ELUSIVE AUDREY, AND DISNEY’S BLACK BEAUTY
ACCORDING to a new Stanley Kubrick biography I’ve just finished reading, the great director wanted to make a life of Napoleon in the late 1960s, with Jack Nicholson as the emperor and Audrey Hepburn as Josephine.
It never happened, and I can’t decide whether we’ve missed a treat or been spared a mess. Either way, Helena Coan’s new documentary AUDREY ( ★★★II) reminds us that, while far from the greatest screen actress of her generation, Hepburn (pictured left) was a consummate movie star. Coan has unearthed lots of previously unseen footage, helping us understand why she so bewitched audiences, directors and costars — and later children, in her tireless work for Unicef — but not why she so conspicuously failed to bewitch the most important men in her life, notably her English father, an acolyte of the fascist leader Oswald Mosley, who abandoned her at the age of six; and her serially unfaithful second husband, an Italian psychiatrist.
In the end, this is a frustrating film, unwisely padded with dramatised sequences intended to chronicle Hepburn’s childhood and her classical ballet training. But if you adore her and her films to distraction, and I know plenty of people who do, there is enough here to tempt you. BLACK BEAUTY ( ★★III), too, promises more than it delivers. Almost unbelievably, this is the first time Disney has saddled up with Anna Sewell’s classic 1877 novel, but relocating the dramatic ups and downs of our equine hero’s life to the modern-day U.S. does the story no favours — and just to further irritate the purists, Beauty is turned into a mustang mare and Joe, her devoted English stable boy of the novel, into Jo (Mackenzie Foy), a teenage American girl who has lost her parents in a road accident and goes to live with her rancher uncle (Iain Glen, dangerously riding bareback with his U.S. vowel sounds).
Kate Winslet offers a better American accent as she rather soppily gives voice to Beauty’s innermost thoughts, but occasionally (as in, ‘it reminded me of my mother and I’) tramples grammar underfoot.
AUDREY is on DVD and streaming platforms from Monday. Black Beauty is available from today on Disney +