Today I picked up a second hand movie at a second hand joint for seven bucks. I have a new shopping list on my mind, as the William Holden obsession still rages without pause.
(Pardon me for a second… *sigh*… mmmmmmm, William Holden… Ok, I’m better now.)
The film I picked up was one I had never heard of before this freak infatuation, one he made with Audrey Hepburn in 1963, Paris When it Sizzles.
I had looked up some reviews of it along with all his filmography, as I am wont to do when I have a new obsession and I comb the internet and my reference library for trivia and analysis… and pictures of the guy with no shirt, but that is purely a fringe benefit. I am, after all, a serious film student, you know.
(Pardon me for a second… *sigh*… mmmmmmm, William Holden… Ok, I’m better now.)
Anyway, the reviews of this were not quite masterpiece raves, if you get my drift, but I figured $7 for a little piece of romantic-comedy fluff would be tolerable value, even if it wasn’t exactly The Killing Fields.
Now, I have just finished it. I am stunned.
The movie opens, and you have a drunken Holden and a cutesy Hepburn… Basically, the two stars play themselves, one could say. The acting is intentionally over the top and the situations enormously foolish, but they are meant to be so. You see, Holden is a washed-up hack screenwriter (a sort of Joe Gillis for the vulgar 60s), and Hepburn his Post-Holly-Golightly secretary. The first bulk of the film shows him trying frantically to write 138 pages of script, for which he has already been paid, before the producer arrives in two days.
Now, the film-within-the-film is written through fantasy sequences and bizarre twists, as well as through some pretty nifty insights into the filmmaking process. To provide decoration and diversion, there are a million Givenchy dresses, a platoon of Nelson Riddle string twiddles, and much liquor is consumed, and there is a peach of a cameo by Tony Curtis…
And, aside from all this glory, there is a distinct sexy heat. I mean real, honest-to-goodness warmth, the kind that makes your stomach wobble. So much so, that even normally-cheesy dissolves to symbolic shots of the Eiffel Tower and fire works take on a believable and effective nature.
Not bad at all, and unusual for a 1960s rom-com, even one starring William Holden.
(Pardon me for a second… aw, you get the drill.)
So things go along swimmingly. We like the two, the film is getting written, and we are having a gay old time. We think we know exactly what we are seeing, what we will see, and what is expected of us.
And then, suddenly, acting drunk or really drunk (who knows with poor Bill?), William Holden cuts us down. He has finished writing the script, which we have enjoyed watching come together; we think it is marvelous, because, by now, we think he is marvelous. But it is not. It is trite and horrible. He is a hack and drunk. There, in his bathrobe, the patented Holden self-loathing of Sunset Boulevard and The Wild Bunch rises from somewhere within that angelically beautiful man and boils like so much acid. No one can appear as depressed and as inwardly-cancerous as Bill Holden, Hollywood’s Golden Boy. It is always a magnificent and horrible thing to watch. And it always surprises me when it comes.
And suddenly the film, for this scene, floats, weightless, and makes our breath catch in our throats. It is brief, and then fades, but we want so desperately for him to love and be loved – but that is the situation he fears more than death… And we believe Hepburn’s tears as she looks on his self-destruction, and suddenly he is not Richard Benson, hack screenwriter, but Bill Holden, the beautiful and sad drunk.
And of course things then slide down to normal, and we are shaken out of our senses by a bit more fantasy and the oddest image in the world, in which a large French woman is shocked by a scoop of ice cream down the cleavage, and then giggles as she shakes it down and relishes the strange and icy sensation.
And one asks: “Am I suddenly in a Fellini film???”
But then it goes back to romantic-comedy mode, with the reconciliation. And then the happy ending comes, as we expected, and “The End” comes…
But you can’t forget those tragic blue eyes, and the moment of such truth that came out, even in a romp like this, and you realize you have actually seen something quite beautiful and heart breaking.
This is a film that moved me, got to me, heated me under the collar, and made me laugh more than once. I think it may stay with me for a while… I was hoping for a bit of William Holden’s good side, but what I got was his bad side, and it was so much more than I expected for $7. I want to watch it again and again. It is vermouth with a whiskey chaser. Chipper in a vulgar sort of way, and then painfully raw.
I don’t know what to make of it, and it leaves me without a real ending for this post, except, naturally…
*sigh*… William Holden.
No comments:
Post a Comment