One of the greatest films ever made, a romantic comedy shot like a thriller often summons up thoughts of
Rear Window. Has its own massive back story which seeks to weigh the film down, but if you know nothing about this it has a bubbly and effervescent life unlike almost anything else. Today, I was catching Audrey Hepburn - it's her last great role. It's so lovely to see her in material of this kind, where flashes of her
Sabrina self emerge - but in the older, sophisticated model (is this the only film which actually shows her indulging in her life long habit of smoking?*) It's just so well made, a collision of Robby Müller's urban lens with the best of 1940s cinema - Welles, Ford, Hawks - all the greats influence and end up in the film. The scene for example where Ritter and Dottie kiss, and she suddenly runs back into the house - it's so well edited and constructed. But then it also has all its own style, personified by Blaine Novak and the roller disco and that everyone makes friends immediately.
Like
A Canterbury Tale, it is a film entirely original and without equal - there's simply nothing else like it in all of cinema. And in light of that, it is
criminally underestimated and neglected. I love the way we don't know what's going on, and the silent beginning. In that respect it's like how
Illegally Yours would have started without the tacked on and annoying voiceover.
"I know this little French place."
"How chic."
"Chic it ain't."
Of course it's Peter's favourite of his films - and why shouldn't it be? And amongst its other achievements, it makes you love Country music - how does
that happen??
I once commented that the film begins where
Avanti ends - well it ends where
Avanti ends, also.
That joke about the detective agency - "we never sleep" - is repeated by Mofogen in
She's Funny That Way.
* No, of course it isn't.
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