Audrey Hepburn Film Series: CHARADE, MY FAIR LADY
Gary Cooper, Audrey Hepburn in Love in the Afternoon
Audrey Hepburn LACMA Series: ROMAN HOLIDAY, SABRINA
Love in the Afternoon
October 30 | 9:35 pm
Love in the Afternoon, Wilder’s long awaited tribute to his idol Ernst Lubitsch, is based on a French novel and tells the story of Ariane, an innocent young cello student in Paris whose father is a detective, played by Chevalier, the star of four Lubitsch musicals. In order to spark the romantic interest of Frank, an American millionaire and notorious playboy ensconced at the Ritz, Ariane assumes the guise of a sophisticated woman of affairs; but when Frank hires Ariane’s father to investigate the mysterious girl who only visits him in the afternoon, complications arise. Despite the luminous cinematography and lavish production values—for a scene at the Paris Opera, Wilder put 960 extras in evening gowns and white tails; and in order to shoot at will in the Ritz, he had a replica of the hotel’s second floor complete with working elevators built by Alexandre Trauner, the renowned set designer of Children of Paradise and Riffifi—this cinematic labor of love was clearly out of step with the times and a critical and box office failure. Today the continental charms of Love in the Afternoon are easier to appreciate: critic Richard Corliss notes that “the film reverberates with Lubitschian touches, Ophulsian caresses, and the gentle fatalism characteristic of both these directors. It is no coincidence that the film’s plot carries melancholy echoes of Letter from an Unknown Woman, or that Cooper’s rainy, five p.m. departure from a Paris train station evokes memories of the Bogart-Bergman estrangement in Casablanca. Wilder is operating in the same area of old-young, cynical-idealistic romance, where love must be frustrated before it can be fulfilled.”
1957/b&w/130 min.| Scr: Billy Wilder, I. A. L. Diamond; dir: Billy Wilder; w/ Audrey Hepburn, Gary Cooper, Maurice Chevalier.
Charade
November 6 | 7:30 pm
Donen worked closely with writer Peter Stone on this North by Northwest- inspired film that alternates high suspense and grisly murder with comedy and romance. The story of a woman who realizes she knows absolutely nothing about her murdered husband, and who seeks help from an attractive stranger when her husband’s criminal cohorts threaten her life, Charade is a series of stylish twists and romantic reversals that allowed Donen to display his directorial mastery of innuendo-laden dialogue, striking camera angles, and breathless pacing. An enormous hit with audiences—it played New York’s Radio City Hall at Christmas and well beyond—Charade remains one of the iconic Audrey Hepburn pictures, complete with romantic Paris settings, clothes by Givenchy, and a lilting Henry Mancini score.
1963/color/113 min. | Scr: Peter Stone; dir: Stanley Donen; w/ Cary Grant, Audrey Hepburn, Walter Matthau, James Coburn.
Wait Until Dark
November 6 | 9:35 pm
In his hit Broadway play Wait Until Dark (Lee Remick was the lead on stage) Frederick Knott, the screenwriter of Hitchcock’s 1954 thriller Dial M for Murder, returned to the theme of a woman alone and under attack by an intruder in her home and tightened the screws in two important ways: the terrorized heroine was blind, and the man trying to kill her was a psychopath. In the film version, Hepburn brings the full force of her acting skills, both technical and emotional, to the role of Suzy Hendrix, the “number one blind lady” who gradually realizes that a cache of heroin has been hidden in her Greenwich Village apartment and that the various men who keep coming to her door are ruthless thugs who will stop at nothing to get their stash. Alan Arkin in his first dramatic role is a taunting sarcastic villain who takes pleasure in provoking Suzy’s rising hysteria, and the deadly cat and mouse game that Hepburn and Arkin play in the dark, claustrophobic apartment provides a finale that had audiences literally on the edge of their seats.
1967/Technicolor/108 min. | Scr: Robert Carrington, Jane-Howard Carrington; dir: Terence Young; w/ Audrey Hepburn, Alan Arkin, Efrem Zimbalist Jr. | Technicolor print courtesy the Academy Film Archive
War and Peace
November 7 | 7:30 pm
The long and distinguished career of director King Vidor was launched in 1924 with the success of the The Big Parade, an epic film about World War I, and came to a close in a new era of epics with War and Peace and Solomon and Sheba, two big-budget international co-productions that were Hollywood’s wide screen answer to television. Set during the Napoleonic Wars between 1805 and 1812, Tolstoy’s novel chronicles the fates of a group of aristocratic Russians engulfed by the forces of history, and is rich in battle scenes, balls and duels at sunrise, all of which Vidor and cinematographer Jack Cardiff brought to the screen in a series of stunning compositions. The emotional center of the film is Natasha, a naïve young woman romantically torn between two friends—the officer Prince Andrei and the intellectual Pierre—and who, in Vidor’s words, “permeated the entire novel as the archetype of womankind… If I were to reduce the whole story of War and Peace to some basically simple statement, I would say that it is a story of the maturing of Natasha… My main memory of that picture is of Audrey Hepburn giving a wonderful performance. I used to see it over and over again in the dubbing and music cutting, and I never tired of it. I always found something new that she did.”
1956/color/208 min./VistaVision | Scr: Bridget Boland, Robert Westerby, King Vidor, Mario Camerini, Ennio De Concini, Ivo Perilli, Irwin Shaw; dir: King Vidor; w/ Audrey Hepburn, Henry Fonda, Mel Ferrer, Vittorio Gassman. | Archive print courtesy George Eastman House
My Fair Lady
November 13 | 7:30 pm
Having acquired the longest running Broadway musical as a prestigious property for his studio, Jack Warner immediately cast Audrey Hepburn over Julie Andrews as Eliza Dolittle, and placed the important task of production and costume design in the skilled hands of Cecil Beaton, the former Vogue photographer whose imaginative costumes were credited with giving the stage production a uniquely stylized look. When Cukor was hired he expressed his delight in the choice of Hepburn—he later commented that she looked “dangerously beautiful,” which was Shaw’s description of Eliza—and brought aboard Rex Harrison to revive his acclaimed performance as Henry Higgins. Though the finished film had its critics, audiences turned out for the famous Lerner and Lowe score, the impeccable production values, set pieces like the Ascot races and the Royal Ball, and the performances of a stellar cast, and it won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, Director, and Actor. Though overlooked in the Oscar sweep, Hepburn is particularly impressive as the street urchin whose hard-earned transformation into “a lady” is the emotional heart of the drama. In the words of critic Gary Carey, “she catches the Cinderella quality of the role beautifully. She has always been an actress assured at wearing a bittersweet heart on her sleeve, but here she exhibits an unexpected comedic talent with great dexterity of timing. “
1964/color/170 min./70mm | Scr: Alan Jay Lerner; dir: George Cukor; w/ Audrey Hepburn, Rex Harrison, Stanley Holloway. | Archive print courtesy the Academy Film Archive
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Tags: Audrey Hepburn, Audrey Hepburn: The Now and Forever, Charade, Classic Movies, LACMA, Los Angeles Screenings, Love in the Afternoon, My Fair Lady, Wait Until Dark, War and Peace
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