Sabrina

Audrey Hepburn’s fame is so divorced from the actual movies she made that it’s likely many people who think they adore her haven’t even taken the time to watch Roman Holiday, Sabrina, Funny Face, or Breakfast at Tiffany’s, to see for themselves just how boring they all are. Of those four, the one I can tolerate is Sabrina, but after re-watching it this weekend, I felt strongly that the nearly two-hour film was twenty minutes too long. Sabrina showcases Hepburn’s natural charm and her unusual, captivating screen presence, as well as her striking fashion choices, via French fashion designer Givenchy. But the movie lumbers along at a much too contented pace as Sabrina woos—and is wooed by—two brothers, played by Humphrey Bogart and William Holden. (Bogart was thirty years her senior, while Holden was just eleven years older.) Sabrina is the daughter of their chauffeur, so the movie gets to “examine” the class structure. (It’s not all that convincing.) By the time Sabrina made up her mind, I was frankly bored and not too thrilled with her choice. But the first half of the film has a lot of lovely moments. The director, Billy Wilder, knows how to create a mood. Sabrina is lit beautifully, capturing the enchanting quality of studio films of the 1950s. It’s also kind of a somber reflection on unrequited love up to a point, a sort of 1950s take on what it was like to be Juliet, only Sabrina doesn’t commit suicide (she tries), and she eventually does get what she wants. She’s so obsessed with William Holden’s character that when she returns from a two-year stay in Paris (for culinary school) all dolled up and all grown up, she wants to recreate his romances with other girls, the ones she would spy on from a tree-top when she was a girl. Maybe there’s a little of Fatal Attraction in there, somewhere. There’s also a distressing kind of cultural and economic prophesying in this movie: The corporation the two brothers work for (which is owned by their father) is developing all kinds of plastics, which are indestructible even to fire, and Bogart mutters with a perverse sense of pleasure that some day soon they’ll probably be able to eat the plastic. How naïve we were then to think we weren’t hurting ourselves—and our planet—with our inventions of convenience. Come to think of it, many romantic comedies of the 1950s were about mildly-career-driven women (like Doris Day) dating men who worked for big corporations making strange new inventions that are strangely normal to us now.

Breakfast at Tiffany's

Breakfast at Tiffany's (1961) showcases Audrey Hepburn's glamorous loveliness, and it probably cemented people's equating of Hepburn with cool cosmopolitan chic. But the movie's a bore, stretched out with lots of unconvincing little vignettes until it reaches its blatantly obvious conclusion. Hepburn plays Holly Golightly, a frivolous girl who lives on the cash of wealthy gentlemen, and throws loud parties in her cramped East Side apartment in New York, to the chagrin of her landlord (Mickey Rooney made up to look Japanese. He's a caricature, the embodiment of what Americans think of when they use the slur, "Jap.") Holly becomes friends with her new neighbor, Paul (George Peppard), whom she calls "Fred." Paul's a writer who gets paid to sleep with a wealthy interior decorator (Patricia Neal), which in turn funds his burgeoning literary career.

As I understand it, the relationship between George and Holly in Truman Capote's novel was considerably more Will-and-Grace than it is in the movie. Screenwriter George Axelrod turned Paul from gay to straight, and made him into the one redemptive love interest in Holly's long line of "rats" and "super rats," the men she pursues for her love of money. But it's so hard to want Paul and Holly to get together when she treats him with such indifference at times. She's flighty, and when she's not being impetuous and charming, she's distastefully rotten, and her self-absorption, which is always apparent, becomes overt and offensive. Paul's a nice guy, Holly's the girl he can't have. When he finally unmasks her at the end, breaking her stubbornness, you wish he could have told her earlier. The film would have been shorter and far less irritating.

The problem with a lot of Audrey Hepburn's movies is that directors and screenwriters are always trying to turn her into something "real" or "deep." She can't just be chic and stylish, and her stylishness can never come from within. It always has to come from somewhere or someone else. She has to be a country girl who's come to the Big Apple to re-invent herself (as in Breakfast at Tiffany's), or a chauffeur's daughter who goes to Paris to get culture (as in Sabrina), or a poor flower girl in My Fair Lady whose source of sophistication comes from a snide old fuddy-duddy of a linguistics professor.

The movies that let Audrey be Audrey, naturally, and with nobody to credit her stylishness to but herself, are the ones that have held up best. I'm thinking most particularly about Charade (1963), which never tries to go serious on us, the way Breakfast at Tiffany's does. It's always proudly and shrewdly displaying its enchanting trashiness. Breakfast at Tiffany's creates contrived complications to try and elevate itself. Had the tone remained light, the way it is for about half an hour, this could have been a comedy classic of its era, something smarter and more off-beat than the run-of-the-mill Doris Day-Rock Hudson vehicles and other such romantic comedies from the 1960s. Instead, it's remembered as a gooey romance, or rather, it's remembered as an Audrey Hepburn runway, where she can show off her attractiveness. (Which would have been find, had the movie been content to be light and frivolous rather than heavy and mildly portentious.)

George Peppard, as the co-star, is nice and sincere. He doesn't stand out, but then, he's playing it straight to Audrey's ultra-off-kilter personality. Axelrod tries to write dialogue, some of it likely right from Capote's novel, that will become instant trash-poetry when it comes out of Hepburn's mouth. It doesn't always work out that way. (Joseph L. Mankiewicz got damn lucky with Bette Davis in All About Eve: every line was gold when spoken by Margo Channing.) As director, Blake Edwards should have referred more to his comic abilities and less to his sentimental ones. This feels like a less-weapy-eyed prologue to Days of Wine and Roses, saved from being maudlin by the notorious happy ending, where man, woman, and Cat are united.

With Buddy Ebsen, Martin Balsam, Alan Reed, and Jose Luis de Vilallonga. 

Charade

Cary Grant was 59 when he played opposite Audrey Hepburn (25 years his junior) in Charade, but his age isn't as much of a hindrance as you'd think. He's still able to pull off the image of a suave leading man (he'd also done remarkably well four years earlier in North By Northwest). He plays a stranger who comes to the rescue of a young widow in Paris (Hepburn) whose husband was the target of three ruthless goons (James Coburn, George Kennedy, and Ned Glass) who are after 250,000 dollars that he swindled them out of. Her husband is murdered (and his body thrown from a train) before the opening credits, and so Hepburn becomes the central focus of the goons' continued quest for the elusive money. (They're cartoonish and yet menacing, like sociopathic Coyotes and Audrey is the Road Runner.)  

Charade is like a vacation from the stodginess of Audrey Hepburn's other movies that seem to hoist her on a pedastal like Galatea (Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany's, Sabrina and then later My Fair Lady). She's at her best when she's allowed to be fun and intelligent, but also accessible. She's always one-upping Cary Grant, but she's never too good for him. She's wholesome without being a prude, and she's game enough for the fun of this movie, which is set completely in Paris. The city becomes a labyrinth for us to try and find our way out of, but once we become engrossed in the movie we're hard-pressed to want to leave.

Along with the comic suspense that makes Charade so engaging is Henry Mancini's music score. Mancini's music is positively creepy (it's so slick and sophisticated and yet incredibly menacing) when it comes to thrillers. So many early thrillers didn't get the music right. It was as though the composers were told to de-emphasize the terror and the suspense, so their music takes a frightening or exciting scene and turns it into sentimental corn. Mancini, on the other hand, isn't afraid to take the material and run with it. His work on Experiment in Terror and Wait Until Dark is fantastically freaky, and in Charade  he captures something of the allure and the magic of Paris and Audrey Hepburn and Cary Grant and of the entire genre itself, and for that Charade is a better movie. It's the loveliest kind of trashy entertainment, and ironically enough it was not a hit when first released.

Directed by Stanley Donen. With Walter Matthau. ★★★★