Wick's Review

Summary - Great 4.0

Audrey Hepburn is the spoon-full-of-sugar who makes the cultural imperialism go down in Funny Face. Stanley Donen’s musical – done Broadway style – is an intoxicating Vogue-tini, a Size 0 fashion fantasy.

Richard Avedon famously created the opening titles, which are perfectly high fashion. George & Ira Gershwin, Edith Head and Hubert de Givenchy are among the glittering names they chicly memorialize.

Kay Thompson famously and broadly played Maggie Prescott, Editor-in-Chief of a Queen Bee fashion magazine. Think Harper’s Bazaar in the Fifties. The Devil Wears Prada comes to mind, though that 21st century movie doesn’t approach the supernova of stars, smarts & songs that Funny Face assembled.

Cheesiness it’s got in spades also, which was apparently more of a problem than the producers of this big musical realized in 1957.¹ However, it’s also subversively smart, for instance, discovering Audrey Hepburn’s philosophile in a Greenwich Village bookstore. From there to a comically Bohemian club on the Left Bank, screenwriter Leonard Gershe found plenty of opportunities to cleverly tweak the dominant social trends that Funny Face personifies.

It’s also got more than a few perfect movie moments:

• An ultra-smooth first kiss 16½ minutes in, when Fred Astaire pulls Audrey Hepburn to him as she stands on a bookstore’s rolling ladder. That’s also when the subject of empathy gets introduced.
• Moments later, Audrey dances alone with a ribbon bedecked summer hat. Perfect movie moment!
• Astaire’s photographer dances Hepburn around his darkroom to Funny Face. Love it.
• Astaire’s Bohemian bolero routine
• A Bird of Paradise emerges in Givenchy

Perfect movie moments aside, Funny Face barely stands the test of time. For instance, it is romantic but not sexy or gripping, due less to a lack of chemistry and more because of its mid-century phoniness.

That said, for fans of the inimitable Audrey Hepburn, of Edith Head, of fashion and of musical comedies, Funny Face “fills the air with smiles, for miles and miles and miles.”

¹ Funny Face didn’t initially earn back its budget, becoming another commercially unsuccessful Fifties’ musical, along with There’s No Business Like Show Business and even the sublime Singin’ in the Rain.

Acting - Great 4.0

Kay Thompson nearly steals the show as an imperious fashion magazine editor. Think Diana Vreeland, then at Harper’s Bazaar. Thompson made only four movie appearances in her career, instead becoming most famous as the author of the Eloise children’s books. Her Think Pink! number that opens the movie is a showstopper that works as well in 2014 as it did half a century earlier. She is – in short – a revelation.

Fred Astaire plays fashion photographer Dick Avery, a doppelgänger for Richard Avedon. Almost 60 when the movie was made, he takes to the role like a duck to water, even wearing his trademark belt – a tie tied round his waist. No middle-aged paunch for him! Interestingly, Astaire starred in the Broadway incarnation of Funny Face thirty years earlier, even if that was a substantially different show.

Audrey Hepburn made her musical debut in Funny Face, with her character becoming the It Girl in high fashion circles, a la Suzy Parker. Hepburn, a Size 0 with a flawless face, is a natural, also demonstrating a decent singing voice, well rounded dance talents and the innate intelligence to credibly play a bookworm who loves nothing more than to discuss philosophy. They don’t make ’em like her anymore.

Supporting Players

• Michel Auclair as a French philosopher greatly admired by Audrey Hepburn’s bookish beauty.
• Robert Flemyng as a top fashion designer based on Hubert de Givenchy
• Dovima, then a top model, as a top model
• Suzy Parker, the first supermodel, cameos as a Specialty Dancer in the Think Pink! number.
• Ruta Lee also cameos. She had a small but notable part in Witness for the Prosecution the same year.

Film - Great 4.0

A melange of the old and the cutting edge (for the Fifties), Funny Face works today as a demonstration of boundless talent and as a mid-century time capsule of cultural imperialism in action. However, it is cliche ridden right till the end.

Yet, as a takedown of the hypocrisy, coldness and fakery of the fashion industry, it is a direct hit.

Edge - Tame 1.5

Audrey Hepburn is idealized as a figure of feminine perfection, yet she’s not sexualized: no twerking, teasing or anything approaching today’s hyper-sexualized approach to fashion and fashionable movies. How far we’ve come…

Reality - Glib 1.7

Made just pre-Mad Men, Funny Face serves today as a color drenched postcard from that exuberantly optimistic era.

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