"I'll see him in anything, so, I'll stand in line."

Well I'm standing in line in the rain to see a movie starring Gregory Peck
Yeah but you know it's not the one I had in mind
He's got a new one out now, I don't even know what it's about
But I'll see him in anything, so I'll stand in line.

Just watched Roman Holiday, which is one of the five films in the Audrey Hepburn collection. But you don't just watch it for Audrey, because Gregory Peck has as much class as she does.

This is pretty much my perfect film. It's got romance, it's got comedy. I'm going to invent a new term for it: Romantic Comedy. Or Rom-Com for short. Thank me later.

How classy is Gregory Peck? Cary Grant turns it down, having read the script and decided the film was really about the girl. So they send it to Peck, who says that whenever he received a comedy script, he got the feeling Cary Grant had seen it first. No room for ego in those circumstances. Still, he advises the producers to put her name above the title, as well as his, because he knew it would look silly in years to come. Now that's class.

How serendipitous, too, that they filmed it on location instead of doing the usual Hollywood thing (for the time) and back-projecting it. As such, it hasn't aged one bit, except in terms of the amount of traffic on the streets of Rome. Italians should watch the movie and weep for what the car culture has cost them. How did people manage before they had cars, eh? But, somehow, they did.

I think the strongest scene in the film, the one packing the most punch, is the one at the end where she just walks slowly down the line of press and shakes each one by the hand, sometimes thanking them or greeting them in their own language. It's so understated, so beautifully done, the very definition of the price of duty. One by one, shake hands, hello, until she finally reaches Joe, the one she wanted to be close to one more time.

And of course, I envy my wife because she saw it this afternoon for the first time. Imagine that!

There was a movie I seen one time, I think I sat through it twice
I don't remember who I was or where I was bound
All I remember about it was it starred Gregory Peck, he wore a gun and he was shot in the back
Seems like a long time ago, long before the stars were torn down