Many years ago I went to the WV Cultural Center for a free screening of An American In Paris. They were playing a bunch of Oscar winners and as a film lover, I wanted to see them if possible. I was incredibly disappointed in the film. It was more of a “dance recital” with limited plotting than what I would call a movie. I have often thought that I need to re-view the film with nearly 30 years of life experiences added on and see if my opinion has changed. After watching Funny Face, I’m not sure that it would.
Funny Face was one of the films I decided I needed to see after watching My Fair Lady last month. I didn’t know the name of it, but I knew it had Audrey Hepburn and she did a dance in a tight black outfit. The dance had been featured in an ad a couple years back for The Gap and stuck in my mind. I was in Big Lots on Friday and in the new stick they had received were two different versions of Funny Face. One was labeled as part of the Fred Astaire or Audrey Hepburn collection, while the other was the 50th Anniversary Edition. The cover on the 50th Anniversary Edition featured a picture of Audrey in the skinny black pants. Surprisingly, Fred Astaire is barely mentioned on the DVD cover and only a tiny full body side shot of him as his Dick Avery character is featured on the cover.
The plot to Funny Face is very simple and versions of the same story have been told for decades. A bookish girl is transformed into a gorgeous model, falls in love, and changes the life of the man who changes her life. The thread bare plot is wrapped around several Gershwin songs and (as in the case of An American in Paris) several dance numbers. Obviously Fred Astaire is a marvelous dancer and Hepburn is wonderful as well, but it just made the movie seem like less of a film to me. I enjoy a good musical, but the musical numbers here seem secondary to the dance sequences. I did enjoy the number (Clap Yo’ Hands) that Astaire and Kay Thompson perform at the professor’s party and the Bonjour, Paris! number functions as a song and dance number as well as a travelogue of Paris. Never the less, the songs and dancing didn’t seem as integrated into the movie as the ones in My Fair Lady for example.
Funny Face is also one of those films where the look of the film is incredibly important. It reminded me of the early Image comic books where the art is gorgeous, but the writing is not on the same level or even Kubrick’s 2001 where the visuals over shadow the story. The colors are so vivid and the imagery so striking, that there is no mistaking this film with any other, but as I said earlier, the story line is formulaic.
One other issue I had with Funny Face had to do with Fred Astaire as the leading man and love interest. While he shows a touch of comedic charm in several scenes, I just had a hard time buying him as the romantic leading man. Astaire looks to me more like the creepy uncle in a lot of his scenes.
The DVD has several bonus featurettes. One featurette covers the fashions, one covers Paris and one covers Paramount films of the 50s. All three were decent, but not eye-opening. There is not a lot of information on the making of the film in any of the featurettes. The DVD also features the trailer, which shows the end of the movie, thus earning a 9 1/2 on the Quarantine scale.
The movie itself gets a 2 1/2. The songs were fine. Audrey Hepburn was gorgeous. The art direction and cinematography were top-notch. Kay Thompson was incredibly entertaining. But there needed to be a better story holding it all together.
365 Days of DVDs 