One of the many "spinster" roles Katharine Hepburn played throughout the 1950s, and one of the best. She plays a woman on vacation by herself in Venice, too uptight to let her hair down and succumb to the romance of the environment, yet tired of spending her evenings alone. She succeeds in doing a lot with a nothing role, and earned her sixth Academy Award nomination for her efforts.
Beyond Hepburn, there's not a whole lot to this film. It consists mostly of scenes in which Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi, as an Italian paramour, make tentative gestures toward one another. David Lean provides solid if uninspired direction. The movie looks nice -- Venice especially looks beautiful, and really what's going on in the background almost always holds more interest than anything going on in the foreground -- but one wishes they had splurged on CinemaScope. Subsequent Lean films would not have this problem -- he was about to embark upon his transition to massive epics that would keep him busy for the next thirty years.
Grade: B
Beyond Hepburn, there's not a whole lot to this film. It consists mostly of scenes in which Hepburn and Rosanno Brazzi, as an Italian paramour, make tentative gestures toward one another. David Lean provides solid if uninspired direction. The movie looks nice -- Venice especially looks beautiful, and really what's going on in the background almost always holds more interest than anything going on in the foreground -- but one wishes they had splurged on CinemaScope. Subsequent Lean films would not have this problem -- he was about to embark upon his transition to massive epics that would keep him busy for the next thirty years.
Grade: B