I enjoyed Roman Holiday quite a lot too when I saw it, partly because I screened it with my students in China a decade ago and they absolutely fell in love with it, no doubt for Audrey Hepburn. All those adjectives you use to describe Wyler are spot on, he’s quintessential tasteful director (to a fault perhaps?). You can’t say that Wyler isn’t manipulative in his own way (as is Hitchcock) — the real matter that would separate him or Hitch from the chaff of today’s schlock is whether there’s something going on that informs or gives a deeper sense of purpose to those cinematic manipulations imposed on the audience. Million Dollar Baby is as manipulative as hell (how can’t it be with Haggis as screenwriter) but Eastwood manages to give the melodrama a feeling that is unmistakably genuine and unmistakably his own — a sense of his patriarchal protectivist stance towards the world falling apart at the seams.

Anyway have no fear, there’s a lot of great stuff out now, not even just on technological grounds but in terms of feeling — it may just be that human feelings are different than they were 60 years ago, for better or worse. Two films I’m interested in seeing that seem to touch on genuine human feelings are AWAY FROM HER and KNOCKED UP — hope I get a chance to see them.

i recently watched wyler’s “roman holiday,” which i was prepared to really dislike, but it won me over with its intelligence; this analogy might not hold up to any scrutiny but i was being all curmudgeonly and things-ain’t-what-they-used-to-be by telling a friend that “roman holiday” is to a current oscar-bait-type film (a ron howard joint, say, or “crash”) what david straithern’s ed murrow is to joe mccarthy in “good night, and good luck”; wyler is stoic,intelligent, articulate, dignified above all else, while yuor current oscar-bait is manipulative, blubbering, and loony, desperate to be liked and insisting on blubbering lunacy as proof of authenticity. dignity wins the battle but blubbering lunacy has won the war. i say this as someone who is deeply suspicious of aesthetic conservatism or vague fondness for golen ages, but it really does seem to me that there has been a real decline.