Ain't it obvious already that we love Audrey Hepburn. This is one of her great movies as she won an Academy Award for Best Actress for her role as Princess Ann.
Movie starts off with the royal Princess Ann being on an official goodwill tour of Europe, where she attended various ceremonies in behalf of her country. Rome was her last stop, she was already tired of the tour. She saw some people dancing below her window and she wished she could join them. Being a princess she was stuck with her bedroom. Her aide then proceeded to remind her of their next day's schedule when she snapped. She had a small nervous breakdown and her doctor gave her some sedatives. Thinking that she was asleep, they left her alone. She then escaped from her room and wanders around Rome.
The story then progresses when she was met by Joe Bradley (played by Gregory Peck), who is a reporter for the American News Service. Bradley did not disclose his work to the princess so that he can gather information for a story that will give him a big payday. All she was was a story in the beginning until he fell in love with Princess Ann. In the end, he ditches the article and informs his editor he doesn't have it.
In the end Princess Ann returns to her duties and when she met with the Press, Joe Bradley was there and she was shocked. Joe then put her fears to rest when he had a chance to talk to her amidst all the other press people. Joe's photographer, Irving (played by Eddie Albert) was also at the press conference and gave her the pictures of her "tour" of Rome.
Princess Ann then thanked everyone of the press who were there and turned around and walked away. Likewise Joe walked alone from the press conference.
Although this one did not have happy ending, it was a delightful movie to watch. We can understand why Hepburn won an Academy Award here as she was great at being an innocent princess who sneaked out of her royal duties to be a commoner for a change.
We had a young Hepburn here, looking sweet and delightful to watch. She simply lights up the movie with her screentime. The movie is about her so expect much of her in the entire film. Can't complain here.
The production was also decent enough to feature much of Rome's features and although they may have "cheated" with the brief tour of the other European nations, we couldn't care less as we expected much of Rome anyway. The market scene, the crowd, the carabinieri or italian police made up for a truly wonderful roman experience. We love rome and its nice to see it in black and white and with less people that is.
Gregory Peck was in his usual handsome form and was great in pretending he is not a reporter to Hepburn. His actions were appropriate to the scenes but we can't say that he excelled herein. It was Hepburn who shined and thanks to his performance, he added that needed boost to bolster Hepburn's character to the hilt. So we applaud also his performance here. We also can't discount Eddie Albert's acting here. He was great as that hired photographer and he had lots of screen time here as well.
As we have started to review movies of this era, we noticed that story telling during this time was very much in the early stages if we compared it to modern times. This was mostly done by dialogues and not much of visual renderings, except for the location scene. Unlike the movie Charade, this was less of the dialogues and we appreciate the different style used in this one. We loved this movie more than Charade although we can't endear to the love angle between Peck and Hepburn. We simply can't relate to the fact they can be indeed lovers here in the story. She may have been young compared to Peck (15 year age gap) and Cary Grant (25 year age difference in Charade), but she had more chemistry with Cary Grant on screen as per our opinion.
In summary, we have read many great things about Roman Holiday and how glad we watched other classics prior to this movie. Story telling was very much different and when we compare Roman Holiday with the films in the 1950s and 60s, we can say that this was unique for this era. A lovely film to begin with, a simple story with simple twists, story telling kept on a steady pace, although with an ending we didn't like, other than the last one, we liked it.
Sadly its not being shown anymore in Netflix but with little research on our part, you watch this streaming on Amazon Prime. You may also watch a cut of version (split into 13 parts) on YouTube. Simply click on the thumbnail below.
