The Best Old Movies for Families by Ty Burr

Author:Ty Burr [Burr, Ty]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-48216-7
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-06-13T00:00:00+00:00

FUNNY FACE (COLOR, 1957)

Directed by: Stanley Donen

Starring: Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn, Kay Thompson

Ages: 6 and up

The sell: The last classic musical—and, yes, that’s Eloise’s mother.

The plot: Dick Avery (Astaire) is a fashion photographer seeking a new face for a magazine (think Vogue) run by powerhouse editor Maggie Prescott (Thompson; think Diana Vreeland or Anna Wintour). During a shoot in a Greenwich Village bookshop, he meets mousy intellectual Jo Stockton (Hepburn) and determines to turn her into a supermodel. Jo is willing to go with him to Paris, but mostly to meet Flostre, the star philosopher of “empathicalism.” Where do her allegiances land—uptown or downtown?

Why it’s here: Not for realism. The plot is a rehash of things Fred was doing with Ginger Rogers twenty-five years earlier (see Top Hat below), the goof on Jean-Paul Sartre and existentialism is heavy-handed, and Astaire has three full decades on his costar. Yet the movie has a gossamer charm; it works. The colors are as seductive as a magazine spread and the Gershwin songs—“S’Wonderful,” “He Loves and She Loves,” the title tune—shimmer with the aching, careworn loveliness of things that have stood the test of time. It feels like the last exhalation of the MGM musical, and in fact it was; Paramount imported all the major players of the Freed unit for this one-shot.

And it has Astaire and Audrey, two of the most naturally elegant life-forms in this or any other universe. The least sexual of the major stars, Fred has no interest in Hepburn that way, at least on-screen—he’s about appreciating her as an aesthetic object, then as a dance partner, and only then as a friend and lover. Hepburn, for her part, exuded ardor more than lust, and she seems to respond to his touch. They’re surprisingly well matched, and at its best the movie is a ballet between two people delicately but truly comfortable with each other. Among its other assets, the movie’s a neat object lesson in the many things love can be besides heavy breathing. My daughters, attuned to a movie’s ewww factor, loved it.

Pause-button explanations: The crazy, bossy magazine editor who sings “Think Pink” at the beginning and accompanies Fred and Jo to Paris? That’s Kay Thompson, author of the Eloise books, and, indeed, she acts much like that belle of the Plaza all grown up.

Useless trivia: Astaire’s character is based on real-life photographer Richard Avedon. The dresses are by Givenchy.

What next: See the MGM musicals section above.

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