Madison Avenue - 1962

 

Madison Avenue (1962) is a less slick, more cumbersome Mad Men ancestor that does not expose the hypocrisy and shallowness of the world of corporate advertising as much as it merely makes a polite nod to its existence.  It is a plodding movie, but there is something striking about the way Dana Andrews chain-smokes, wields a ready cocktail (as does everybody in this movie), and openly and publicly leers at women, condescends to them, and conveniently uses them whether he knows them or not.  If we were watching the television show Mad Men, we might grin and shake our heads at the faux-1960s parody before us.  But Madison Avenue was made in 1962 and it’s the real thing.  What may shock us more is not the behavior we titter over on Mad Men, but that we know full well it was filmed with absolutely no intent to shock us.  Nobody in the theater in the 1962 was surprised by any of it, and probably didn’t notice the sexism, or stop to count the cocktails.

This is our annual post in anticipation of Labor Day.  We’ve covered two similar films in the past here:  Executive Suite, and I Can Get it for You Wholesale.  We do not encounter in Madison Avenue any hint of the contributions of organized labor, as we do a bit the previously mentioned films, but since Madison Avenue, the New York advertising institution, plays such a huge role in our economy, for better or worse, it’s worth a look—and so is this movie, even if it does not have the energy and bite of the other films.

Dana Andrews is a cunning ad man.  We get his measure in the opening moments of the film when he in the office of a client—the CEO of a milk association, played by David White, who most of us remember as Larry Tate on Bewitched.  Mr. Andrews leers at Mr. White’s nubile secretary, speaks all the sycophant kiss-ass bilge he can to David White, and heartily sips a glass of milk to please his client with the rapture of a baby enjoying it for the first time.  Andrews is an up and coming man, we are told, but he is due for a heavy fall.

His boss, sneering, cigar in hand, played by Howard St. John, stabs him in the back over a new account because he feels threatened by Dana’s success and wants to keep him under his thumb.  Dana spends the rest of the movie trying to steal back Mr. St. John’s top account.

To do this, he enlists old girlfriend Jeanne Crain and uses her shamelessly, which she knows.  She’s disgusted with him, but stuck on the guy.  She remarks sardonically, “I just got promoted from a person to a contact.”  There is the point of the movie in a nutshell.  She’s a reporter for a Washington newspaper, and against her better judgment, does a favor for him by setting up a series of articles that will promote Dana’s new client, a small Washington-area dairy.  This is his first steppingstone to swiping the big client—David White—back from Mr. St. John.

Dana starts by attaching himself like a barnacle to a small, dying ad agency run by Eleanor Parker.  Her only employee is played by the wonderful Kathleen Freeman, who, as Dana Andrews says, “She greets people as if they were stepping into an open grave.”

One of my favorite scenes in this movie is when Dana is led by Miss Freeman back to Eleanor Parker’s office.  He passes slowly through a large, dim room with empty desks and drafting tables.  We see this business is failing, with almost all employees let go, and the lights turned down to save energy.  It is deathly quiet.  I think there may be nothing more haunting and depressing than a business that looks like it’s going under, or already has.  Haunted houses are not more ominous.

This scene, and a couple scenes that show the New York City skyline from the enormous windows of an executive office—which denotes power as much as Eleanor Parker’s dingy office denotes failure—are really the only times that setting moves the story along.  This movie was shot in CinemaScope, and really didn’t need to be.  Most of the action takes place in a bar.  Because of this widescreen camera process, we have very few close-ups—they didn’t look good in CinemaScope—and we have actors placed several feet apart from each other when delivering their lines.  The space needs to be filled up, you see, so CinemaScope becomes the master of the film instead of the director.

 

 

As for bars, if we’re not in the bar, we’re talking about going to a bar at the airport, or downtown.  Even a later bowling alley scene has the neon sign “Cocktails” right over the shoulders of the actors.  In 1962, it seems people needed a lot of refueling.

Dana, taking stock of Miss Parker’s office, decides to join her firm like a rainmaker promising a shower to a desperate farmer.  His message is hardly friendly; it is downright rude, but strikingly honest and ultimately helpful to her:

“You need light walls behind you, maybe one of those French grays that looks neutral that vibrates with life; low, modern furniture, paler than your hair; thick, cream-colored carpets; indirect lighting, with a few hidden spots directed at you.  That’s an old stage trick.  Concentrate light, you concentrate attention.” 

 

 

Then he proceeds to tell her what a mess she looks like.  “You look like a refugee from a nursing school or a novel by Louisa May Alcott.”  He suggests a new outfit, makeup, a little blush and lipstick two shades darker.  He wants soft wools, nothing frilly, that fits well but not too tightly, with the sheerest hose she can find and high heels.  No jewelry, or very little.  “The average businessman wants the deal, not the dame.  When a man is doing business with a woman, he doesn’t want her sex thrown at him.  It’s distracting.  On the other hand, he resents it if she throws her sex out the window.”  He writes her a check to fix herself up.

 

 

What a fine tightrope the ladies in business walk, but one wonders if good taste can really be taught, let alone be manipulated to a commercial advantage.  The advertising world of today clearly has no use for good taste.

Just when we may despise him for  his arrogance, he treats Kathleen Freeman with greater tact, moving her from the receptionist’s job—because he wants an attractive, younger woman there—and appoints her as his personal secretary.  No young chippie for him to sit on his lap.  He’s got work to do and realizes she has experience.  He gives her a raise, and they become pals.  His one gesture of flirtation is to tell her that “Thelma” is a very pretty name.  We see it makes her whole day.

 

 

Miss Parker, after initial resentment, takes Dana’s advice and comes into the work the next day in a whole new outfit, her hair coifed, and ready for action.  They converge upon the owner of the dairy, a simpleton, child-like oaf who inherited it from his father.  He is played in a very cute and deceptively deft way by Eddie Albert.  They meet him in his executive office.  He plays with toys, and wears a white milkman’s uniform, because he likes to take his own route for fun.  The business of the company is left to sour-faced Henry Daniell, who is kind of wasted in the small role.

 

 

Eddie Albert takes a shine to Miss Parker, which Dana notices and he exploits.  Soon they have the account, and Dana, in his campaign to win back David White’s business, creates two Frankenstein monsters: Eddie Albert and Eleanor Parker.

Mr. Albert’s shy reticence soon turns to bombastic egoism with every speech he’s encouraged to make before members of his industry.  He sounds like a fool, but he speaks with absolute belief in the blather he says.  Confidence, it seems, is the path to power, and real substance doesn’t matter.  His business increases, but more important to him, his fame and power increases and soon we see he may be invited to run for public office—shades of A Face in the Crowd (1957) here, another great movie showing the hypocrisy of the advertising world and political evil of manipulating public opinion.   (But as we see, not even ad men are immune to the spell of their own message -- Dana confesses he smokes too much because he got hooked on the habit when he worked for a cigarette account.)

 

Eleanor, who, after some vigorous chasing of Dana realizes he’s not the marrying kind, transfers her intentions, if not actual affections, to Eddie Albert who looks as though he’s going places.  She began as an earnest and hardworking ad woman, who like Mr. Albert, inherited the family business, but given a taste of the glamorous life, wants to keep it by hook or crook.  In a strange way, they really are meant for each other.

 

 

The movie culminates with a series of double-crosses.  Jeanne Crain wants to take Dana down by writing an exposé on his tactics and the nefarious ad world.  Dana, realizing he’s responsible for foisting Eddie Albert on the American public, plots to knock him out of high position even at the cost of his own career.  That move, and his relationship with Kathleen Freeman are the only indications we have that deep down, Dana is a mensch. 

He tells Mr. Albert, “I’m tired of inflating balloons.  I’m tired of seeing good men held back while mediocrity like you are catapulted to the top.”

 

 

And of Miss Parker, he regrets that he, “kicked her up the ladder, now all she wants to do is kick other people in the face.”  Curiously, all the people Dana has touched in this movie are the worse for it.  Ironic for man who’s supposed to have the Midas touch.

 

 

Dana Andrews was in his early fifties when he made this film, and looks older than a freewheeling bachelor cad who is supposed to be up and coming in his career.  The two leading ladies are in their late 30s, and all of them are nearing the end of the film careers (though Eleanor Parker gets to make one more big splash as the nasty countess in The Sound of Music- 1965).  The 1960s will belong to younger actors with fewer moral dilemmas.

Only plucky, indispensible Kathleen Freeman would have a longer active career in film, TV, and the stage as a character actor we’re not supposed to notice but we always do.  She was working on Broadway in the musical version of The Full Monty in 2001 (a role for which she was nominated for a Tony), when she died of lung cancer only five days after she resigned her part.  She was 82. 

That’s a trouper.

We never really know where Dana stands with Jeanne Crain until the last few moments of the film, when he proposes.  I don’t think we really believe him at this point, but Jeanne does.

 

 

One other scene I like occurs in a bowling alley, where Dana brings an out-of-town client to entertain him.  The client is played by our old pal Grady Sutton.  Here’s our previous post on Grady.  It’s also nice to see that Mr. Sutton actually got screen credit; he usually did not.

In way, I suppose it’s appropriate that Dana’s unresolved relationships keep us off balance, because that reflects his personality, and the CinemaScope-required arm’s-length distance between characters also suggests the isolation and lack of warmth, of genuine connection between the characters.  We just can’t seem to get close to these people, but maybe it’s for the best.  There’s really not much there.  Both reflect Madison Avenue and the modern world where insincerity, shallowness and opportunism are the way to prosper.  Mad Men is intentionally nostalgic; Madison Avenue is unwittingly prophetic.

 

Roz Russell's Waterbury Premiere

Rosalind Russell experienced a very special, but precarious, movie premiere when her comedy “The Girl Rush” (1955) premiered in her hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut. What began as an exciting and poignant celebration of, as the newsreel narration put it, “hometown girl makes good”, ended in a frightening disaster when an unforeseen flood nearly obliterated Waterbury that night.

She wrote in her autobiography, “Life is a Banquet” (with Chris Chase, Random House, NY, 1977) “Nineteen fifty-five was my year for attracting natural disasters.”

Mayor Snyder, Rosland Russell, and Gloria DeHaven.



The festivities were scheduled for August 18th. Roz (as she was referred in the local paper), was due to arrive by train along with her co-stars from the film, Fernando Lamas, Eddie Albert, and Gloria DeHaven (who we last saw in this post on “Summer Stock” - 1950)

According to author Bernard F. Dick’s biography, “Forever Mame - The Life of Rosalind Russell” (University Press of Mississippi, 2006), Miss Russell arrived the day before, visited with siblings and her elderly mother, and prepared to take on the public mantle of hometown hero.

Miss Russell remarks in her autobiography, “Waterbury authorities explained that I was the only motion picture star to have a theatre named for her (I don’t know whether they meant in Waterbury or in the United States or in the entire world, but how could such a declaration not go to a girl’s head?)”

In “Life is a Banquet” she puts us right in the middle of the scenario, “Before the rains came, I rode in a parade in a white satin dress that was all beaded, with a matching little thing that sat on my head, being Princess Grace all over the joint.”

The stars, along with the flock of Paramount newsreel men, the inevitable publicity department, and some 10,000 townspeople straggling on the sidewalks to watch the parade, would be taken from the railroad station to the Elton Hotel, the swank spot in town.

After a luncheon, the Hollywood contingent were then to be whisked away to City Hall where Mayor Raymond E. Snyder, Sr. (who incidentally had bought Rosalind Russell’s parent’s home a couple of decades before and turned it into a funeral parlor, which it remains), would present her with the key to the city. They were also to get a tour of town, including some of the Brass City’s famous industries, and Roz’s birthplace.

Dave Garroway (who is mentioned as having a problem with chimpanzees on the set of The Today Show in this post from Monday), showed up with his Today Show crew to film the festivities live on television from the Elton Hotel.

Roz’s take: “There was a big dinner at the great snob Waterbury Club, and my brother had to make a speech, and everything was to be televised - crews had been there for a week, setting up cameras all over the Waterbury green.”

They were in the right place to broadcast an even bigger surprise story the next day.

The evening of the 18th, they all headed over to the State Theater, which had just been re-named the Rosalind Russell State Theater, to watch the premiere of “The Girl Rush.” The Mattatuck Drum Band and a U.S. Marine Color provided escort.

Roz writes in her autobiography that, “there was a drum and fife corps - that’s very big in Connecticut; they always wear tricorne hats.”

The shots of Roz accompanying this post are all from a newsreel. Here is the plaque Roz unveiled marking the occasion.

Limos downtown, and powerful spotlights sweeping the cloud-covered night sky. Nothing like it had ever been seen in this factory town. Nothing ever would again. By morning, the Rosalind Russell State Theater, like much of the downtown, would be under several feet of water.

That cloud-covered sky. It had been raining pretty steadily all day during the celebrations on the 18th. By late that evening, smaller brooks in the Naugatuck River valley would jump their banks. The mighty Naugatuck itself, which powered so much industry in Waterbury, would morph in the wee hours to a monstrous thing that scraped factories, stores, and homes to rubble before morning, and leave some 30 people dead in Waterbury and over 90 people dead or missing and presumed dead total in the towns of the Naugatuck Valley.

Astonishing was the suddenness of the event. To be sure, Hurricane Diane had spent a couple of weeks sliding up the Eastern seaboard, but it made a sharp right turn out to sea before ever entering New England. It, and Hurricane Connie, dropped more rain than the already sodden ground could take, and what had begun as a gloomy day became a fearful night of torrential downpour, causing destruction no one could have predicted.

Roz fortuitously left right after the premiere, rented a car with her maid and a driver, and they made their way to New Haven while the bridges were being washed out in Waterbury.

From Roz’s autobiography: “I directed the driver - ‘Go up this hill, go down that lane, I know this town’ - because I realized if we could get to New Haven, we could get from there to New York. There was no hope of driving along the Naugatuck Valley toward Bridgeport; the Naugatuck River had overflowed.”

Her intention was to make it to the next publicity chore, the Ed Sullivan Show in New York City on the 21st, for an appearance with co-star Gloria DeHaven to promote “The Girl Rush.”

According to Mr. Dick's book, Miss DeHaven, however, got stuck in Waterbury temporarily until train service resumed.

Recovery took weeks, months, even years for some people. Some businesses, and people, never did recover.

According to this Cinema Treasures information, the State Theater had at various times, been called the Broadway, the Bijou, or the Rialto. It was torn down a couple decades ago. Currently, it is a parking lot.

This remarkable event was the last time Rosalind Russell ever visited Waterbury. Truly, the dual theatrical masks of comedy and tragedy were worn on this night.

For more on the New England Flood of 1955, have a look at tomorrow’s “New England Travels” blog.

The 1950s Princess - Part 1

For the next three posts, concluding next Thursday, we’ll discuss what could be a social phenomenon, or maybe just a passing fad…the 1950s princess.

Three films we’ll use to examine our '50s princesses are Roman Holiday (1953), The Swan (1956) here, and Anastasia (1956) here. There are similarities, and there are differences, but there may yet be a thread that links the three films, the three stars, that possibly has to do with the last years of a lumbering paternal Hollywood machine, and society at large in the last decade or so before feminism became a social force.  Maybe you have some thoughts about this.  I look forward to your comments.

The three princesses are Audrey Hepburn, Grace Kelly, and Ingrid Bergman, icons of that decade. One would obviously note at this juncture that Grace Kelly distinguished herself among this group by actually becoming a real princess, but that is not the only instance where make-believe blurred with reality in these three films. There is cozy melding of fantasy with reality, rather than usurping it, that may determine the uniqueness of the 1950s princess, something apart from any other kind of Cinderella story from films of previous decades.  We never go too deeply into fantasy.

It could be said that the 1950s was an era obsessed with princesses. The coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953 marked a profound response by media and fascinated commoners around the world newly linked by fast developing communications technology.

What part the backwash of World War II could have had in this fascination is intriguing. There are several factors to consider. First, in the United States at least, there was a fairy tale aspect to the swarm of returning veterans building suburban dream houses for sweethearts who had waited for them, women who had now left the grind of the war plant to set up housekeeping in long planned for and idealized homes of their own with modern gadgets. Peacetime at the end of several years of hardship, worry, and terror, was the happy ending. Americans have always been addicted to happy endings.

Home, and the children who followed in the happy ending, were considered primarily feminine concerns, a woman’s realm, but the post-War woman seemed determined to avoid being the kind of household drudge she may have regarded her mother. Gadgets and modern appliances were part of the modern woman’s campaign to keep her station elevated, but there was something more. It had to do with fashion, and icons, which perhaps had to do with advertising.

The 1950s were a time of breakneck manufacturing, selling, and advertising. Cars were big, and women’s skirts were long and full. The new muscular economy brought forth a woman with an idealized feminine wardrobe, elements of which, like the cinched waist and full skirt dress, petticoats and evening gowns which allowed for bare shoulders, had not been seen for nearly 100 years, when such styles would have been comfortable at any mid-19th century cotillion. 

Or, as one ad in the New York Times in November of 1951 described a "breathtaking" nylon tulle dress, "feminine allure of bared shoulders, sculptured waists, skirts that whirl forever." 

Other elements in 1950s society were forward-looking, modern, Atomic Age. Women’s fashions, however, were receding to a romantic past. For a time, even the tiara became standard decoration from brides to debutantes. And these princesses had princess phones.

Roman Holiday sets us in this post-War paradoxical world, with a modern princess from a fictional country. The country is never named, even to give it a fictional name, and this adds, curiously, to the film’s realistic veneer. We may well imagine it is one of any number of small locales in Europe previously unknown to Americans until the GIs came through. Names of countries we, in our self-absorbed manner, never bothered to learn.

The film begins with a kind of Citizen Kane jolt of realism with a pseudo-newsreel opening. Audrey Hepburn, as Princess Ann, attends various functions on a European tour to promote trade for her tiny country.

The movie was filmed on location in Rome, and this is one of the best things about Roman Holiday. It has all the adventure of the many location films produced in the 1950s and afterward, but there’s a subtle post-war European just-getting-back-on-their-feet quality to this film. It’s not just a travelogue; it’s a look into ordinary lives that are not terribly hip despite the Vespa scooters.

Like our cliché American not needing to know which country the princess comes from because we will likely be ignorant of it anyway and who cares (when Grace Kelly married Prince Rainier III of Monaco, Americans went scrambling for their atlases), is the occasional reference to the Italian lire as being extremely devalued compared to the American dollar. On a few occasions, Gregory Peck flips through large bank notes worth thousands of lire and notes with a smirk it is worth about a dollar and a half. Such commercial observations brings the fairy tale and the travelogue to a halt.

Its being shot in black and white probably adds to this suggestion of realism compared to later films of this similarly lighthearted vein shot in Italy, like Three Coins in the Fountain (1954) and Summertime (1955), which were more like picture postcards with a plot.  (Ten-year-old Jackie Coogan remarked on a visit to Rome and an audience with the Pope in 1924 that Rome was "the best place in the world for shooting pictures, after Hollywood."  Out of the mouths of babes.)

But the realism in Roman Holiday is occasionally delicately swept aside by the fairy tale. Audrey Hepburn plays the reverse of Cinderella. She is a princess overburdened by the responsibility of representing her tiny country and runs away to escape her troubles and wander the city as an ordinary person. Her tour guide is Gregory Peck, who is partly her fairy godfather and partly her charming prince. By the end of the film, Miss Hepburn’s character changes from a sad girl to a sadder-but-wiser woman of authority. The story is at turns funny, romantic, occasionally breathtaking.

Some elements of realism in the story are hidden, part of the backdrop of which we, in our own innocence, may not be aware. For instance, some of the royalty attending the embassy ball were real minor European royalty, wearing their real jewels. At the end of the film, many of the journalists introducing themselves at the press conference were actually working European journalists playing themselves, not actors. It may not be important to the story that we know this, but knowing it adds depth to the legacy of this movie and the blurring of reality.

Most of film is populated by some terrific Italian character actors, such as Paolo Carlini, who plays the barber who cuts Audrey Hepburn’s hair, turning her long, girlish tresses into a short, modern, 1950s style. Audrey is not just a princess, she’s a modern princess, a 1950s princess.

There are many delightful moments in the film which have director William Wyler’s imprint on them: when Hepburn loses her shoe in the receiving line and her anxious staff must find a graceful way to retrieve it for her. We see that royalty, like William Wyler, lives in a world where attention to detail is foremost, and perfection is a subtle quality sometimes to be worked at, and sometimes only chanced upon.

But the ball is dreary for a young person. Retiring for the evening in the ornate bedroom of her country’s Roman embassy, Audrey stands on the enormous bed, moping and brushing her hair, dressed in a voluminous and somewhat old-fashioned nightgown, looking like a pouting child, “I hate all my nightgowns and all my underwear, too.”

It is the first line we hear her speak after several minutes of princessly posturing for the public in her finery, and most charmingly disarmed, we are clued in immediately to the troubled mindset of this young woman.

She is overwhelmed and overtired, depressed and anxious, ready for a breakdown, as every moment in her life is booked up. Her youth, her charm is perhaps her beleaguered country’s ace in the hole. She is sent on the public relations tour, doing the work of seasoned diplomats, but completely unarmed for the rigor of being both politician and icon.

Margaret Rowlings plays the Countess, her lady in waiting who has the charge of Audrey and, like the rest of the staff, plays her role with splendid warmth and tightly controlled comedy. Needing to get the nearly hysterical girl calm, she first pleads,

“Control yourself, Ann.” Then she barks, “Your highness!” not as a gesture of respect, but as a reminder to Audrey of her station in life and duty. It comes as a slap in the face. 

The phrase "your highness", as much as it is a respectful grand gesture, will always carry a glint of dismal foreboding in all these three films, a reminder of the limitations of being a princess.

She is remorseful, “I’ll bow, and I’ll smile, and I’ll improve trade relations!” but asks if she can keep just one light on when the doctor gives her a sedative and puts her to bed, like a child again. But, the child will run away, as children sometimes will, (and something princesses occasionally seem to do, as we’ll see in our next two posts) dressed and clutching her white gloves, before the sedative knocks her out, and will return in 24 hours a princess of maturity and authority.

Mr. Peck is a journalist, one of the typical movie newshounds who chases stories and is always hard up for cash. He discovers the now tranquilized and loopy Audrey Hepburn on a bench, takes her home to sleep it off, and only discovers the next day that the street person is a princess. He intends to exploit her for the story of a lifetime, and so this leads to both romance and screwball comedy.

But if this had been filmed in the 1930s, the golden age of screwball comedy, we likely would have had a different story. We would have had a studio back lot Ruritanian setting, not the real streets and warm velvet night of Rome. We would have had more Cinderella and less trade relations. We would have had a different ending. This is the 1950s when life, and especially princesses, has to be taken more seriously. After World War II and the atomic age, you can’t really go back to fairy tales and believe them.

More great moments: The funny bit when loopy Audrey, being taken home by him, is about to knock on a neighbor’s door and he grabs her wrist just in time.

“Is this the elevator?” she wonders at his dingy one-room apartment with sleepy dignity. She speaks with precise diction, and gentle awareness of her difference to people who are not royal.

“I’ve never been alone with a man before, even with my dress on. With my dress off, it’s most unusual.” Her line is delivered in a manner not coquettish, just pondering, which makes it all the funnier.

When Mr. Peck tosses the now sound asleep Audrey off his bed and onto a smaller, hard couch, it is a funny slapstick moment. So much for chivalry. When the next morning he discovers he has harbored a princess, he awakens her with a respectful implied request for her to admit her identity.

“Your royal highness?”

“Yes, what is it?” she sleepily responds, and we sense Peck’s triumph because he’s now sitting on the story of the year. In a way, we share his glee, because she is a real princess, and we hear the soft mist of some middle European folk theme playing in the background, which we associate with the young princess. She is who she is. As royalty, she is her own destiny.

When at last she is aware and jumps at his voice, she learns she has spent the night in his room. A look of indecision, concern, alarm, melting into a sort of naughty glee as she erupts with a luminous smile and an infectious giggle. Princesses are humble as they are proud. It is a joyful surprise when we learn they are also human. They are one of us.

But we don’t really want them to be one of us. We want them to be special, perhaps only so we may exploit them.

Another interesting play on reality versus fantasy is that throughout their day’s adventure together of sightseeing in Rome, Mr. Peck pretends not to know she is a princess, and allows her to pretend not to be one. Ostensibly, his motive is to catch her with her guard down, but as the day progresses, it becomes a kind of courtesy they extend to each other, not to shatter their pleasant outing with the hard truth. This is much better than if she had revealed at the beginning she is a princess out for a spree. It is a secret we share with both of them separately. We, too, want to see her let her hair down, but we don’t want to see her hurt.

More fun moments: the cleaning woman played by Paola Barborni berating Audrey in Italian for her loose morals, having found her wrapped in a towel in Gregory Peck’s bathroom. Also the janitor, who suspiciously frowns at Mr. Peck when he thinks Audrey is a prostitute.

Though the movie is less concerned with the setting than the plot, we do get glimpses of the Trevi Fountain, the Spanish Steps, the Coliseum. We get a more profound view of what it is like for a princess, who never carries money, to have her hair cut or buy an ice cream. She is helpless in the real world, princesses are. We have to take care of her, shelter her. Keep her as an inspiration, a muse, but never let her do for herself. Keep her from being independent, but for her sake or for ours? How many sheltered 1950s American suburban princesses brooded over the same thing about themselves?

Her first independent action, in having her hair cut, is to change her own appearance. She wants to be different, even if only the illusion of being different.

Eddie Albert is wonderful as Peck’s beatnik photographer buddy. He joins them on their madcap spree around Rome, taking secret candid photos of the princess living her dream of escape.

The climax of the movie occurs that evening when they attend a dance on a river barge. Her country’s secret service, having been dispatched to find her, suddenly catch up with her. A brawl erupts in the tradition of slapstick mistaken identity plots, and Miss Hepburn and Mr. Peck escape by jumping into the river and swimming away.

A sweet romantic moment becomes instantly erotic when they climb out of the water, sit on the riverbank, dripping wet, laughing over their adventure, and suddenly kiss. Instead of the usual movie violins swelling, and throwing their arms around each other for another kiss, reality sets in. They pull part, staring at each other, droplets of water dripping down their faces, surprised at what they have done, and the fantasy takes another realistic turn. There are consequences.

Back in his apartment, she is in his paisley bathrobe, primping in his bathroom, waiting for her clothes to dry, where the disapproving cleaning woman had earlier accused her of naughty things. Gregory Peck has changed into dry clothes, a freshly knotted tie around his neck, because real men wear ties.

They listen to a radio bulletin about the sick princess. The palace has issued a fake report hiding the fact that she is missing. It seems a modern touch, this simple spin doctoring, this manipulation of the media. It is her first inkling that people are worried about her, that others might suffer for what she has done.

They turn the radio off, because each still wants to protect the other, and make the fairy tale last a little longer.

We learn the Princess has been taught to cook, and sew, and clean, and iron as part of her education. “I just haven’t had a chance to do it for anyone.” She never will as a princess, unlike her American suburban princess counterparts.

They nearly confess both their love for each other and their real identities, embracing with longing and desperation, but with an ultimate self discipline that keeps them from doing either. What they share will end forever the moment they talk about it, and they know that.

He takes her back to the embassy in a car, and it is a leaden goodbye, until they kiss again in a farewell that grows tragic. When she greets her staff, and they remonstrate her for running away, she demonstrates instantly that she is now in charge, and is no longer their charge.

“Were I not completely aware of my duty to my family and my country, I would not have come back tonight, or indeed, ever again.” Her commanding voice shakes at the last bit with barely repressed emotion. She dismisses them, not with haughtiness, but with the authority that is her birthright, that she has discovered, ironically, by running away from it.

She is left alone in her room with its baroque accoutrements, walking in a stately manner to the window, not galloping there as a curious child like she did only the day before.

Another fun moment is when photographer Eddie Arnold shows up at Peck’s room and they review all the candid photos, thinking up funny cut lines. But, Gregory Peck now changes his mind about publishing a tabloid story about the runaway princess. He wants to forget it.

Arnold pleads, “She’s fair game, Joe. It’s always open season on princesses.”

What might have been written as a comic line carries a hard and unsavory truth to it. Princess Diana would one day discover that, too.

Perhaps the grandest moment of the film is the end, when all the press meet in the ballroom of the embassy where the Princess will hold a press conference. She shows up, her staff in tow, no longer in her fairly princess evening gown, but dressed for business, a 1950s variation on the Juliet cap planted on the top of her short hairdo, a modern stateswoman.

She is shocked to discover Gregory Peck is a journalist, but when she makes a general, but probing, remark about faith among nations and trust among people, Mr. Peck responds in code that she has nothing to fear from him, and he will keep their secret. “We believe that your highness’ faith will not be unjustified.”

Comforted by his gesture of gentlemanly discretion, the Princess deviates from the script when she admits that her favorite city on her tour has been Rome, “I will cherish my visit here as long as I live.” It is a grand declaration, and a personal one. Then, alarming her staff, she presses the flesh with the (real) journalists, just so she can touch Peck one last time. Mr. Albert slips her the candid photos in an envelope. He will keep their secret, too.

“So happy, Mr. Bradley,” giving her standard greeting to Gregory Peck that she had earlier mocked as being one of the most tiresome things she had to say as princess, but there is more meaning in it this time. She gently shakes his hand.

For all its dignity, it is one of the most romantic moments in the film.

Then she moves down the line, and we see him swallow with emotion. The press, captivated, applauds her act of humanness. She has won them over with a handshake. She has done her diplomatic mission by being what people want her to be: a Princess, and yet one of them. A fine line to walk.

She walks off with her staff after one last look. All the press filter away, but Peck remains solidly at the barrier rope, looking blankly ahead. Then he turns and makes his slow walk down the grand ballroom, his footsteps echoing, a mixed expression of pain and pride on his face, pride for what she is. A princess, with a special destiny. They will never see each other again. It is a perfect ending.

Had this been filmed in earlier decades, they might have ended up together, either she giving up her throne or he being discovered to secretly have been a prince all along. Or, a combination of the two. After all, Britain’s King Edward VIII gave up his throne for the woman he loved a generation earlier, but still got to remain a Duke. Having one’s cake and eating it, too.

Had the movie been made in later decades, we might have none of the nobility (not of bloodlines but of spirit), or the heartbreak of self denial. Self denial has long been out of fashion.

Come back next Monday for Part 2 of the 1950s Princess when we have a look at Grace Kelly in The Swan here, which she made while, unknown to her colleagues on set, she was being secretly courted by a prince.

A Warner Pathe newsreel on events leading to the wedding in Monaco is another example of the melding of fantasy and reality; it’s curiously reminiscent of the fake newsreel of Audrey Hepburn’s good will tour of Europe at the beginning of Roman Holiday.

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Jacqueline T. Lynch is the author of Ann Blyth: Actress. Singer. Star. and Memories in Our Time - Hollywood Mirrors and Mimics the Twentieth Century. Her newspaper column on classic films, Silver Screen, Golden Memories is syndicated nationally.