Why Audrey Hepburn’s only R-rated movie made Roger Ebert incandescent with rage: “weep for the cinema”
No actor with more than a handful of credits to their name manages to escape Hollywood without a few duds in their filmography. Even those whose careers have been celebrated, rewatched, dissected, and reframed countless times are susceptible. Most of us think of Audrey Hepburn as the effervescent screen presence who lit up such classics as Roman Holiday, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and Charade, but she made over two dozen screen appearances in her life, and some of them were decidedly beneath her.
Hepburn rocketed to fame in 1953 after her starring role in William Wyler’s Roman Holiday and was one of Hollywood’s biggest stars for more than a decade. But in the late 1960s, she left the US and quietly retired from acting. Between 1968 and her death in 1993, she only made four feature films, none of which reached the heights of her early work.
Her reasons for coming out of retirement were different for each film, but it is still perplexing that she chose to appear in the 1979 thriller Bloodline. Directed by Terence Young, it follows a pharmaceutical heiress (Hepburn) who a mysterious killer targets after her father dies under strange circumstances. Meanwhile, a murderer is killing young women in snuff films. It is based on Sidney Sheldon’s novel of the same name, the rights of which were purchased by the producers for a record $1.25million before it was even released.
Young, who also directed Dr No, From Russia with Love, and Thunderball, had already collaborated with Hepburn in the film she made just before her retirement, Wait Until Dark. Given the success of that film, it is easier to comprehend why Hepburn was willing to be coaxed out of retirement to work with the filmmaker again, but the fact that she turned him down when he first approached her with Bloodline is a testament to how truly shockingly terrible the script is. Despite a supporting cast of James Mason, Ben Gazzara, and Michelle Phillips, it was a trainwreck from start to finish.
In his review of the movie, film critic Roger Ebert was characteristically eloquent. “After six months, a week, and two days of suspense, we can now relax,” he wrote. “The worst movie of 1979 has opened.” After advising people to keep well away from it, he changed his mind. “On second thought, I’m not recommending that you avoid it,” he wrote, “See Sidney Sheldon’s Bloodline, and weep for the cinema.”
Ebert wasn’t just being a snobby film critic. Bloodline was not a hit. Despite Hepburn’s return to the screen and the shamelessly smutty storyline, it only made $8 million at the box office off of a $12 million budget. Still, Ebert had no sympathy for the author who walked away with $1.25 million before a word of his manuscript had been read. “Sheldon,” he wrote, “Is laughing all the way to the remedial writing class.”
Hepburn only made two films after Bloodline, and although neither of them was close to a masterpiece, they were infinitely better than Young’s ill-conceived pharmaceutical thriller. 1981’s They All Laughed was a satire about infidelity directed by Peter Bogdanovich, while 1989’s Always was a romantic drama about an angel directed by Steven Spielberg.
