Unhappy Endings, Perfectly Delivered
This weekend I watched Roman Holiday (1953) again.
It's maybe my third time in as many months, because it comes up on one of the free channels on my smart TV, and I can never turn away until the very last lingering shot, as Joe walks away from the press conference, alone. Reader, I like Roman Holiday so much! I first saw it in my first year at university, when I rented it from the uni library on VHS (!) and watched it multiple times until I had to return it a week later. The film's look is timeless: black-and-white makes it absolutely of a certain era (Hollywood on the Tiber) and yet also makes it transcend its 1953 birthdate. (By way of contrast, the last black-and-white film I saw, Sam Levinson's Malcolm & Marie, is very bad indeed, and I think the decision to film in black-and-white locked it into this time, and serves to make it badness even starker).
I love the story of Roman Holiday which is a feat for a staunch republican like me—what good has a monarchy, anywhere in the world, ever done, really?—but look: it's about a princess who escapes the confines of her royal girdle, meets a handsome man, and has a glorious, unfettered good time in Rome, a city that I also love and have good memories of. Yes, Ann/Anya must return to her duties eventually, but first she gets to live, she gets to get a chic haircut, and eat gelato, and go to The Mouth of Truth and the Spanish Steps. She gets to take a ride on a Vespa and go dancing on a barge... and she gets to kiss this almost unbearably handsome man, Joe, and to be held by him, and to look into his eyes and see everything she's feeling in this elongated moment of carefree living reflected right back. The city looks beautiful. Gregory Peck (a gentleman who apparently was the one to suggest that his co-star get equal billing) is so handsome and dashing and... big. His eyebrows are as thickly luxurious as Audrey Hepburn's, who is luminous and tentative and convincingly naive (she won an Oscar for this role). Edith Head did, as she always did, the damn thing with the costume design. The whole thing? Gorgeous. The romance is wielded so lightly — the hum of attraction between the pair is obvious and yet so underplayed all through their long day and night in the city. By the time they kiss, they can see the end of their doomed dalliance on the horizon, and it's approaching fast. Before Joe drives Ann back to the corner near the embassy, they embrace in his tiny apartment, and talk around the elephant in the room:
Ann: Sorry I couldn't cook us some dinner.
Joe: Did you learn how...in school?
Ann: Mmm, I'm a good cook. I could earn my living at it. I can sew too, and clean a house, and iron. I learned to do all those things, I just haven't had the chance to do it for anyone.
Joe: Well, looks like I'll have to move, and get myself a place with a kitchen.
Ann: ...Yes.
A place with a kitchen, where Ann could cook. But then she changes out of Joe's robe, and he drives her away from him, back to her scheduled life of royal obligation, where she will never cook dinner for her boyfriend or indeed, anyone. Where she will never clean, or sew, or iron for herself or for anyone else. And sure, Joe might get a place with a kitchen one day, but it won't be Anna who cooks in it. (Regressive? Yes. 1953!) "I don't know how to say goodbye," Ann says, before their final flurry of kisses in the car. "I can't think of any words." Joe relieves her of the burden. "Don't try," he says. His shallow exhalations and rapid swallowing after she exits the car feel intimate... because they are. The scene has sparse dialogue because it's all face acting here. And it is exquisite.
I adore how sad and realistic and final the ending is: Ann and Joe can never be together. And it feels to me — and I might be wrong, of course — that this is perfectly on brand for 1953, which is the same year as the coronation of Elizabeth II. I don't know, and I won't Google, if there existed a draft of Roman Holiday in which Ann and Joe find a way to make it work. I like to think it never seriously crossed the screenwriters' minds. Public life was very much a different beast then, and yes, I'm counting what the queen's uncle had done just a couple decades before.
I first watched Roman Holiday in 2002, aka the decade after the big, fruitful boom of 80/90s romcoms and teen romcoms. I believe that if this movie had been made in 1999, Ann and Joe would've ended up together, somehow, because, well, love finds a way. Right? The world of 1999 is not the world of 1953, and it is not even the world of 2021... Watching Roman Holiday again made me think about two other movies in this genre: Notting Hill (1999) and Long Shot (2019).
In each of these, there is a high-powered woman whose ivory tower is built with bricks moulded from the blood, sweat and tears of her success—a Hollywood actor and a US politician, respectively—and then there is some regular dude, who is almost blinded by the bright fact of this woman's existence. There is that initial window, like Ann and Joe got, where the two delight in the hot burn of new intimacies, and the bubble is undisturbed. This is the time the successful, important woman lets her hair down and lives like a regular person. The woman encounters some of the colourful characters that fill up the dude's life. She thinks to herself, fleetingly, of course, am I doing this? for real? and at home, we say, "shit, sis... maybe?!" They test the waters, posit what ifs and "but how about...?" scenarios, talking around the split that must surely occur, sooner rather than later... And then, just like with Ann and Joe, reality sets in, often in the form of some horrible incident that serves as a timely reminder to the powerful woman that life outside the tower is complicated and just as hard but in a different way, and playtime is over, time to get back. The bubble bursts, there is a tearful kiss, one last rueful glance, a dry-eyed goodbye.
But there is more often than not an out. One final spell hidden in the dying wizard's robes. A generous gesture from a winking fairy godmother. Just enough elixir left for one (1) final miracle—they can be together. But Roman Holiday doesn't go that route. There is a studied honour in the way Joe lets Ann go — he doesn't expressly ask her to consider him and his intentions. His wants take such a backseat to the facts on the ground that it's never even raised as an option. There is honour, too, in the way Ann squares her shoulders and heads back into the rigid casing of her life. Sure, there's a bit more steel in her spine when she handles her handlers ("Were I not completely aware of my duty to my family and my country, I would not have come tonight. Or indeed ever again.") but at what cost?!
With my modern eyes, I see and am wowed by the chasteness of these two — all that time together, alone, and undercover, and... no sex? Not even a hint of some over-the-clothes action? — but I am also inclined to believe that the filmmakers left it up to us to fill in the blanks here. And I have done so. My headcanon is: they totally did it. But beyond the chasteness I am also struck by how heavy their sacrifice feels on my shoulders. They didn't even get to date for a bit? Like, in secret? They just had 24 hours in Rome, case closed? Argh. Oldest ruling family in Europe be damned, her country is never even named, for fucks sake. Nobody would've cared, dammit!
What I love the best about Roman Holiday, though, is one specific sacrifice — when Joe refuses to capiltalise on his perfect day with Anya by writing a piece that would certainly have burnished his star while tarnishing hers. He's losing earnings, and maybe some standing with his boss. But Joe is resolute. He will behave as a man with honour. Irving, Joe's photographer friend, who's got snaps of Ann in the city, puts it plainly: "She's fair game, Joe. It's always open season on princesses!" and he's not wrong (boy, he's not wrong) but Joe won't be budged. He leaves the door open for Irving — he can sell the pics, if he wants — but here's what the audience knows: these are journalists/manure salesmen who are also honourable guys. He knows his friend would not knowingly hurt "Smithy". I dunno, it makes me proud to be a journalist? (All I know is: this is the movie in which I fancy Gregory Peck the MOST. Coincidence?) And when Joe and Irving see Anna again, she breaks royal protocol by declaring her favourite city of the tour to be Rome. And then Joe promises, in coded language, that the princess's faith in the "relations between people" will not be unjustified. It is, for my money, one of the most romantic declarations in all of cinema. You're safe with me, Joe is telegraphing. You would've always been safe with me. Fuck. It kills me.
I'm not saying one type of ending is superior. Long Shot is pretty deft at naming some of the systems that rule our culture and reminds us (and Charlotte and Fred) of what punishments stepping out of line will bring. And the ending (complete with flashforward) is a tour de force of wish fulfillment—Charlotte as POTUS; Fred as First Mister—that I swallowed greedily. Notting Hill also pulls off its ending: montage of wedding day, movie premiere, a glimpse of lightly pregnant Anna with her head in William's lap as they laze in the park, a shorthand for "they figured it out, guys! A bookseller from London and a Hollywood actor made it happen!"
But I know I feel softer in my heart when Ann says her last words to Joe, and her eyes are boring into him as she does, because she doesn't want him to miss even a sliver of nuance, she wants him to see everything she means because she will literally never get the chance to say it again. This is it. The shining thread of connection that saw them gallivanting through Rome, desire safely banked but always present; that compelled them to dance on the barge, and kiss while shivering on the banks of the river; that held them as they were almost crushed under the weight of things unsaid in his apartment; that sustained them as they sat in his car on the corner near the embassy and clung desperately to one another... it will be irreparably severed. So when she looks at Joe and says those words in front of all those people and can't give herself or him away, she's asking him to hear her clearly.
So happy, Mr Bradley.
PS: today is the fifth anniversary of me moving to New York. Wow. Have some cake on me!