She’s going to have a lot worse problems than that. It starts with the aspic (in the shape of a lion, in honor of the British guests of honor). The cook had to throw it on the floor to break up the fight between the valet and the butler. One’s been stabbed and needed to have his eye stitched up, the other’s been arrested and it all had to do with the flirtatious  housemaid. And then the guests of honor up and went to Florida. Watch Burke at the end of her tether and you’ll never confuse her with Glinda again.

But Burke isn’t the only treat. You get both Lionel and John Barrymore, the latter playing a washed-up actor whose decline is quite riveting. Here’s his poignant admission to his infatuated young lover, right before he sends her back to her fiancé:  “You want to know the truth Paula?  I love you as much as I can love anyone. But it isn’t real love anymore. There have been too many.”

“Dinner at Eight” also features Jean Harlow as the sexy, manipulative, and cheating wife of a crooked businessman. You won’t believe what a bad girl she is!

My favorite character is the aging actress, Carlotta Vance, played by the magnificent Marie Dressler. She’s a hoot in every scene, but she’s also the film’s moral center. Back in the days before the Hays Code, you didn’t need a goody-two-shoes in that role. Someone like Carlotta, who’s seen it all, done it all, and regrets not one minute, is just right for the part.

Hepburn plays Linda Seton, the older sister of the woman Grant’s character (Johnny) loves. The Setons are a wealthy family with the usual skeletons in the closet. In this case, it’s a younger brother with a drinking problem. Ned Seton has given up his love of music to go into business and his quiet self-destructiveness broke my heart.

It’s New Year’s Eve, and Linda has just realized that she’s in love with Johnny. She’s too high-principled to steal him away from her sister — nobody does high-principled better than Hepburn — even though we can see that she’s just his type.

So Linda asks Ned to pour her a glass of champagne.

“What’s it like, to get drunk Ned?”

He considers this seriously. “How drunk?”

“Good and drunk.”

“Grand!”

“How is it?” Linda persists.

“Well…” He pauses to refill his glass. “To begin with it brings you to life.”

“Does it?” she asks, brightening to the idea.

“And after awhile you begin to know all about it. You feel… important.”

“That must be good!”

“Yes.” He beckons her closer. “And then pretty soon the game starts.”

“What game?”

“A swell game. A terribly exciting game. You see, you think clear as crystal but every move, every sentence is a problem. It gets pretty interesting.”

Linda’s face falls as understanding dawns. “You get beaten then, don’t you?”

“Sure, but that’s good too. Then you don’t mind anything. Not anything at all. Then you sleep.”

“How long can you keep it up?”

“A long while. As long as you can last.”

“Oh, Ned. That’s awful.”

“Think so? Other things are worse”.

“Where do you end up?

“Where does everybody end up?” He says this matter-of-factly. “You die.  That’s alright too.”

Shades of the bitter disillusionment of “Dinner at Eight,” which George Cukor also directed from a stage play. The romance is lovely, right up there with “The Philadelphia Story” (another Cukor gem). But the dialogue lends this film a darker tone.

Many thanks to E. H. for recommending it to me.

Fair enough, but was this opening salvo in the neorealist campaign any less of a myth?

The film was dark and gritty—such a contrast to the clean aesthetic of Fascism! The style was no-style. Much of it was shot on the street, as opposed to in a studio, using non-actors to play most of the parts. The German soldiers in the film were real POWs. Instead of a glamorous movie star, Rossellini’s leading lady, Anna Magnani, was earthy, a woman of the people. The character she plays was based on a real woman killed in the streets by the Germans. The priest in the film, Don Pietro, who works with the Resistance, was also based on a real person.

But for all of the picture’s authentic, documentary feel, despite the deaths and betrayals, and notwithstanding the brutal scene of torture that we, along with Don Pietro, are made to witness, “Rome Open City” is a surprisingly uplifting film. Its message, in Rossellini’s own words, was that the German Occupation brought out the best in Italians, purifying them of the taint of collaboration with an evil regime:

If we go back to that period in our minds, it was perhaps the loveliest most thrilling period that we lived through, and the most extraordinary thing is that at that moment when everything seemed destroyed, when our lives seemed completely shattered, it’s precisely out of those ruins and debris, all that destruction, that there suddenly and miraculously arose in Italy, in every field of life an activity, a pugnacity, a consciousness and a human warmth that were absolutely astonishing.

Certainly Italian audiences were proud to recognize themselves in the ordinary heroes of this martyred Rome, and felt vindicated in the eyes of the world when “Rome Open City” won the Grand Prix at Cannes. A new Italy was rising from the ashes, one that was no longer passive. An Italy in which Catholics and the Left could find common cause in the quest to behave decently.

“It’s not that hard to die a good death,” says Don Pietro, “what’s hard is to live a good life.”

Let’s call it a necessary myth.