The Screengrab : audrey hepburn

DVD Digest for January 13, 2008

Paul Clark — Tue, 13 Jan 2009 15:00:00 GMT

This week, Criterion and Eclipse’s salute to the late films of an Italian master takes the top spot, opposite a handful of notable classics and a bunch of recent junk.

DVD of the Week: Having finished yet another holiday season, most of Hollywood’s high-profile recent releases aren’t due on DVD for another few months yet. In other words, it’s the perfect opportunity for Criterion to roll out some of their most interesting work yet. Case in point is this week’s release of several of Roberto Rossellini’s historical films. The most noteworthy of the bunch is his film The Taking of Power by Louis XIV (Criterion), which invests the “historical drama” genre with Rossellini’s trademark realism, turning the genre on its ear by refusing to succumb to its usual picturesque tendencies. In conjunction with this release, Criterion’s sister company has created the box set Eclipse Series 14: Rossellini’s History Films- Renaissance and Enlightenment, which contains three more of Rossellini’s historical films, including The Age of the Medici, Cartesius, and Blaise Pascal, which our own Vadim Rizov praised here a few months ago. In the middle of an Oscar season dominated by biopics and period films, the Rossellini DVD should provide a reprieve from the usual bloated reverence.

The most notable recent release coming to DVD this week is the Ed Harris-directed oater Appaloosa (Warner, also Blu-Ray). Also this week: Kevin Costner in Swing Vote (Disney, also Blu-Ray); Dane Cook and Kate Hudson in My Best Friend’s Girl (Lionsgate, also Blu-Ray); Keifer Sutherland in Mirrors (Fox, also Blu-Ray); Tyler Perry’s The Family That Preys (Lionsgate); the India-set drama Brick Lane (Sony); and the Evelyn Waugh adaptation Brideshead Revisited (Disney).

In the classics department, this week sees the release of Eagle Pennell’s seminal proto-indie The Whole Shootin’ Match (Koch Entertainment Distribution). Also this week are two more Paramount Centennial Collection DVDs both starring Audrey Hepburn, Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Funny Face.

Finally this week’s TV on DVD releases include: Reba Season 5 (Fox) and ’Til Death Complete Second Season (Sony).

Screengrab Salutes: The Top 25 Leading Ladies of All Time (Part Five)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 16 Oct 2008 22:00:00 GMT

5. KATHARINE HEPBURN (1907-2003)

Given her longevity, and her four Academy Awards (out of a total twelve nominations), it's easy to forget what a tough time of it Hepburn had early in her career. With the aristocratic-goddess bone structure that was built to last and the tremulous voice and her no-nonsense regal quality and the tall frame and strapping physicality that went with it, she stood apart from the run of Hollywood ingenues in the 1930s: a Fox News commentator would proclaim her "elitist"-like. (In her first movie, she played John Barrymore's daughter. In her first Oscar-winning role, in Morning Glory, she played an ambitious young actress who cares more about her career than about finding love with Mr. Right -- exactly what the mass audience had been indoctrinated to view as an unsympathetic character.) She had great successes in such comedies as Bringing Up Baby and Alice Adams, but there was always a love-hate relationship going on with her and the movie audience, and after a string of flops (which included a number of deadly costume dramas but also the inventive and risky Sylvia Scarlett, where she was in male drag for most of the picture) got her designated box office poison by distributor's groups. She retreated to Broadway and came back in the film version of the hit play The Philadelphia Story -- which made her bigger than ever, but in a comedy whose point was partly to bring her down a peg. Her character there has to be humiliated a little so that she can be humanized and become more of a regular Josephine Sixpack, an idea that was also a constant of the many, mostly dull movies she made with Spencer Tracy. She left a more durable image co-starring with Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen -- a comic marriage of mismatched equals -- and in the very fine 1962 version of Eugene O'Neill's Long Day's Journey Into Night. She spent much of her last several years tending to her image and the images of those closest to her in a string of books and interviews.

4. ELIZABETH TAYLOR (1932 - )

Taylor is one of those rare larger-than-life legends (not a fat joke!) who packed seven or eight careers into a lifetime. Or was it seven or eight marriages? Actually it was both (for the record, the total is eight marriages, seven husbands), and though her offscreen exploits always threatened to overshadow her movie career, there can be no denying her place in the pantheon of leading ladies. She became a star at twelve years old in National Velvet, making fans of young girls, adolescent boys and dirty old men as fresh-faced, buxom horse trainer Velvet Brown. She transitioned into adult roles through the original Father of the Bride and its sequel, but it was 1951's A Place in the Sun that set her on the path to superstardom. She was the first actor to crack the million dollar mark in salary for the title role in Cleopatra, which turned out to be a disaster of biblical proportions. She emerged unscathed, more famous than ever, although that had as much to do with her tumultuous marriage to co-star Richard Burton as her onscreen work. Taylor was always renowned more for her beauty and glamour than her acting talent, until those attributes began to fade in the late '60s. She emerged as a terrifying, emasculating force of nature in Reflections in a Golden Eye with Marlon Brando and Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf with Burton, winning her second Academy Award for the latter (she'd earlier won for Butterfield 8). After that, her film career was more miss than hit, but she did have two indelible moments on the small screen: she cursed Luke and Laura on their wedding day in the most-watched episode of General Hospital in 1981, and she was the voice of baby Maggie in a 1992 episode of The Simpsons.

3. INGRID BERGMAN (1915-1982)

At a time when an actress could still seriously damage her career by having an extramarital affair, Ingrid Bergman jeopardized a reputation as one of the greatest of all Hollywood stars by falling in love with Italian director Roberto Rossellini, by whom she soon became pregnant. While most Europeans shrugged with indifference (Bergman continued making films in Italy to great acclaim), America went apeshit, and for several years, the moralistic fervor of the ‘50s cost us the good graces of one of the shining lights of cinema. Bergman was simply too good for this world; when she finally died in 1982, she was assumed directly into Heaven, where God immediately put her to work making a sequel to Casablanca and gave St. Peter a dirty look for even daring to mention her affair behind closed doors. She was always something special, even in the early days: she was tall and striking in an era of waifs, she rarely wore makeup in an era of kohl and lipstick, and she remained resolutely Ingmar Bergman when Lucy Fay LeSuer was trolling around for a more cinematic name. And, happily for American moviegoers, she was never one to hold grudges: after years of being treated shabbily for the crime of falling in love, she favored us with Anastasia, for which she won her second Academy Award. She always wore her heart on her sleeve, much like many of her most famous characters: when she finally returned to Hollywood in 1958 as an Academy Award presenter, she was given a standing ovation by a crowd who, presumably, couldn’t stand to see her cry.

2. AUDREY HEPBURN (1929-1993)

Audrey Hepburn’s early career was the stuff of Hollywood legend -- plucked from relative obscurity (a handful of minor roles in European films) to star in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday, she proceeded to charm the pants off of moviegoers worldwide, and took home an Oscar for her trouble. Throughout the 1950s, Hepburn sustained the stardom that her breakthrough performance had brought her, using her dancer’s grace and petite, almost elfin beauty to bewitching effect in movies like Billy Wilder’s Sabrina and the musical Funny Face, in which she starred opposite Fred Astaire. But it wasn’t until her performances became a little more melancholy that she revealed what a truly great star she was. 1961’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s is fondly-remembered today largely for Hepburn’s turn as the soulful party girl Holly Golightly (and admittedly for Henry Mancini’s score), and she proved surprisingly adept within the thriller framework of Charade and Wait Until Dark. Best of all was Stanley Donen’s Two For the Road as the increasingly dissatisfied wife of Albert Finney, a role that takes her character through the many seasons of a marriage. It’s perhaps her most down-to-earth role; yet at the same time that unmistakable Audrey Hepburn glow is always in abundance. In the last few decades of her career, Hepburn worked sparingly, with memorable roles in Robin and Marian and They All Laughed (let’s forget about the star-studded stink bomb Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, shall we?). But despite being mostly absent from the screen, she remained busy as a fashion icon and goodwill ambassador for UNICEF, all the while raising her children and keeping them largely out of the limelight -- an appropriately graceful life for a star who practically embodied the word.

1. BARBARA STANWYCK (1907-1990)

According to her IMDb bio, Barbara Stanwyck is best remembered today for her work on TV’s The Big Valley and The Colbys. To which we can only say -- what? Any true pop culture maven will at least recognize Stanwyck from her iconic turn as Phyllis Dietrichson, one of the most famously fatale of film noir femmes, and the owner of cinema’s most legendary anklet. And any cinephile worth his salt should be familiar with a number of her priceless comedic roles, particularly the irresistible con artist Jean Harrington in The Lady Eve and gangster’s moll Sugarpuss O’Shea (who else could have pulled off that name?) in Ball of Fire. But lest one think Stanwyck was all about tough-talking dames, there’s also her performance in Sorry, Wrong Number as a bedridden woman who picks up the telephone and overhears two men plotting a murder. In short, Stanwyck was one of classical Hollywood’s most complete stars, male or female. She was equally at home in a racy pre-Code drama (like Ball of Fire, in which she played a shameless social climber) as she was in a Breen Office-approved weepie (King Vidor’s Stella Dallas), and equally adaptable to the worlds of Frank Capra (Meet John Doe), Fritz Lang (Clash by Night), and Sam Fuller (as the “high-ridin’ woman with the whip” Jessica Drummond in Forty Guns). We could keep going, but you get the idea -- Stanwyck was a true-blue movie star to the core, and to suggest that her most memorable roles came on two late-period TV series is tantamount to cinematic blasphemy.

Click Here for Part One, Two, Three, Four, Six, Seven & Eight

Contributors: Phil Nugent, Scott Von Doviak, Leonard Pierce, Paul Clark

15 Films That (Almost) Could’ve Been Directed By Somebody Else (Part Four)

Andrew Osborne — Thu, 07 Aug 2008 21:30:00 GMT

SCENES FROM A MALL (1991) & 2 DAYS IN PARIS (2007), Not Directed by Woody Allen

While not as legion as Hitchcock (or even Tarantino) imitators, there have certainly been a fair number of pretenders to the Woodman’s throne over the years (including, in the recent period, Mr. Konigsberg himself), but Scenes From a Mall (which, if it were actually part of the Allen oeuvre, would rank well north of Hollywood Ending and somewhere south of Sweet and Lowdown) deserves special mention if only for the Allen-esque stammer of the dialogue delivered by none other than Woody Allen himself, charmingly paired with Bette Midler as a slick, successful, L.A.-loving Bizarro World version of his usual New York schlub persona (yet still kvetching endlessly about the difficulties of getting the whole love and happiness thing to work out). Meanwhile, after numerous attempts at regenerating his aforementioned trademark schlub persona, Dr. Who-style, into the form of younger actors ranging from John Cusack and Will Ferrell to Jason Biggs and Scarlett Johansson, it’s astonishing that Allen has never, to my knowledge, thought to cast the wry, world-class neurotic über-Jew Adam Goldberg in one of his films. Fortunately, writer/director/actress (and former Goldberg paramour) Julie Delpy corrected the obvious cinematic oversight with 2 Days In Paris, the type of hot-blooded, fast-talking, quick-witted meditation on life, romance, family, morality and mortality that used to be Allen's default setting before a string of duds forced his own recent decampment to Europe in search of inspiration.

MYSTERY MEN (1999), Not Directed By Tim Burton

This loudly hyped, much derided, and in fact somewhat underappreciated superhero parody (based on characters created by Flaming Carrot writer-artist Bob Burden) boasts elaborate set design, a smashing pop-Gothic look mixed with improvisational comedy riffs, satirical homages to various geekish interests, and Paul Reubens, all of which helped remind viewers of Tim Burton. In fact, the unusal-sounding name of the film's first-time director, Kinka Usher, actually helped inspire a rumor that the movie was, in fact, directed by Burton under an obviously contrived alias, even though Burton was busy at the time trying to bring his own Sleepy Hollow to market. Other evidence that Burton had nothing to do with it include the fact that the action scenes are fairly coherent, along with the movie's role in making Smash Mouth's "All Star" the hardest-to-avoid pop song in America for a good two or three years. (If the devoutly contrarian Burton had had a hand in that, he'd have probably joined the French Foreign Legion to atone.) Based on available evidence, there is in fact a Kinka Usher, but after the disappointing reception to this movie, his film career seems to have folded up its tent.

CITY OF LOST CHILDREN (1995), Not Directed by Terry Gilliam

Thanks to the fluke of his having broken in with Monty Python's Flying Circus and what that seems to have done to his sense of humor, the Minnesota-born Terry Gilliam has been fated to spend most of his life striking many people as sort of English. Oddly enough, the most successful Gilliam movie of the last fifteen or so years may have been cooked up by a couple of Frenchmen. Like Gilliam, Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet began their work as collaborators working in animation; with their first feature, Delicatessen, they announced their intent to make live-action films with the same degree of frenzied visual imagination (and the same sort of sick humor) usually found only in cartoons. But with Lost Children, they dove head-first into Gilliam's territory, with a sophisticated take on childlike fantasy that boasted a complicated plot, a look that was half fairy tale and half cyberpunk, and a villain out to steal the dreams of children. If Gilliam had made it himself after Time Bandits and Brazil, it would have made a far more fitting end to his "imagination trilogy" than the film he did make, The Adventures of Baron Muchausen. Instead, Gilliam did at least recognize the filmmakers as kindred spirits, and was quick to issue a blurb that they could use in the trailer.

And finally...

CHARADE (1963), Not Directed By Alfred Hitchcock

To tell the truth, we here at The Screengrab think that the tendency to compare just about any attempt at a stylish thriller to the work of Alfred Hitchcock has been overblown. Hitchcock didn't invent the concept of screen thrills, any more than (say) John Ford invented men on horseback or Stanley Donen, the director of Charade, invented singing and dancing. They all just happened to be really good at their specialties. What makes Charade, with its Parisian setting and alternately jokey and spooky murders, so much of a special case is its use of its star, Cary Grant, and the way it links this charmingly light romantic-mystery-comedy to North by Northwest and To Catch A Thief, the films that Hitchcock built around Grant after the strain of Hollywood comedy that made Grant a star had dried up or curdled. (Hitchcock also directed Grant in one of his best movies from the 1940s, Notorious, but that was in a darker, more hard-boiled style of tortured romance.) In all these movies, the filmmakers take Grant's star image into account in a slightly ironic way that makes it all the more glamorous and irresistable. (This is the movie where Audrey Hepburn, the damsel in distress, asks Grant, "Do you know what's wrong with you?" and then answers her own question: "Nothing.") They all hold up a lot better than the other movies that Grant made during the last twenty years or so of his career, and in fact, Charade, which he made just before he turned sixty, is for all practical purposes the last real "Cary Grant" movie. He did star in two more pictures, Father Goose and Walk, Don't Run (a remake of The More the Merrier), but they were half-hearted stabs at seeing if Grant could delight the public as, respectively, a boozy, unshaven old grump or a lovable match-making old busybody. Neither was a success, and Grant, sensing that his fans had no interest in seeing him evolve into anything besides Cary Grant, graciously retired from the screen. (Trivia note: in 2002. Jonathan Demme remade Charade as The Truth About Charlie, a movie whose Big Idea was, as Demme explained it, to see what Charade would look like if it had been directed in the flyblown experimental style of a French New Wave director working in 1964. It turned out that if the movie had been made that way, it would have kind of sucked.)

Click Here For Part One, Part Two & Part Three

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent

Morning Deal Report: Sienna Miller in the Hood

Scott Von Doviak — Thu, 19 Jun 2008 14:30:00 GMT

Add Sienna Miller’s name to a list that already includes Audrey Hepburn, Uma Thurman and Rich Little. That would be the list of people who have played Maid Marian in one version or another of Robin Hood. Ridley Scott’s “revisionist take” called Nottingham already has Russell Crowe on board, but not in the role you might think. According to Variety, Scott’s version “focuses on the Sheriff of Nottingham (Crowe) as a noble and brave lawman who labors for a corrupt king and engages in a love triangle with Marion and Robin Hood.” Miller is currently shooting G.I. Joe, so she should have action figures aplenty in stores by this time next year.

Insert your own “offer they can’t refuse” joke here. The estate of Mario Puzo “has filed suit against Paramount Pictures, claiming the studio owes it at least $1 million in revenues from the series of video games based on the Oscar-winning film The Godfather,” per the Hollywood Reporter. The author’s son Anthony is behind the lawsuit, which states: “Despite the vast wealth Puzo created for Paramount, it has refused to pay his children their agreed share of the revenue from that audio-visual product.” No truth to the rumors that Puzo’s lawyers are responsible for the horse’s head found in the Paramount CEO’s bed.

Finally, you’ll be delighted to know that the appropriately named Film Movement has acquired the U.S. distribution rights to The Pope’s Toilet. The Cannes favorite “is set in 1988, as a small Uruguayan town, Melo, gears up for the arrival of Pope John Paul II. One local resident, trying to profit from the visit, decides to build a portable pay toilet for the event, setting in motion a chain of unforeseen complications,” Variety reports. I guess that answers Steve Martin’s old question, “Does the Pope shit in the woods?”

Related:
How Bad Will "G.I. Joe" Be?
American Lawsuit

We Be Jaman

Leonard Pierce — Tue, 20 May 2008 16:45:00 GMT

With bandwidth cheaper than ever, the international tech market booming, and investors eager to find some new tax shelter in which to dump their millions, the internet is in the midst of a multimedia boom not seen since the late 1990s. And hey, we all know how well that ended, right? Yes, there's probably another massive crash coming, but that doesn't mean that in the meantime, office drones can't kill those long empty hours between lunch and five o'clock with exciting new ventures like Hulu and now Jaman.

Founded by Indian-American enterpreneur Gaurav Dhillon and backed by Hearst money, Jaman is an online on-demand video rental service, similar to those offered by Apple and Netflix, but focusing on an entirely different market. Jaman will, with the exception of a few Golden Age blockbusters that were out of copyright control (like Audrey Hepburn's Charade) focus on independent films for an English-speaking audience, and foreign-language titles -- espeically the wildly popular Bollywood genre so beloved by a growing Indian diaspora -- for the audience it's hoping to reach overseas. Hoping to tap into the underserved markets in tech-savvy countries like Brazil, Russia, India and China, where most people rely on DVD pirates for most of their movie needs, Dhillon is focusing on foreign language movies as both a source of cheap profit and a means towards building an audience. To help build that audience, they're set to offer an introductory deal that will applie to indie fans everywhere in the U.S. as well: free (well, ad-supported) access to a library of over a thousand indie films via the site's streaming browser windows.

Lest anyone get too excited over the prospect, Jaman is also hard-selling the 'social networking' aspect of their site, using those magical words, speaking of the 1990s, that everyone seems to find necessary but no one seems to have thought up a way to make money with so far. Still, the prospect of at-will callups of hundreds of inde flicks will keep us interested in the site...until the Great Crash of 2010, anyway.

Yesterday's Hits: The Bells of St. Mary's (1945, Leo McCarey)

Paul Clark — Mon, 24 Mar 2008 19:00:00 GMT

After last week’s review of Robert Bresson’s Les Anges du Péché, I briefly toyed with the idea of writing a nun-themed post every week. I’ve since reconsidered, but the truth is that there are quite a few memorable nun movies. Just think- a When Good Directors Go Bad on Neil Jordan’s We’re No Angels, a Movie Moment column on the rose-scourging scene in the Japanese nunsploitation classic School of the Holy Beast, a comparison piece on the wimple-worthiness of Anna Karina and Audrey Hepburn- the list goes on, even before the nuns go on the run. It’s hard to talk about nun movies without The Bells of St. Mary’s quickly coming up, so with the Easter season upon us I decided to revisit Leo McCarey’s 1945 film.

What made The Bells of St. Mary’s a hit?: 1944 saw the release of Going My Way, which introduced audiences to Bing Crosby’s Father O’Malley character. Audiences quickly fell in love with Father O’Malley, a young priest who kindly ministers to the poor with a smile and a song. Crosby- and O’Malley- won over both audiences and Oscar voters, with Going My Way proving to be both the biggest hit of 1944 and the year’s Academy Award winner for Best Picture, Best Actor (Crosby), and Best Supporting Actor (Barry Fitzgerald), among others. Based on this success, it was almost inevitable that a sequel would be a hit.

But what really put The Bells of St. Mary’s over the top was the presence of Ingrid Bergman. Bergman, who was already a popular and Oscar-winning leading lady, was best known at the time as a serious actress, playing dramatic roles in Casablanca, For Whom the Bell Tolls, and Gaslight. The Bells of St. Mary’s gave her the opportunity to play a somewhat more lighthearted role, as the devout Sister Benedict. Even audiences who hadn’t seen Going My Way turned out for the unlikely yet intriguing Crosby-and-Bergman matchup, and The Bells of St. Mary’s is widely believed to be the first sequel ever to outgross the original film.

What happened?: The Bells of St. Mary’s had few pretensions other than to make war-weary audiences feel good for a couple of hours. A movie this featherweight was practically fated to see a fade in its popularity, especially compared to the more lavish color musicals and spectacles of the fifties. In addition, both of the film’s stars saw their box-office heat wane. Bergman’s slide came first, following the controversy over her affair with Roberto Rossellini, hardly the best way to endear yourself to Bells’ core audience. Bing held out longer, drawing in crowds well into the fifties, but his appeal to younger audiences was shrinking as they embraced younger performers like Frank Sinatra. By the time rock’n’roll hit the scene, Bing felt like a relic to them.

Does The Bells of St. Mary’s still work?: Not really. Watching the film again, the two words that kept springing to mind were “quaint” and “cornball.” The Bells of St. Mary’s is so committed to making the audience feel good- whether it’s through gentle laughter or easy tears- that the film never has any edge to it. At the beginning of the film, O’Malley is warned about the strong-willed nuns, but aside from a few heated discussions over how the school is run, little becomes of this. Likewise, the episodic nature of the story isn’t a problem, except that all of the subplots are resolved in the easiest and most predictable way possible.

Consider the story of Horace P. Bogardus (Henry Travers), the rich man and city bigwig who is erecting an office building next to St. Mary’s. Bogardus, like so many other rich men in movies, only seems to think about money, while the nuns pray in the hope that he’ll turn over the building to them to use as their new school. So O’Malley does a little scheming, and after Bogardus falls ill, the nuns’ prayers are answered, with Bogardus requiring surprisingly little convincing to make a gift of his not-inexpensive new property. This wouldn’t be so bad except that every subplot in the film is resolved in much the same way.

In addition, the film’s characterizations are almost distractingly thin. O’Malley doesn’t play any notes that he hadn’t already played in Going My Way, and none of the supporting characters show any real depth. Most disappointing is Sister Benedict- the film sets her up as a formidable rival to O’Malley, but none of this pans out. Instead, she becomes practically saintly, as she sticks to her principles, has Job-like patience with her students, and prays for Mr. Bogardus. Even when she does something questionable, such as teaching a picked-on boy how to box, she does so for all of the right reasons. It’s a shame, since as Bergman plays the character it’s easy to imagine how, with only a few script changes, Sister Benedict might have been interesting and multi-dimensional, rather than the sanctimonious cipher we see in The Bells of St. Mary’s.

But then, when you’ve got a valuable property, why rock the boat? Even the film’s most potentially divisive element- its setting in a Roman Catholic Church and school- is portrayed in the most sanitized way imaginable. This is understandable, as in the year before Vatican II and President Kennedy there was some suspicion among non-Catholics about Catholic tradition. However, aside from a few throwaway lines (like the bit about a kid named Luther- “how’d he get in here?”) and the presence of priests and nuns, there’s little actual Catholicism on display here. Heck, many of the ads for the film didn’t even show its stars in their clerical garb, so clearly the religious issue wasn’t a very big one for the film and its studio.

In many ways, The Bells of St. Mary’s is an ideal example of a movie that is a hit in its day but hasn’t stood the test of time. While there’s nothing edgy or controversial that would have incurred the ire of 1945 audiences, it always offers nothing that’s especially interesting to moviewatchers in 2008. But then, how many of today’s hits will we be able to say the same about sixty years from now?

David Watkin, 1925-2008

Phil Nugent — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 16:00:00 GMT

Cinematographer David Watkin has died of cancer at the age of 82, at his home in Brighton, England. Watkin developed his skills after joining the Southern Railway Film Unit as an assistant in 1948. He branched into work on TV commercials in the early 1960s, where he met the director Richard Lester. Lester hired him to shoot his 1965 film The Knack and subsequently worked with him on Help!, How I Won the War, The Bed Sitting Room and Cuba. In those movies Watkins demonstrated a mastery of a wide range of styles, ranging from the cinema-verite vaudeville of Lester's Beatles films to the Godardisms of How I Won the War, but their best work together may well have been in The Three Musketeers (1973) and its companion piece The Four Musketeers (shot at the same time as the first film but released separately a year later) and the 1976 Robin and Marian, with Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn as the middle-aged Robin Hood and Maid Marian. In those movies, Watkin, famous for his mastery of soft light, somehow achieved a romantic period look while incorporating his director's love of slapstick and visual clutter.

Watkin, who wrote two books of autobiography, Why Is There Only One Word for Thesaurus, which came out in 1998, and Was Clara Schumann a Fag Hag?, which was published only recently. Watkin always strove to give the impression that he was just a guy who knew how to work a camera who made his living shooting movies and who had a whole other compartment of his life devoted to the things he really cared about. But if he saw himself as a mere technician, he was deeply committed to his craft, and was constantly experimenting and extending the reach of the technology he worked with. (He invented a system of lights that made it easier for cinematographers to get better, soft effects during night shoots. Watkin, who was aparently a bit of a camp, was known to friends and co-workers by the nickname "Wendy", and the lighting system he devised became known as "the Wendy Light.") Besides his work with Lester, Watkins's proudest professional moments included Tony Richardson's The Charge of the Light Brigade (1968), Chariots of Fire (1981), Yentl (1983), and Out of Africa (1985), for which he won an Academy Award. He was given a Lifetime Achievement Award from the British Society of Cinematographers in 2004.

Video of the Day: Audrey Hepburn, Hero of the Underground

Leonard Pierce — Thu, 24 Jan 2008 16:45:00 GMT

Screen tests can be interesting just on their own merits, especially when they show us a future superstar before they're famous. Other times, though, especially when they're generally perfunctory formalities for big stars who are generally assured of getting the part, they serve as what we now think of as DVD bonus material fodder: chances for the actors to let their hair down and chat with directors or producers in a format not unlike a talk show.

Roman Holiday, in 1953, was the movie that made Audrey Hepburn a huge international film star, and it was her screen test that caused William Wyler to cast her in the romantic comedy. The camera was left running after she finished her audition, and she began candidly speaking about her childhood — including, as seen here, her experience dancing at secret performances to raise money for the Dutch underground during the Second World War. Look at the expression of wicked, playful joy on her face when she describes why the Germans didn't shut them down, and you'll know why so many people were charmed by her in the film.