To the pure all things are pure; or, Roman Holiday

Watching Mystery Science Theater 3000 has taught me that movies from the 1950s do not always appeal to the most noble of instincts in moviegoers. I still recall a Batgirl movie that included a lot of unnecessary dancing and jiggling that made little tangible contribution to the curtailment of crime in Gotham City. Yet I still tend to presume that the “classic” 1950s movies inculcate family values and/or have appealed to something more enduring than one of the seven deadly sins (which have actually been around quite a long time). And I do have to say that, after I watched Roman Holiday, this presumption remained uncontested: the movie seems like fairly innocent fun. I mean, sure, the main character sleeps at the house of an unmarried man, but she was drugged at the time, and nothing untoward happened.

However, I have to say that I find the original theatrical trailers (available on the DVD) somewhat puzzling. Now, I wouldn’t have been surprised by a trailer that said something like, “Audrey Hepburn is really pretty, come see her get dressed up for a fancy ball.” I find more surprising the actual words of the trailer (imagine a very excited male announcer, crank it up a notch, and you’ve got the voiceover): “Yes, there’s a nightgown scene, and what a nightgown!” Even if the commentator restrained himself from making the compulsory “Hubba hubba” noises, I still don’t think the trailer adequately portrays that this is a movie about a love that transcends time when it announces elatedly that the starlet is going to be wearing a nightie. Despite a number of funny scenes from which to choose, the trailer selects the most potentially scandalous moments of the movie: for instance, it shows Helpburn’s skirt falling off while she’s in a man’s room (she appears drunk at the time), which is immediately followed by the scene in which she is covered in towels from a bath in the man's apartment, and a maid is rebuking her for apparently indecent behavior (no doubt expressing her moral indignation in Italian so we do not know the full extent of Hepburn’s naughtiness). You have to go see the movie in order to learn, in the words of the perky trailer announcer, “how’d this cute little surprise package [Audrey] wind up in Greg’s apartment?”

I don’t mean to suggest that there was no appeal to romance and/or courtly behavior. After all, if you see the movie, you can “share the glory of a romance as radiant as the Roman moonlight,” whatever that means, and you can watch confidently with the knowledge that the whole movie was “lived, loved, and filmed in Rome.” And if you watch, you’ll see that “all the things happened to them that you always hoped for on the happiest day of your life!” The movie is, after all, “The happiest picture you’ve seen in years!” what with two of the characters falling in love and having to live the rest of their lives forever apart (the film ends with Gregory Peck walking out of a press conference alone). I don’t know about you, but the happiest movies I see are those in which the people in love are forever separated. Anyway, there were certainly a number of viewers (and by a number, I mean women) who probably really were in the theater to see “the gayest spree any girl ever had.” But it does seem to me that the trailer-makers were banking on the idea that the men would be going because they would see “what a nightgown!” and the “cute little surprise package” that enjoys acting drunk, dropping her clothes, and taking showers in bachelor’s apartments.

I realize that I am taking these scenes out of context. My point is that the trailers take such scenes out of context. Further, the trailers may actually establish the expectations of the original viewers—the trailers essentially create the context in which many moviegoers watched the movie. “Hey! When do I get to see the hubba hubba nightgown?” we can imagine a hormonally-charged adolescent in the theater thinking to himself. “I wanna see some more objectification of women as cute little surprise packages,” thinks the self-conscious degenerate in the audience.

I do recognize that I am not watching these original trailers with the same sensibilities with which the original audience would have viewed them. For example, perhaps if you wanted to compliment a woman in the 1950s, you would tell her she was a “cute little surprise package,” and just watch the girlish glee ensue. And maybe there was some 1950s fashion I don’t know about, such that the showcasing of girls in their nighties constitutes tasteful art akin to nude modeling. (And as my wife pointed out, the nightgown is only “revealing” in a grandmotherly sort of way. So, there may be an implicit joke, “Ha ha, you want to be lustful? Take THAT, lecher boy!”) And some people may simply go because they enjoy the incongruity/irony of a princess acting regal the moment right before her clothes accidentally fall off. Nevertheless, it seems to me that the trailers perpetuated ways of looking at women and describing them (or at least Audrey Hepburn) that were not admirable. At the very least, it seems that the trailer-makers intentionally invoke scandalous associations. (I realize one could argue that they only invoke these associations in order to subvert them: “See, she is not drunk at all! See, nothing morally suspect happens, you silly double-entendre people!”) It is interesting that, much as we might celebrate the “classics,” we wouldn’t want to see the classics in their original “hubba hubba” context but instead in a context that is divorced from the conditions of historical reception. Things may appear pure to us only because we have taken them out of an original context that could make them seem prurient.