A study in subtlety: Roman Holiday’s final scene

The last scene of Roman Holiday is like a Beatles single, in that it's so compact, and so perfect in its construction, that you instinctively feel it cannot be improved, irrespective of what you think its artistic merits are. The director William Wyler sets the audience up beautifully with an hour and a half of charming, scenic fluff; diverting, sure, but not such stuff as dreams are made on. Then when everyone expects him to end the fairy tale the way all fairy tales ended in the 1950s, he calmly pulls the rug out from under their feet. It’s a strangely unsettling ending – no tears are shed, and there is no need. No matter how much one may deny it later, almost all who watch it for the first time are left with a feeling of gnawing emptiness, as if the happiness denied to the characters on screen was in reality their right, and was being denied to them.

Clichéd may a slightly tough word to use the first one and a half hours of this movie; it has winsome performances, beautiful Rome in the background and the sort of leisurely charm which Hollywood couldn’t come up with the today if you gave them a multi-million dollar budget and a special effects system which thinks for itself. But clichéd it is – Audrey Hepburn plays a slightly spoiled, very bored princess who runs away from her drudge of a royal life, and Gregory Peck a journalist who sees in her the story of a lifetime. Like any good Italian romance, they walk around, see the the Trevi Fountain and the Colosseum (and, in a marvelous improvised scene, the Mouth of Truth), have close brushes with the local police, and finally, fall in love. However, the clock will soon strike twelve, and Cinderella must return to her gilded rags and troop inspections. So they part, if only to clear the way for the final, towering cliché – the journalist is sent off to the climatic press junket to win her back.

So the great Gregory Peck stands and looks at his love for a sign, but things are not going according to script. We have seen a little while earlier that the princess is no longer controlled by her advisors, and she reacts sharply when one of them reminds her of her duty towards her station. It gives us a hint that she has already thought the matter through, and made her decision.

The deliberate manner in which Audrey Hepburn says her lines here could be (and has been, by some critics) put down to nervousness, a debutante handling her first big scene. As for me, I think of Anna Karina in Godard’s Bande a Part looking straight at the camera and saying “My heart goes out at the sight of you”. Then I think of Audrey Hepburn interrupting her own manufactured response to slowly intone “Rome. By all means Rome” and I can’t choose one classic movie moment over the other.

Finally, after all the questions have been asked, the princess comes down to meet the members of the press, including Gregory Peck, who probably expects her to say a lot, and is disappointed. By now, the look of confidence he started the scene with is visibly beginning to wane; like the audience, he is slowly, painfully coming to terms with the fact that this may not be a happy ending. Yet he looks up, and with a movement so subtle as to be non-existent asks her “Well, how about it?” She replies with the slightest shake of the head. In an unforgiving close-up, we see hope fade from his face, and he swallows. The audience though, has not learnt its lesson, and still expects a fairy tale end. They force him to linger until everyone else has left, hoping that she will reappear, recant. But she doesn’t. It truly is the end, and all one can do is accompany the man on his lonely walk out.