave a gift and a summation of himself and why he can't stay: "'Cause I'm a loner clear down deep to my guts. Know what a loner is? He's a born cripple. He's a cripple because the only person he can live with is himself. It's his life, the way he wants to live. It's all for him. A guy like that, he'd kill a woman like you. Because he couldn't love you, not the way you are loved."

He has one other advantage—the police pursuing him. The local sheriff, Morey Johnson (Walter Matthau) is a good man, but he's a bit ham-strung—his deputy (the immortal William Schallert) is a little slow, and Burns has gone into the mountains, where police cars, stake-outs and search helicopters are at a disadvantage. Even a sadistic deputy (George Kennedy in his first film role) who beat up Burns in prison can't seem to outmaneuver him in the high country, even when Burns is difficulty maneuvering in the terrain with a skittish horse.

The project was the fallow-up project from Spartacus from Douglas' Bryna Productions and the star had fallen in love with the novel "The Brave Cowboy" by ranger and environmental activist Edward Abbey, and went to his Spartacus screenwriter Dalton Trumbo (who had beat the Hollywood black list by receiving an out-in-the-open credit for his Spartacus script) to adapt the novel, taking it out of its 1950's setting and cracking the issue of Paul Bondi's incarceration—substituting his actions in sympathy for Mexican immigrants instead of the novel's draft evasion. Trumbo also did the adaptation one better by planning out Birns trip on a map of the Sandia Mountains. Douglas hired director David Miller, who had a spotty record in Hollywood—directing one Marx Brothers comedy and several thrillers—but an ability to bring films in on budget, something needed with all the location work necessary on this film. 

The film is a classic, and if it has one flaw it might be setting up a parallel, seemingly unimportant story about a truck driver (Carol O'Connor, his film debut) driving "privies" cross-country, which has a tendency to take one abruptly out of Burns' story for one that really doesn't have an pay-off until the climax. It certainly doesn't lend the movie any added suspense to cut away to a truck-driver, when Burns story is compelling, and suspenseful, enough.

It also benefits from one of the breakout scores of composer Jerry Goldsmith, then a contract-writer for Universal pictures, after doing a few B-pictures and some episodic television, including for the series "Thriller" and "The Twilight Zone." Goldsmith was a friend and colleague of composer Alex North, who had composed the music for Spartacus, and it might have been North who passed along Goldsmith's name. What Douglas got was a score of many moods that retained a central theme, but tailored towards introspection and action, with a nice mariachi influence that kept the film rooted to its location (and goal) of the Mexican border. It was the first of Goldsmith's major works, and would be followed quickly by music for John Huston, John Frankenheimer, and Ralph Nelson.

Part of Jerry Goldsmith's classic score for Lonely are the Brave:

Trumbo

Credits Where Credit Is Due
or
Black-marketing The Black List

You can't find a more dull subject for a movie than writers. The drama is always internal and only externalized by the image of fingers flying on keys in solitude. That's the writing. 

The drudgery gets even worse with the inevitable re-writing and the editing and the second thoughts that threaten to snuff the spark of creativity before it can ever turn to flame. It is only those things, the outside influences that keep a writer from writing, that make for good drama, whether it's drink or love or psychological terror.

Or people that don't like their work. Or their politics. Or them.

A writer not writing is far more dramatic than a writer who is.

For Dalton Trumbo, the roadblocks are manifest, but inconsequential to his output—nothing can stop a writer who loves to write, really, and Trumbo loved writing, as it was an expression of his ego and his own activist zeal. Not even being called to testify before HUAC and going to prison for contempt of Congress, being black-listed by quelling studio-heads bowing to pressure from Hollywood's right wing, he still managed to keep writing through a variety of means and psuedonyms and winning Oscars while doing so—Oscars that would take years before the nom de guerre used could be expunged and his own name could be acknowledged as the source. 

The subterfuge was that he was always an employable writer. It's just that no one could acknowledge they hired him to write, or they would be tarred with the same brush as a communist sympathiser. Lillian Hellman called it "Scoundreltime," where one hand did something while the public face lied about it. Trumbo was perfectly fine with playing that game and protecting those who stuck their necks out for him, as he had a family and he liked to eat.

Others were not so lucky. The stakes in the best of show business times are high and the opportunities slim, and producers are all "scared rabbits" (as the line goes in All About Eve) not willing to take a chance at minimizing their potential profits. And that's in the time of high confidence. In a time of fear, wagons will be circled and shutters drawn and phones unrung and unanswered, and in the product, there will always be the safest of happy endings, no matter how unlikely. It's a time of black and white, and anything gray is suspicious and untrustworthy.

Not that Trumbo—the real one, not the movie concoction—was comfortable in the gray zone, either. Even a casual glance at his work shows his screenplays were full of black/white-good/evil demarcations. Trumbo, the writer, couldn't help but make the antagonists of his heroes hissable with more than just bad intentions towards them. The prison guards in Papillon are sadistic, the nun who betrays him later in that movie is brittle and pharisaical. General Crassus in Spartacus is not only vain-glorious and opportunistic, but also bi-sexual (which was rather phobic for the liberal Trumbo, but even liberals in the 1950's could "protest too much" about masculinity). The real Trumbo wasn't afraid to stack the decks in his writing, rather than going a more subtler route. But that bluntness in thought and word could also create masterpieces like "Johnny Got His Gun" (which Trumbo himself directed for the screen in 1971), one of the most searing and uncompromising "anti-war" novels ever written.

In Jay Roach's Trumbo, Dalton Trumbo is portrayed with some of the warts and all—an affected, high-toned, pugnacious workaholic, with the air of high-minded authority (Bryan Cranston plays him with more than a bit of John Huston to him, probably to suggest that patrician attitude), loving of his family but will exploit them by bringing them in as workers in his script factory after he serves time in prison for "contempt of Congress" (which prompts a line another member of the Hollywood 10 employed) and finds himself blacklisted by the majority of Hollywood studios (who, in turn, are bullied by the Motion Picture Alliance for the Preservation of American Ideals to not hire communists, lest their own immigrant status be highlighted in the press).

In a page right out of one of Trumbo's scripts, the Motion Picture Alliance is portrayed as a monolithic front, with far more power than they actually had. They used other people's power to intimidate. and they attacked through money and people's ability to earn it. All it would take to disarm them would be to simply stand up to them and defy them. Tellingly, the only one who does is one of its own members, John Wayne* (David James Elliott), and that's in a scene where he out-guffs Hedda Hopper (portrayed by Helen Mirren as if she were the Wicked Witch of West Hollywood) when she begins to threaten him for "going soft." That sounds a little "Hollywood" to me. But there's a lot of Hollywood in Trumbo, where, not unlike Hitchcock from a few years ago, they get the main story right, but they get the facts wrong.

The problems of several of the Hollywood Ten are heaped on the created character of Allen Hird (Louis C.K.), who is Trumbo's constant critic within "the Ten" ("You talk like a radical, but you live like a rich guy," Hird gripes at Trumbo after a group meeting discussing legal strategies. "The radical will lose," Trumbo parries back, "but the rich guy wins with the cunning of Satan"). Hird's story runs a parallel course to Trumbo's—conviction of contempt of Congress, imprisonment, no writing jobs, then becomes part of the writing mill that Trumbo creates for the King Brothers, a B-movie exploitation movie-maker that was the only studio that would employ them (It's been revealed that Trumbo wrote the classic Gun Crazy for the King Brothers in 1950). But even then, the fictional Hird can't help himself but try to throw in some left-leaning polemic in the basest of material. On top of that, he has issues in his private life and health issues that couldn't come at a worse time.

Trumbo, in the meantime, keeps writing. Obsessively, compulsively. Long into the night, and, when inspiration leaves, in his bathtub (a statue of him** writing in the bath was erected in Grand Junction, Colorado, not far from his hometown of Montrose), popping benzedrine, and making life strained at home. Still, despite being black-listed, he won two Oscars for his work, which were credited to "fronts" or psuedonyms—Roman Holiday and The Brave One—until there was a competition between Kirk Douglas and Otto Preminger over who would actually name him as their pictures' screen-writer (and get the credit for "breaking" the black-list). Even when Spartacus—Douglas' picture—came out, it was picketed by the American Legion, until John Kennedy finally made the issue of Trumbo's black-listing moot by crossing the picket lines to see the film while President. The only way to fight a conspiracy is another conspiracy, like a back-fire. The fact that Spartacus made a lot of money for Universal Pictures helped, too.

Trumbo is worthwhile in that it gets the story out, if not right. Performances are solid from the main characters (although I have problems with Cranston's affected performance) and John Goodman is a stand-out—again playing another Hollywood producer, as he did with The Artist and Argo—but the film does a bit of a disservice to the times, almost making those times a "Hollywood problem." 

 

It wasn't. It just got more of the publicity, where a lot of the battles took place. There is no triumph in Trumbo—as close as it gets is an odd shot where his Spartacus credit is reflected in his glasses, which feels oddly unimportant in the scope of it all. But, there's no real sense of the over-arching tragedy as dissent was punished and the wildly hysterical was given credence. Maybe that's why it doesn't register much, emotionally or psychologically. It feels too much like today.

* And I'm not sure I'm even buying that one. Wayne was a righteous anti-communist, no doubt about it (and no doubt because he was one of the few male stars who sat out World War II in Hollywood—something his mentor, John Ford, never let him forget). He was proud of it. And he had a hand in destroying many a career in Hollywood during the 1950's. Conversely, once The Red Scare had passed, he held no grudges—blacklisted screenwriter Marguerite Roberts was sure Wayne would reject her script for True Grit, but he surprised her when he told the producers "Don't touch a word. It's perfect." But, Trumbo would have you believe that Wayne was the only person in Hollywood who stood up to Hedda Hopper. Not buying it. And I'm not buying how Edward G. Robinson (played by the ubiquitous Michael Stuhlbarg that doesn't suggest Robinson at all) is portrayed as naming names. He never did. And even though David James Eliott looks nothing like Wayne, he still has the voice and bearing perfectly, whereas Dean O' Gorman, who resembles Kirk Douglas, doesn't recall the actor at all.

**

The Brave One (1956)

The Brave One (Irving Rapper, 1956) An almost essential film for children that has fallen by the way-side in the public consciousness, but its story of a boy and his bull, each with their own battles to fight in an uncaring world filled with cruelty will create that sense of wonder in a child (or an adult), while delivering a message of empowerment to the short—and dismissed—in stature.*

There's nothing better in a kid's film, whatever the genre, be it The Wizard of Oz, Willie Wonka, or The Yearling, or even (dare I say it?) Star Wars or Harry Potter.  If you're gonna plop your kid in front of a movie, it's a bonus if there's a life-lesson that will resonate, rather than merely amuse or create short-term product demand.

Like a lot of these, the story involves bonding.  A child, Leonardo (Michel Ray), saves a young bull, separated from its herd, from a terrible storm.  He adopts the bull, names it "Gitano" (for "Gypsy") and raises it (I guess, to "bullhood"), only to have it taken away, because technically, the bull belongs to the wealthy rancher Leonardo's father works for.

But, because of Gitano's rebellious spirit (with anyone but Leonardo), the unruly bull is sent to Madrid for the bull-fighting ring in the nation's capitol. Knowing the bull's chances of surviving the competition don't exist, the boy travels to Madrid to plead mercy for the bull, exhibiting the same courage against the rigid rules of the bullring and of government bureaucracy. 

Now, it's interesting to consider...if one is drawing parallels between films (and one tends to do that)...that the author of this film—"Robert Rich," a nom de blacklist of Dalton Trumbo, who, because of his dealings with Communist publications during the 1940's, would run him afoul of the House Un-American Activities Committee in the '50's and "blacklisting" throughout that decade—would, in three years, be producing another script about another rebel sent to a ring to fight to the death, and started a revolution of his own. That film is Spartacus, and one can't help seeing the similarities between the death-battles in the bull-ring and the gladiator-coliseum, both in the script by Trumbo and the direction of a young Stanley Kubrick.

The director of this one was Irving Rapper, a bit of a maverick in his career as a Warner Brothers dialogue coach and director (Bogart once told him "Skippy, you have one more suspension and you'll be on the San Francisco Bay Bridge!"—this from an actor who had his own run-in's with the Warner brass) Rapper had a varied career (from the classic Now Voyager to the less-than-classic The Christine Jorgenson Story), but he was an intelligent, intuitive director (and he gets a marvelous performance out of young Ray), who could make the most out of good material and struggled mightily with bad.

When it cam Oscar-time, The Brave One won an Oscar for its story credited to "Rich," and the Academy ("brave" industry reps that they were and are) kept up the studio-imposed subterfuge.  It wasn't until 1975 that Trumbo was acknowledged by them as the author of The Brave One.

* It may also be difficult to find as it shares the title of a fairly lousy Jodie Foster vigilante revenge movie, made in 2007 by Neil Jordan.  Make sure which one it is before showing it to your child.