In 1953, Audrey Hepburn made her starring debut as Princess Anna in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday. She’s a stoic princess, full of duty, until she has a breakdown brought on by the stress of her scheduled life. Her doctor calms her with a shot in the arm of something that will make her happy, and sleepy. So she slips out the embassy, falls asleep, and ends up in the apartment of Gregory Peck.
The situation is, as Princess Anna says, very unusual. During her altered state, Anna quotes her favorite poem “Arethusa,” by Keats. No, Shelley. Says Anna: “Arethusa arose / from her couch of snows / in the Acroceraunian mountains.” In the drawling mouth of Audrey Hepburn Shelley has never sounded better.
Arethusa, as it turns out, was a nymph in classical Greek mythology. Ovid wrote about her in Metamorphosis (book 5). Arethusa fled from her home in search of freedom. She bathed in the river Alpheus, not realizing that the river was indeed the god Alpheus, who fell in love with the young nymph. Arethusa fled Alpheus; she was devoted to Artemis, the god of chastity, who saved her from Alpheus by turning her in to a cloud. That cloud became a river, that river an underground stream, and eventually, a fountain spring.
If you don’t want to go read Ovid or classical Greek myths, the rest of Shelley’s poem will suffice. It’s beautiful. “The earth seemed to love her, / and heaven smiled above her, / As she lingered towards the deep.”
Nothing in the movies is accidental, of course; the life of Arethusa overlays that of Princess Anna.This is the story of Princess Anna and many young women since stories became stories (including, curiously, another Princess Anna, from Disney’s Frozen). In Roman Holiday, Anna flees her family in search of a life of her own, flows through the streets of classical Rome in a dream-like state, finding for the first time adventure, romance, independence. She returns to her old life, changed yes, but unable to free herself completely.
The writer of Roman Holiday was Dalton Trumbo.
Trumbo was a novelist and screenwriter, but he is most famous for his refusal to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee, during their 1947 hearings on the influence of Communism in Hollywood.
Trumbo was, in fact, a Communist. He joined the party in 1943. For his failure to participate in the HUAC hearings, he was held in contempt of court, and spent 11 months in prison. He was also banned by the MPAA, along with 9 others (who comprise the Hollywood 10) from working the motion picture industry until he disavowed the Communist Party. He didn’t.
Instead, Trumbo went underground. He wrote dozens of screenplays, mostly for B movies in the 1950s, waiting out the influence of the blacklist in Hollywood. One of the screenplay’s Trumbo wrote in 1950s was Roman Holiday, which was credited to the front-name Ian McLellan Hunter. For having his name appear in the credits, Hunter won a Best Screenplay Award at the Oscars in 1954.
It wasn’t until 1993 that the Academy decided to acknowledge the contribution of Trumbo, awarding him a posthumous Oscar for co-writing Roman Holiday. Then, in 2011, at the behest of Trumbo and Hunter’s sons, the Writers Guild of America finally officially credited Roman Holiday to Dalton Trumbo. A long winding passage from the testimony table to prison to a posthumous recognition.
Here, too, is the end of Arethusa:
At noontide they flow
Through the woods below
And the meadows of asphodel;
And at night they sleep
In the rocking deep
Beneath the Ortygian shore;—
Like spirits that lie
In the azure sky
When they love but live no more.
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