Film Forum

Audrey Hepburn & Fred Astaire in FUNNY FACE

Stanley Donen · 1957 · U.S. · 103 min

IMDBLetterboxdTrailer

With songs by George and Ira Gershwin Relentlessly thinking Pink, Kay Thompson’s Quality magazine honcho (based on Vogue legend Diana Vreeland) and her minions swarm a Greenwich Village bookshop, but Fred Astaire’s photographer “Dick Avery” (based on visual consultant Richard Avedon) thinks the overwhelmed clerk, gamine Audrey Hepburn, is just the right face for that “new look.” Empty, shallow modeling contract vs. turtle-necked professor Emile Flostre’s “Empathicalism?” Oh, there’s a trip to philosophical hotbed Paris thrown in... along with a score of Gershwin evergreens (and originals by Roger Edens); nightclub great/Eloise creator Thompson in one of only two major movie appearances; Astaire creating a courtyard bullfight with only a red-lined raincoat and an umbrella; Hepburn, in basic noir, letting herself go in a smokey bohemian boîte; the three performing together (in split screen) for the ebullient “Bonjour Paris!”—through stunning locations of a city that never looked more inviting; topped by the equally-locationed fashion shoot and its electrifying finale: Hepburn, a scarlet Givenchy gown, and the “Victory of Samothrace.”