Hacker Cinema
Roman Holiday
1953 · Film · 119 min
Directed by William Wyler
Overwhelmed by her suffocating schedule, touring European princess Ann takes off for a night while in Rome. When a sedative she took from her doctor kicks in, however, she falls asleep on a park bench and is found by an American reporter, Joe Bradley, who takes her back to his apartment for safety. At work the next morning, Joe finds out Ann's regal identity and bets his editor he can get exclusive interview with her, but romance soon gets in the way.
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7 comments on Hacker News
I recently watched Beat the Devil. I thought it was pretty dreadful. I had no idea it had a cult following and I can't imagine why. The film really runs out of steam about halfway through and most of the actors seemed to be going through the motions. It is certainly not among the Huston films that I would recommend. Watch The Maltese Falcon or The Misfits first.
That said, Ebert put it on his "Great Movies" list:
https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/great-movie-beat-the-devil-1954
It's also possibly interesting for having had a 28-year old Truman Capote as screen writer. Except that I really think Capote wasn't a good fit for Hollywood. Breakfast at Tiffany's did not translate well to screen.
On the other hand, Roman Holiday is among my favorite films. It's the quintessential romcom.
For a terrific and unusual red-scare inspired film, let me recommend Johny Guitar. Now that's a film that deserves a cult following.
I've tried to watch the movie multiple times, always get bored in the beginning and abort early. Once tried to watching with a friend and we were both bored fairly quickly.
To be fair I don't watch movies / TV shows often because I have a low attention span for this stuff, but this is a movie I really wanted to like because I love the genre, but it's too slow paced for me. I do know that pacing was generally slower in older movies (eg. I recently watched "Roman Holiday" because so many older people love that one, and found it incredibly slow).
I’ll play:
The Thin Man (1934), It Happened One Night (1934), Dodworth (1936), Fury (1936), The Awful Truth (1937), Grand Illusion (1937), You Only Live Once (1937), Wizard of Oz (1939), Only Angels Have Wings (1939), The Great Dictator (1940), His Girl Friday (1940), Philadelphia Story (1940), Rebecca (1940), The Maltese Falcon (1940), Citizen Kane (1941), A Woman’s Face (1941), The Magnificent Ambersons (1942), The Ox-Bow Incident (1943), Casablanca (1943), Double Indemnity (1944), Mildred Pierce (1945), It’s a Wonderful Life (1946), The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), Great Expectations (1946), The Big Sleep (1946), The Red Shoes (1948), A Letter to Three Wives (1949), Sunset Boulevard (1950), All About Eve (1950), A Place In The Sun (1951), High Noon (1952), Roman Holiday (1953), The Wages of Fear (1953). (I slipped two French films in.)
Almost anything by Hawks during those years. Or Hitchcock. Almost anything with Bogart. Or Grant. Or by Wilder.
Tons of noir films skirted the rules.
Look, I’m not a fan of the Hays code but some of those movies were to me better because of what they had to imply.
This is after the Hays code but as an example I recently watched the original 3:10 to Yuma and the remake. I hated the remake. What appeals to me about Elmore Leonard stories is that despite being about bad guys, they have a degree of charm to them (Out of Sight, Justified, Jackie Brown, Get Shorty,etc). The remake took all of the charm out of the original and replaced it with graphic violence and cruelty.
My wife and I used to buy a DVD in the second-hand books/new dvd's shop round the corner every Friday for a Friday-night movie viewing. He knew our tastes -- it must be sweet, funny with a happy ending and no adultery or rape -- but the shop closed.
We regularly ask each other "Where's Roman Holiday but with a cute girl instead of Gregory Peck. Audrey Hepburn can stay."? Why all the drama in movies these days? We just wanna see two girls kiss and walk away in the twilight, hand-in-hand. But all we get is drama like Ammonite.
Why isn't there yet a Poser or Daz3D/Blender/MakeHuman/$GAME_ENGINE that combined makes it easy for people to tell tales as movies yet? It should be possible to put everything together in an interface that even a movie producer could understand, which would make it a doddle for ordinary people.
In Italy it's basically expected to use foreign heroes in pop culture, ever since fascism (and its farcical fall) effectively corrupted any sense of national pride. We went from a situation where "Superman" was considered too anglo-sounding under Mussolini (so he was renamed "Nembo Kid") to a postwar expectation that Italian-sounding heroes are just not credible. This was compounded by the Hollywood influence, which in Italy was stronger than average (Cinecittà studios in Rome produced quite a bit of US movies in the '50s/'60s, think "Roman Holiday" etc).
All the most popular comic book characters written and designed by Italians are not Italian: Tex Willer (US), Zagor (US), Dylan Dog (UK), Martin Mystère (US), Nathan Never (US), Diabolik (acting largely in UK)... Italian characters are typically relegated to parody strips, or stories strictly linked to local issues. Occasionally you have stuff like Ranxerox, which takes place in Italy but with people carrying anglo names.
One of the most Italian characters in comicdom, Dago (a Renaissance renegade adventurer, banished from its native Venice), was actually created by Argentinian authors Robin Wood and Alberto Salinas. The Argentinian school really knew no thematic boundaries whatsoever, and produced a number of great series in the '70s/'80s.
Somewhat ironically, the comic-books of the most traditionally-American characters ever, Disney's Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, have been largely created in Italy in modern times. Local demand for "Topolino" and "Paperino" (their Italian names) grew so large over the '70s, that the company started training their own authors in Italy. In the late '80s Disney even set up an academy in Milan to mass-produce artists and stories; it lasted 25 years, creating stories that were then published all over the world, including the US. This also means that the Disney character roster is significantly larger in Italy than pretty much anywhere else - only some of the new characters have been introduced into US canon.
Just watch the classic film “Roman Holiday” and you will associate scooters with gorgeous people.
I don't think I mistook you. The Popular Mechanics piece gives an example of quoting body language from Audrey Hepburn in the 1953 movie 'Roman Holiday'.
I don't know how I'm supposed to interpret that loop, or how it fits into any context. I can think of multiple interpretations, and have no way to figure out which one is meant, or if that mixture of interpretations is the point.
It's "Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra" for me, but without even the search ability that the text phrase has to figure out how it's used in context.
Do you have an example of how quoting is used in a good way?
> "quotations of body-language "acting" depicted in a TV show"
Similar problems exist in TV shows when actors require the watcher to know the allusion (or "quote") in order to understand what's going on. I remember as a kid watching the old Loonie Tunes and recognizing there was a gag, but not understanding it. My mom would explain that it depending on knowing that they were referencing some piece of 1950s American pop culture.
When done well, the quotes fit in smoothly. You don't need to know it's from an external source, though knowing that it does provides extra depth and texture. For example, see "References to 70-80’s movies in Stranger Things" at https://vimeo.com/175929311 .
But in mixed media of text and video, it's very hard to make a smooth transition. That's why I wrote that the clips seem to stand out in large font, exclamation points, etc., as a "look at me!" attention grabber giving the quote far more attention as a quote than as a supplement to the conversation.