By Scott Ross
Fred Astaire’s last major (and penultimate) musical, an exercise in style that, somewhat shockingly, was a financial disappointment on its release; it returned a profit only when re-issued following the success of My Fair Lady, which like Funny Face also starred Audrey Hepburn in the distaff lead. It’s one of the many pictures in which Hepburn appeared that paired her with an older man; indeed, in all of her major roles before Green Mansions and Breakfast at Tiffany’s (and several after) her co-stars were significantly older than she. I wonder if her almost preternatural poise and aura of maturity led to this? In any case, as a heterosexual version of Richard Avedon, Astaire is three decades too old for her, and looks it, as Gary Cooper would also do a year later for Billy Wilder in the otherwise perfect romantic comedy Love in the Afternoon. Somehow she makes an odd cinematic recurrence work.
Not a singer — or, if you prefer, a singer with a tiny range — Hepburn also makes her liabilities work, for her, and her awe-struck rendition of “How Long Has This Been Going On?” is one of the most charming vocal performances in movie musicals. (The heroic sound editors who stitched together her various takes into a tuneful whole have something to do with it as well.) Of course, today’s audience for Funny Face… always assuming there is one… would doubtless squeal with outrage at the cause of her singing: Astaire kissing her. (This even as they defend the Hair-Sniffer-in-Chief for his latest groping of some poor young girl.) And if the picture carries with it a slight whiff of anti-intellectualism, which its director, Stanley Donen, claimed was never the intention, it’s filled with marvels: A (mostly) Gershwin score; Astaire and Hepburn dancing among swans to “He Loves and She Loves” and “‘S Wonderful”; Hepburn’s marvelous abstract number in a Left Bank bistro while clad in chic black with white socks; Fred serenading Audrey with the title song under a red dark-room safe-light while developing a close-up of her; Astaire’s mock bullfight to “Let’s Kiss and Make Up,” during which he sends an umbrella sailing through the air to land with precision in a Parisian ash-can; and Kay Thompson in everything she does.
Thompson, a superb singer, was also a great vocal arranger, with a hip, hand-clapping, finger-snapping style that enlivened any number of otherwise indifferent movie musicals. (She was also the author of the beloved Eloise books, and launched the Williams Brothers, not incidentally landing Andy as her lover for many years.) In Funny Face she proves a comedienne of wit, and one of the truly great musical performers. Playing a dry, acerbic women’s fashion magazine editor based either on Diana Vreeland —and the Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Carmel Snow depending upon which source you consult —Thompson opens the picture smartly in the visually imaginative “Think Pink!” number, strides around the City of Light as if she owns it during “Bonjour, Paris!” and, with Astaire, sings and dances an incendiary “Clap Yo’ Hands” as a diversion while they scheme to “rescue” Hepburn from the French philosopher she idolizes. If Astaire was, as has been reported, uncomfortable working with an aggressive female performer like Thompson, in “Clap Yo’ Hands” he not only doesn’t betray those feelings but appears to be fully immersed in her style, kicking both sides of his guitar as rhythmic punctuation, falling to the floor in slow motion, kicking up his feet as he lies on his back and, at one point, literally screaming his enthusiasm. “Clap Yo’ Hands” wasn’t written for Thompson but it could have been; it’s virtually a personification of her style.
Although the movie employs the title of the 1927 Fred and Adele Astaire stage musical and several of its Gershwin songs (“Clap Yo’ Hands” came from Oh, Kay!) the plot has nothing to do with that brother-and-sister show. In fact, the felicitously-surnamed Leonard Gershe based his screenplay on his own Broadway musical Wedding Bells. While his satire on post-war philosophie française, here something called “empathicalism,” is a bit wan (its originator is, as Astaire’s character intuits, a womanizing phony) Gershe doesn’t stint on satirizing haute couture either. In this he is amusingly abetted by Donen and Avedon, the picture’s visual consultant. The split-screen images in “Think Pink!” are fun, and in their brevity and wit a definite improvement on the screen fashion show that is the only bad sequence in Singin’ in the Rain, and which Donen co-directed. But the actual fashion shoots, in which the reluctant intellectual played by Hepburn is coached by Astaire’s photographer, a sort of Stanislavsky of the high fashion set, are both amusing and exciting, especially the bit where Hepburn in a rich, red gown with cape evokes the Winged Victory at the Louvre.
Funny Face is slight — a VistaVision trifle — but like that layered dessert provides enormous pleasure and, for those who are new to it, the surprise of discovery. With the exception of Hepburn (the reason the picture was made at Paramount) it’s like a great, sparkling Arthur Freed MGM musical lacking only Freed himself: It was produced by his associate, Roger Edens; the music was orchestrated by people like Alexander Courage, Skip Martin and Conrad Salinger; the numbers choreographed by Astaire and Eugene Loring; and the whole of it wrapped up in Ray June’s glorious color cinematography which, unusually for the period (and perhaps inspired by John Huston and Oswald Morris’ work on Moulin Rouge) includes two musical sequences shot seemingly through the then-ubiquitous cigarette smoke of 1950s La Rive Gauche. Edith Head designed the often humorous costumes while Hubert de Givenchy, naturally, came up with Hepburn’s Parisian wardrobe.
Gershe, incidentally, altered Diana Vreeland’s famous neologism “bazzaz” in his script as “pizzaz,” which despite the movie’s financial failure somehow stuck; everyone today pronounces the word as “pizzaz.” Even Vreeland herself once said she wished she’d used a “p” instead of a “b.”
Text copyright 2022 by Scott Ross
So few critics, so many poets 