Movie 16 - "Funny Face"

So I will be doubling up this weekend to make up for missing yesterday.  But in my defense, I am trying to catch up on sleep and not doing very well.  Back to the blog...Audrey at last!  I love her dearly.  Probably the first classic movie star I loved.  This is the second Audrey movie I ever saw.  "My Fair Lady" was first (thank you Gram)!  But this is great!  In this 1957 flick, Fred Astaire and Audrey Hepburn together is an excellent pairing.  And strangely, the age difference, isn't all that creepy.  It actually works.  Anyway!  Hepburn plays Jo Stockton, a "plain" intellectual, beatnik type whose place of employment gets invaded by the evil, fashion magazine types.  Astaire plays Dick Avery, a fashion photographer and Kay Thompson plays Maggie Prescott, the editor.  The only stretch is that Hepburn could never really be plain.  She has too unique a look to be plain.

Jo works in a bookshop in Greenwich Village at the time of beatniks and is taken over by the hideous fashion people looking for a place to make their ditzy models seem more intelligent.  Ha!  Good luck here.  The movie paints the models as mindless creatures.  Dick gets some shots with Jo in them and notices a uniqueness in her look that he thinks will sell magazines.  He convinces editor Maggie to give her a try, but Jo adamantly refuses.  She is offended at the thought of being a part of something so trivial.  But the opportunity to go to Paris is too great for her to refuse.  She wants to meet a philosophy professor and sees this as her only way to do it.  Once in Paris and once working with Dick, she finds she doesn't hate it as much as she thinks she will.  Working together, the pair finds themselves falling in love.  Insert problem here...once Jo meets the professor, she begins missing work events and Dick becomes jealous, thinking the professor has more than philosophy on the brain.  Jo becomes angry at this, not believing the professor is interested in her that way.  The two fight and almost part ways completely.  Only Jo finds out the hard way that Dick was right about the dirty ole professor and ends up wacking him on the head with a vase.  Ha!

The best parts of this movie are as follows: 1)  Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire, 2)  Maggie and Dick's musical number to get into the professor's house, 3)  all the musical numbers, 4)  the clothes and backdrops for the photo shoot scenes, and 5)  Audrey Hepburn and Fred Astaire.  I can't help it, they are awesome!  Even Audrey was nervous about dancing with Fred.  She was a trained dancer through her life, and was still jittery.  I mean he is Fred Astaire for goodness sakes!  But she did beautifully.  Watch it!  It is great!