Roman Holiday (Special Collector's Edition) | Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn

Roman Holiday (Special Collector's Edition) | Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn | Delightful

DVDs:

Roman Holiday (Spe...

	Roman Holiday (Special Collector's Edition) Gregory Peck, Audrey Hepburn Paramount, 2002 average customer review:based on 174 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

"Rome! By all means, Rome. I will cherish my visit here in memory as long as I live",

William Wyler's "Roman Holiday" is one of the very best, most charming fantasy/romantic comedies ever made. It is sweet, funny, simple, beautiful, and tender. It takes place in the eternal city of Rome during 24 hours that its heroine as well as every movie lover in the world will cherish for as long as they live. The heroine is a young princess, the sole heiress to the throne of an unnamed European country. One evening while visiting Rome, she decides to take a holiday from her royal duties and stiffing life style and explore Rome as one of commoners on her own. She is accompanied by an American newsman, Joe Bradley (Gregory Peck) and his cameraman and sidekick, Irving Radovich (Eddie Albert).

Everything and everyone is perfect and highly enjoyable in "Roman Holiday". Wyler's idea to direct the film entirely in Rome proved to be extremely successful. The script by Dalton Trumbo is terrific. Peck as a handsome journalist who seems to hit a jack pot with the story about a runaway princess that can make him both famous and rich but whose plans collapsed when he fell in love with her was perfect for a role. So was Eddie Albert in his Oscar nominated performance.

The film belongs to Audrey Hepburn. With her blend of innocence, vulnerability, inner strength, and real class, she was perfectly cast in her first Hollywood role that brought her the Oscar. Hepburn was the daughter of a Dutch Aristocrat mother and a British father. She spent the WWII years starving and hiding from Nazis in occupied Holland. The article from the time of "Roman Holiday"s release describes Audrey as an original, "A thin child-woman with irregular teeth, wide jawbone, flaring nostrils and upswept brows, yet she carries herself with ethereal grace and entrances with a smile both wistful and radiant, and has remarkably large and expressive eyes." Gregory Peck predicted from the very first day of the shooting that Hepburn would win Academy Award for her performance and she'd become a huge star. She went to many screen successes including "Sabrina", "Breakfast at Tiffany", Charade, and "My Fair Lady" among others. Her death from cancer in 1992 at the age of 63 left a gap that will never be filled. There will never be another Audrey Hepburn but the final scene of her first film with the close-up of her marvelous face and that "wistful and radiant smile" will live forever as one of the cinema's most precious images.

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Delightful

What an amazing delight!
I think Audrey Hepburn is sensational but I had never seen this film. My husband who had suffered through years and years of romantic movies on Saturday afternoons at the Capitol with his mother started off hostile and set to be dismissive. Well within minutes we were bewitched, charmed and delighted. Audrey Hepburn was so fresh and unselfconscious - it was as if she had forgotten the cameras were there and she was just having fun with these great grownups. There is one scene where her laughter is as thrilling and unconditional as a child's - lovely and poignant.
And Rome, that other character in the film! Well I found myself thinking - this movie was made in 1953 - that is well over a century ago and I know that the past is a foreign country and all that but this was as good as a holiday in Rome and in the past.

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My All-Time Favorite Movie

I have watched this movie at least a dozen times and it still never fails to enchant me. This may not be the best love movie of all but it is definitely one of the greatest and most enduring!

Audrey really looked fresh on the screen, Roman Holiday being her debut American film. Gregory Peck was really good as the newspaper guy contrary to what others think that he was a miscast. Regarding the ending, I admit I was really upset when I first watched it, but then I thought it was really the perfect ending. I would not have loved it so otherwise.

I recommend this to everyone who loves classic love stories and realistic endings!

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Really Good Movie

DVD was received in good order and played well. Good shots of Rome, Italy. I liked the acting and the actors had good chemistry.

The past is not always as we remember it

My wife and I recently visited Italy, including several days in Rome. We thought watching this old movie (and Three Coins in a Fountain reviewed elsewhere) would be a pleasant way to relive some of the visit. My mother-in-law watched with us. Of the three of us, I was the only one who wanted to watch the whole movie (but I am a die-hard fan of old movies, generally of a different sort). It has not aged well. We were disapponted in the sparsity of scenes of Rome, that being our main reason for watching it. The story line was implausable in the 1950s and more so today, but the acting was okay, the storyline sufficient to keep my attention (if not that of my wife or mother-in-law) and I've always enjoyed Gregory Peck and Audrie Hepburn.

I remember being dragged to this movie as a young boy by my mother who could not get anyone else in the family to go with her. I was too young to protest successfully. Now that I am in my 60s, I think my earlier reluctance was not misplaced. However, it is harmless and pleasant enough in its own way and has an 1950s mildly uplifting theme. I can imagine a more modern treatment of this theme (princess wants to escape her life in the eye of the media and royal obligations and experience the common life for a while, then has to make a choice between "true love" and family/state obligations), but I doubt I would want to watch that either.

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