Summer Reading Challenge: Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn in World War II

I've been very excited to read this book, being both a massive Audrey Hepburn fan, and a bit of a World War Two history buff!

Whilst most people are aware that Audrey grew up in Nazi occupied Holland, her reluctance to talk about this aspect of her life led many biographers to gloss over it. However, as author Robert Matzen realised, to understand what happened during the Second World War is to understand Audrey and her views about life.
Audrey lived through the Nazi occupation, the Battle of Arnhem and the hunger winter of 1944. She lost close family and friends, and many times her own life was in danger. I really hadn't realised just how close the battle was to her home, and how relentlessly and devastatingly her village was bombed.
Matzen's book is meticulously researched, he's cleared up many points that were either hinted at, or ignored, in previous Audrey biographies-such as her involvement with the resistance, her parents stance on the war, and her family background. We learn about her difficult, but close, relationship with her mother, her passionate dedication to ballet and her work helping in a hospital run by the Dutch resistance.

Audrey with her mother Ella Van Heemstra, 1942

Audrey with her beloved Aunt Meisje and Uncle Otto

Many of Audrey's experiences were incredibly harrowing and traumatic but she retained her love of dance, children and nature. Matzen does a wonderful job of setting the scene, he tries to make you feel as if you are experiencing the sights and sounds of battle, and I think this is crucial in trying to understand just what it was Audrey lived through as a young woman.

Audrey experienced so much in her early years, more than many experience in a lifetime, but despite the horrors she saw, she remained a loving and kindhearted person, devoted to helping others, I have so much respect for how she lived her life, she really was a special soul.
I recommend this book to anyone who may wish to learn more about Audrey, Dutch Girl, does an amazing job of highlighting an essential part of her life story.

Audrey dancing in 1942

"There's a curious thing about pain. In the beginning, it's an enemy, it's something that you don't want to face or think about or deal with. Yet with time it becomes almost a friend. If you've lost someone you love very much, in the beginning you can't bear it, but as the years go by, the pain of losing them is what reminds you so vividly of them-that they were alive. My experiences and the people I lost in the war remain so vivid to me because of the pain."
-Audrey, p. 105

"I don't think you ever forget anything, totally, but life, and especially time, gives you a way to deal with it, to live with it. I have a good cry every so often, like everyone else."
-Audrey, p. 150

"My childhood in Arnhem and in Velp was the most important part of my youth, I was ten when the Germans invaded the Netherlands and I was fifteen when it was all over. They were very delicate, precious years. I experienced a lot then, but it was not all misery. The circumstances brought family and friends closer together. You ate the last potatoes together."
-Audrey, p. 236

Audrey's wartime identity card

Summer Reading Challenge

I'm pleased to say that this year I will be taking part in Out of the Past's Summer Reading Challenge (or Winter if you're me!) I participated in 2016, but only managed to read four books, this year I'm hoping to read the full six!

The books I have chosen are:

1. Dutch Girl: Audrey Hepburn in World War Two by Robert Matzen

2. Julie Christie by Melanie Bell

3. Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse

4. Julie Christie by Michael Feeney Callan

5. To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway

6. Vivien Leigh: An Intimate Portrait by Kendra Bean

(I think Julie Christie might be my theme this year!)

If you would like to participate all the details can be found here-Happy Reading!

L'Eclisse-Monica Vitti (1962)

Monica Vitti's languid beauty is what fills L'Eclisse, we wait to see her on screen. As Vittoria she is cool, bored, troubled, impetuous and intelligent. She goes from laughing to seriousness in seconds, and this creates a reality to a film that is often dream like in it's stark beauty. It is she who displays the emptiness and boredom of modern day life, the sense that there might be something better but it is unattainable in a society that is fixated on the material. The people around Vittoria are obsessed with consumerism, with wealth, in contrast Vittoria takes pleasure from the small things in life, the wind rattling a fence, people walking in the streets, photographs, things that seem to go unnoticed by the fast paced style of living adopted by her contemporaries. Stylistically Vitti is often filmed from behind, so that we see her world, but do we ever truly see her? Perhaps not, but her dissatisfaction with life, though unspoken, is certainly relatable in this day and age.

Fragments-Marilyn Monroe

Happily as time goes by more and more people seem to be coming to the realisation that Marilyn Monroe was not a 'dumb blonde' but an incredibly intelligent, aware and sensitive woman. The tragedy is that for so long Marilyn has been viewed as being the archetypical sex goddess and few have realised the depth of her knowledge and interests. A quick google search of the books she owned and read gives up a phenomenal and impressive reading list that puts the most avid bookworm to shame.
She is at her most fascinating and raw in the 2010 book, Fragments. 

As the title suggests Fragments is a collection of fragmentary pieces, letters, poems, diary entries and self analysis written by Marilyn over the duration of her adult life. The subject matter ranges from her thoughts on her childhood, marriage, career, emotions and dreams. She is sensitive, self aware, melancholic and sometimes humorous. I cannot think of a better book to read in order to know the real Marilyn.
Here is an excerpt from one of her poems that I found particularly beautiful and haunting:

And the silence is alone
except for the thunderous rumbling of things unknown
distant drums very present
but for the peircing of screams
and the whispers of things
sharp sounds and then suddenly hushed
to moans beyond sadness-terror beyond fear
The cry of things dim and too young to be known yet
The sobs of life itself
p. 73

Bonnie and Clyde (1967)

Arthur Penn's infamous Bonnie and Clyde (1967) is based on the true story of bank robbers Clyde Barrow (Warren Beatty) and Bonnie Parker (Faye Dunaway). Together they form a gang that terrorises America, robbing and shooting their way to an inevitable but brutal end.

The most arresting character is Dunaway's Bonnie. She's flirtatious, impetuous, intelligent, nervy and loyal. Bonnie is also the most complex character, from the moment the audience is introduced to her we sense her boredom with life, her agitation and her frustrated sensuality.
As the film progresses Bonnie's apparent over exuberance and risk taking behaviour make way for someone intensely frustrated with her position in life. Bonnie is tired of her narrow world, tired of being poor, tired of being a waitress. More than any of the other characters it is Bonnie that the audience sympathises with when she is subjected to the noise and hysteria of Buck (Gene Hackman) and Blanche (Estelle Parsons). And it is Bonnie who rightly sees the dangers of having the screaming Blanche as part of the gang.

There is a jekyll and hyde element to Bonnie. On the one hand she is intelligent and deep thinking, writing poetry, patient with Clyde's apparent impotency and perceptive. On the other she is flighty, reckless and seems to have limited moral boundaries. Or perhaps she is just blinded by love. Whilst Bonnie participates in the robberies and brandishes a gun, she is also a lost girl who longs for her mother and is hurt by her mother's perception that it will all 'go wrong'. Initially the excitement of being on the run sustains Bonnie, but later she asks Clyde what he would do if they could start over, be 'clean'. His admittance that he would continue robbing banks, just not in the same state, seems to dissatisfy her.

There is an intense feeling of claustrophobia in Bonnie and Clyde. Each time Bonnie screams out in frustration over the close living quarters, shared with Buck and Blanche, the audience wants to scream their agreement. Much of the film is spent with five people squashed into cars of varying sizes. There is no room to breathe, no room to move. In contrast, when they are alone, Clyde and Bonnie frequent wide open spaces.

If Bonnie and Clyde exhibit a sort of dangerous glamour, it is a false one, that distances them from the reality of what their lives would be like without crime-what the lives of every other American is like. Set in the Great Depression, opportunities are limited for everyone, and in a sequence that could be straight out of The Grapes of Wrath the criminals come across a family camped by the side of the road with everything they own piled on top of their car. This is a tale of the American dream gone wrong, in part because there was no feasibility of the dream to begin with. A story of the immorality of youth, coupled with the dark underbelly of America's obsession with guns-both from the criminal point of view and from that of the law.

4/5

Born Free (1966)

Based on a true story, Born Free, tells the remarkable story of Joy and George Adamson and the lion cub, Elsa, whom they raise. When Elsa becomes too big to keep at the Adamson's home, Joy is determined that she should be released back into the wild.

Elsa and her two sisters are rescued by George Adamson, a game warden, after he was forced to shoot their mother in self defence. He brings the three cubs home to his wife Joy, and they begin to care for them. Eventually two of the cubs are sent to the Rotterdam zoo, but the couple decide to keep their favourite, Elsa. Joy is determined to release Elsa into the wild so she can live a free life. However having been raised by humans, Elsa is unable to hunt for herself, and so the Adamson's set out to train her as best they can. Through a series of trial and error they succeed in helping Elsa learn to hunt.
Her final test is to find a mate, and after leaving her to fend for herself, the Adamson's are delighted when they return to find Elsa with three cubs of her own.

Born Free was based on the hugely successful book of the same name written by the real Joy Adamson. The relationship she had had with Elsa was regarded as a scientific marvel and completely changed the way people viewed lions. All the proceeds Joy made from her books and the film, she put into her conservation trust, named after her beloved Elsa.
In the film Joy and George were played by real life couple, Virginia McKenna and Bill Travers. Determined to make the film as authentic as possible, Virginia and Bill, insisted on working with real lions, whilst the film crew remained safe behind wire cages. This gave the film a greater feel of realism and with it's evocative score by John Barry, it remains a beautiful and moving piece of cinema.

Virginia and Bill were so inspired by their time with the lions that they later formed the Born Free Foundation, dedicated to saving animals and keeping them wild. One of their first missions was to successful rehabilitate the three lions used during the film. Girl, Boy and Ugas were sent to live with George Adamson who then released them back into the wild.

Virginia McKenna, George Adamson, Bill Travers, Joy Adamson

The film continued on with the work started by Joy's book, it showed people a different side to lions, and encouraged people to preserve their lives and their habitats. In telling the story of Elsa the Travers also embarked on a new phase of their careers, and Virginia remains actively involved with animal conservation to this day.

                                                                              4/5

The Ipcress File (1965)

The anti-thesis to James Bond, The Ipcress File, presents a grim, realistic world of double agents with the bleak fantasticalness of Orwell's 1984. It tells the story of Harry Palmer (Michael Caine) an agent working for the Ministry of Defence who helps to uncover a plot involving the brainwashing of British scientists.

The Ipcress File perfectly brings everyday domesticity to the spy thriller and creates a main character that reflects this. Harry Palmer loves cooking, we see him at the supermarket (not a place James Bond would traverse), he enjoys classical music and reading and is from a working class background.
The film brought kitchen sink realism to a genre that was known for its flashy, glamorous and rather unbelievable plot lines. Ipcress is firmly rooted in everyday London, with it's grime and drudgery, this is the other side to the swinging sixties dream. Based on the novel of the same name by Len Deighton the film also owes much to the novels of Graham Greene and George Orwell's dystopian, 1984. The story reflects the Cold War paranoia that was prevalent in Britain at the time, with it's fears of scientific experiments, defection and brain washing.
 However in spite of it's bleak setting Ipcress has it's fair share of humour. Palmer has a laconic attitude and Caine brings his characteristic witticisms to the role. It's also a taut thriller, as who is who, is not fully revealed until the end.
It is a film of secrets and double crossings and so the audience views the characters from the margins. Situations are seen through car windows, telephone boxes, light shades, from behind shoulders-often what we see is partially obscured, as it is for many of the characters. Ironically Palmer has a habit of leaving doors open, something which both his superiors bring him up on, but this could denote his more open, relaxed manner in the face of so many lies.

Sound is incredibly important in the film, and it's not just the brain washing noise of the Ipcress. From the beginning the small everyday sounds are heightened and pre eminent, where in many other films they would be softened. Everything from an alarm clock to a coffee grinder, noise in the street to footsteps. We become aware that this is a film in which every sound has a meaning and sounds can be dangerous. This cacophony of little sounds all lead to the finale of the torture room in which sound is used for a deadly purpose.

4/5