For the sixth feature in our screening series with Martin Scorsese’s Film Foundation at Nitehawk Cinema, we present Stanley Donen’s Two for the Road: a late 60s British relationship comedy/drama featuring a venerable powerhouse of the era’s professionals: Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn portray the couple, with a script by Frederic Raphel (Darling) and directed with delightful zeal by heavyweight Stanley Donen (Singin’ in the Rain). The film tracks the inner workings of a decade-long marriage between Albert and Audrey’s characters and demonstrates that relationships aren’t as sunshine-y as a Gene Kelly musical.
To get you prepped, we reached out to a few friends and critics to weigh in on this beautiful, bitter pill of a film.
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—Introduction by Greg Eggebeen
ZACHARY HEINZERLING – Director (Cutie and the Boxer)
The first thing I remember about this film is the quirky opening titles. The guy who did all the classic Bond movie title designs, Maurice Binder, stylized the title sequence with geometric shapes and bizarre transitions and road signs flying at your face. Cue the ultra-romantic orchestral music, reminiscent of some old French countryside drama, and close-ups of young Albert Finney and Audrey Hepburn, and you have the start of this stone cold, dry-humored, road movie. The first line says it all. Joanne (Audrey) to her husband (Albert) says as she’s looking at a newly-wed couple from their Mercedes coupe, “They don’t look very happy.” Mark replies, “Why should they? They just got married.” From here, the film traces the beginnings, and the ends, of Joanna and Mark’s romance.
The story unfolds with no apparent order, nor with an idea of things getting better, or worse. As we move non-linearly in time through scenes from their relationship, we notice the random nature of memory, and how over time, how little these two stubborn lovers have changed. Their highs are shared as readily as their lows, and we are left with a rather bleak but truthful look at love.
The real genius of Stanley Donen’s film is in the transitions. One sequence of flashbacks is connected through close-ups of various fruits the two are eating while driving together. After finishing the film, I remember thinking the husband Mark deserved a lot more slaps in the face. He is such an asshole. And never seems to realize what an amazing gal he has in Joanne. By the end, you see that their mutual insecurities have locked them in some sort of hard, dependent love. It’s not very pretty, or romantic, but it makes for a good laugh, and at least it feels honest.
JOSEPH WALSH – NITRATE STOCK
“You mean that’s fixed it? Or that’s fixed it?” – Joanna Wallace
On April 27th 1967, ironically enough at the kickoff to the Summer of Love, director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Frederic Raphael dropped their quirky, unique take on the standard Hollywood romance on unsuspecting audiences nationwide. A tale not just of the meet-cute but of all that follows, good and ill. Anybody anticipating a case of the warm fuzzies from the breezily titled Two for the Road, starring screen sweetheart Audrey Hepburn no less, was in for something altogether different. Resting somewhere between the swoon travelogue romcom of Audrey’s earlier Roman Holiday and later, more dire examinations of marriage like Ordinary People, Stanley’s film was and is a very odd duck indeed. That’s not to imply the film received no love upon release. Both the critics and the box office were kind, and it snagged an Oscar nomination for Raphael’s script, as well as Golden Globe nominations for Audrey and composer Henry Mancini’s score (his own personal fave). Its cult has remained a strong one as well these 46 years later, so it’s interesting that so few imitations or homages have been attempted, and fewer still succeed (I’m looking at you, Rob Reiner’s The Story of Us).
What sets Two for the Road apart from other celluloid romances is its willingness to explore the dark places love and marriage can take us— not merely the minor irritations and major betrayals, but the despair, the ennui, the apathy. When Audrey asks hubby Albert Finney twice whether he’s fixed the car, emphasis on the word fixed, it’s to underline the word’s double meaning. Either the car has been restored to working order or it’s for the scrap heap (metaphor!). In times both good and bad for the Wallaces, they never seem to be on the same page, sometimes in completely different books. Miscommunication renders their intentions elusive at best, and utterly worthless at worst. Raphael’s script embraces the uncomfortable, even scary moments when your most intimate partner becomes an insignificant stranger once more, and boldly blends these in with Tinseltown’s familiarly giddy fall-in-the-pool shenanigans. It takes a special kind of daring to risk the likability of the romantic leads in this manner. Of course, it helps to have Audrey Hepburn and Albert Finney essaying those leads. Charm goes a long way.
In terms of its time/memory jump structure and its warts-and-all view of the romance, the closest contemporary to Stanley’s film seems to be Michel Gondry’s Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and I’d love to know how much of a fan Charlie Kaufman was of the earlier film before undertaking his own dark version of Cupid’s hangover. Like ESotSM, Donen and Raphael’s film ends with the audience left to conclude whether the couple’s decision to remain together is the right one. Some might see it as a doomed cycle of dysfunction, others as a championing of romance replete with all its flaws. In any case, the story may not end neatly, or even definitively, but ends satisfyingly, in a way that doesn’t betray the preceding two hours’ worth of honesty. There is no simple conclusion between people in this life, and the film reflects that perfectly.
A couple of last notes; take notice of the film’s rapid-cut editing style (the average shot length is 4.5 seconds according to IMDB), which propels the narrative at a brisk pace, underlining its lead characters’ instinctive understanding that constant momentum is what keeps the marriage alive, if even barely. And my favorite bit of symbolic tomfoolery is Audrey’s routine discovering/safekeeping of Albert’s passport, much to the latter’s combined relief and chagrin. Although he spends the majority of the movie resisting the truth, Mark Wallace knows he’s not getting anywhere in the world without Joanna.
STEPHEN M. SILVERMAN – Author (Dancing on the Ceiling: Stanley Donen and His Movies)
Stanley Donen was never a pushover. Were he a Marx Brother, he’d be Groucho with his quick verbal jab. Yet when the director first spoke to me about his frequent star Audrey Hepburn, he dissolved into a hopeless romantic.
“Audrey,” said Donen, nearly at a loss for words, “in many ways had the same effect on me as Fred Astaire. I think of them, and my heart and spirit just soar.”
“I was bloody lucky, let’s face,” Audrey later confided a few weeks after my initial spate of interviews with Stanley, as I was putting together a biography of him. It was April 1992 and she was in her suite of New York’s Peninsula Hotel on a dark, cloudy afternoon the day before she was to appear at Lincoln Center for a salute to Gregory Peck. (“Look,” she said, pointing out the window up Fifth Avenue. “Tiffany’s.”)
“I do know that my private life was not always happy,” she said, “but with Stanley, I would always be happy on the set. Stanley made me laugh, and that, for me, was an enormous turn-on.”
Their third and final collaboration, Two for the Road, is itself an enormous turn-on. So romantic, even in its telling—jumping back and forth in time—though the relationship at its heart is rocky from its very start. (Originally titled Four Times Two, the movie examines four stages in the couple’s relationship.)
“A happy marriage would not have meant a good story,” said Stanley. Frederic Raphael’s scenario is often painful, especially given that the male protagonist—as played by Albert Finney—seems to exhibit little understanding of what love is. Still, it contains many romantic elements, especially when the French Riviera is underscored by the Henry Mancini’s wistful music.
“It did come out a little one-sided,” Stanley said of the union depicted onscreen. “Two for the Road is not meant to be as downbeat as it is. If you read the script, you wouldn’t get the same feeling. The husband and wife are supposed to be equally responsible for the difficulties in the marriage, and the story is supposed to be about what happens to people when they become too familiar with each other’s habits, how our little idiosyncrasies eventually irritate us and cause us to drift apart.”
Albert’s performance may be to blame. (Paul Newman had turned down the role.) “Albie doesn’t like to play anything charming,” said Stanley. “He doesn’t think he’s acting, in spite of the fact that in Tom Jones he was completely charming. I don’t know, maybe it was me. Maybe I couldn’t communicate it to him, because he wanted to be more difficult as that man, and that tipped the movie a little.”
And Audrey? “The role required a depth of emotion, care, yearning, and maturity that Audrey had never played before,” said her director. “She gave what I think is her best performance.”
Restored by Twentieth Century Fox in collaboration with The Film Foundation.
Print courtesy of the Film Foundation Conservation Collection at the Academy Film Archive and Twentieth Century Fox.
For tickets, click here. Complimentary drinks will be available from Larceny Bourbon after the screening in Nitehawk’s downstairs bar.
