Screening Log - Roman Holiday

Boy, Audrey Hepburn is just a heavenly little creature, isn’t she? My Hepburn knowledge is shockingly sub-par (I watched My Fair Lady with my mom 15 years ago – and until this one, nothing since) so I was pleasantly surprised by those big dark eyes and remarkable screen presence.

Roman Holiday was a lot of fun – fabulous shots of Rome’s landmarks and street scenes, and Gregory Peck was great too, as the American journalist who shows Hepburn’s runaway Princess around the city. He rocked that classic 1950s American-movie-actor accent, you know the one I mean? All those old guys have that odd, here’s-looking-at-you-kid, kind of deliberate way of speaking. I can’t explain it exactly, but the sound is just as evocative of that era, for me, as the grainy black and white film.

The one let-down of the movie is that it’s taken some of the shine off one of my favourite cheesy chick flicks, Chasing Liberty. It’s the Mandy Moore pic where the First Daughter runs off to Europe with a dashing British photographer, and I watch it whenever I’m feeling the travel bug. But it’s also a blatant, shameless rip-off of Roman Holiday, which I had never realized before, and that makes me a little sad.

I’ll definitely have to expand my Audrey Hepburn repertoire – up next, Breakfast at Tiffany’s! That way I’ll finally know what Deep Blue Something was talking about in that good old one-hit-wonder of theirs…