In turning Rome’s architecture and geography into a living, breathing environment in Roman Holiday, William Wyler crafts a romantic adventure for newspaperman Joe and runaway princess Ann, and offers Audrey Hepburn a perfectly charming setting for displays of natural magnetism that carry entire scenes.
As Detective Jim McLeod’s personal and professional worlds collide in the web of narrative threads that emerge over the course of one day inside a police station, Wyler’s deep focus staging of his cast brings layers of both visual and subtextual significance to Detective Story, turning it into a character study of an unforgiving, unsalvageable figure.
In Sabrina, Audrey Hepburn combines two roles she would commonly be associated with in her career – the fresh-faced innocent and the stylish fashion icon – and through her gorgeous transformation challenges clearly defined class boundaries, giving rise to a web of intricate relationships that Billy Wilder relishes in his luscious deep focus cinematography.
While Billy Wilder’s snappy screenplay for Sunset Boulevard bounces from scene to scene in crisp, elegiac prose, he also efficiently constructs one of the most tragic cinematic characters in Norma Desmond, played by a magnificently theatrical Gloria Swanson whose every line and action resounds with pride and misery of grandiose proportions.
Though a World War II German prison camp is not a setting that naturally opens itself up to comical escapades, Billy Wilder recognises the need to step away from its bleakness every now and again in Stalag 17, dedicating this suspenseful, funny, and tender film to the persistence of the human spirit in the worst conditions, whether that manifests as irreverent joy or a cosy, quiet peace.
Whenever some force of political cynicism comes along to threaten the sweet innocence of Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday, Jacques Tati may bite back with good humour, but his focus never strays from the sweet, childlike love of beaches, dress-up parties, ice cream, fire crackers, and summer vacations, effectively turning his film into the cinematic equivalent of a postcard.
Beyond its inexorable influence upon every heist movie from this point on, John Huston’s film noir The Asphalt Jungle sets a perfectionistic standard of plotting that has rarely been topped in the genre, following the exploits and comeuppance of a skilled gang of crooks destined to fail by nature of their own inevitable flaws and a fatalistic universe.
Keeping the spirit of silent cinema alive, Jacques Tati puts his flair for physicals gags and intricate architectural set pieces to use in Mon Oncle, sending up the consumerist culture of post-war France while offering hope in one playful, eccentric man this world isn’t as superficial, self-centred, or tangled as it seems.
