Funny Face (DVD)

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In 1957 Fred Astaire was one of the biggest stars in Hollywood and had been for decades. In 1957 Audrey Hepburn was one of Hollywood's favorite rising young stars. In 1957 Stanley Donen was among Hollywood's elite directors of classy entertainment. In 1957 the music and lyrics of George and Ira Gershwin had been around and loved forever. In 1957 the city of Paris was still in most people's eyes the romantic capital of the world. And in 1957 the musical comedy remained one of the moviedom's most popular genres. Is it any wonder, then, that the combination of Astaire, Hepburn, Donen, the Gershwins, and Paris achieved success in the musical comedy "Funny Face"?

In this modern Cinderella story, Astaire plays the Prince, a high-fashion magazine photographer, and Hepburn plays the poor stepsister, a clerk in a New York bookstore. Screenwriter Leonard Gershe patterned the story on his friend, the famous real-life fashion photographer Richard Avedon, and Avedon's romance with fashion model Dorcas Nowell. Avedon acted as a consultant on the film, set up the photography sessions, and supplied many of the photographs we see in the story. One assumes the real Cinderella performed similar duties in respect to Ms. Hepburn, although the credits do not mention it.

The plot involves Maggie Prescott (played by nightclub entertainer, singer, dancer, pianist, and author Kay Thompson, a bigger-than-life Auntie Mame type), the editor of "Quality," a New York-based woman's fashion magazine, wanting to find a new "Quality" girl to represent them. During a routine photography shoot in a Greenwich Village bookstore, the photographer, Dick Avery (Fred Astaire), notices a mousey clerk, Jo Stockton (Audrey Hepburn), in the background shots and declares her the very "Quality" girl they've been looking for. She just needs a bit of a makeover, he says, and she could be a top model in the business.

Jo, an intellectual type with "character and spirit," wants no part of being in the fashion business until she learns there's a free ticket to Paris involved, where she will model some of the new line of clothing from a celebrated fashion designer, Paul Duval (Robert Flemyng). She doesn't care a whit about fashionable clothing, but she does want to meet her idol, French philosopher Emile Flostre (Michel Auclair), and she sees the trip as her only chance to do so. Anyway, as we might expect, the makeover turns the dowdy Jo into a glamorous, sophisticated-looking woman of the world with "grace, elegance, and pizzazz." However, I thought she looked better as the plain-Jane bookstore clerk with the "funny face." Maybe it's just me.

"You don't have to be friendly to work together," says Jo to Dick. "Acquainted will do." But they become more than "acquainted." The movie's romance involves her and Dick falling in love. Never mind that Astaire by this time was in his late fifties and Hepburn still in her twenties. It's a long-established tradition in Hollywood for older men to romance younger, in some cases much younger, women. Besides, Hepburn probably has the longest history in motion pictures of romancing older men; consider her movies with Humphrey Bogart, Gary Cooper, Cary Grant, and Rex Harrison, besides Astaire. It's to the film's credit and to the actors and to the audience's suspension of disbelief that the romance angle works just fine.

There's also as much a "My Fair Lady" quality to the story as there is "Cinderella," with Jo's makeover foreshadowing Hepburn's character change from flower girl to cultured lady as Eliza Doolittle a few years later. In any case, Hepburn is here as naively appealing as ever, and Astaire is as elegant and graceful. Now, is it only me, or does anyone else think that Astaire was a dead ringer for Stan Laurel? Or was it vice-versa?

The sets, costumes, and scenery involve some truly eye-popping colors and some glorious location shots in and around Paris. I have to admit that I didn't care as much for the love story, though, and I didn't appreciate every song-and-dance sequence, yet the movie is so colorful and Edith Head's costume designs so attractive, I could hardly keep my eyes off the screen for all the showy merriment going on.