Fred Astaire is arguably one of the most famous actors to come out of Hollywood, as is Audrey Hepburn. Put the two together in one film, and it’s bound to be magic.
In “Funny Face,” Astaire plays Dick Avery, a photographer for a fashion magazine. His boss, Maggie, wants to find a new model, one that is beautiful but can also think. They decide to do a shoot in a bookstore and find just the one they want, but the employee of that bookstore makes it difficult for them. She thinks fashion is a silly waste of time and doesn’t want anything to do with it. But when Dick gets a good look at her, he realizes she’s just what they’re looking for.
Her name is Jo (Hepburn) and she’s a studious bookish type. She wants more than anything to travel to Paris to study at the feet of a great philosopher, and doesn’t want anything to do with Dick or Maggie or their attempts to make her over into a model. But when they tell her they’ll take her to Paris, she decides to go along with it, but only because it’s Paris and she’ll have the chance to meet the philosopher.
We then see many of the famous sights of Paris as Dick takes Jo all over the city, capturing her charm. As the movie progresses, so does their relationship, until in the end, they are in love.
I can’t say that this movie had a whole lot of plot to it, because it really was rather simple. But the sights and the music are worth the watching.
At one point during the film, Hepburn does a Bohemian dance routine in a nightclub, which became probably the dance number she’s most famous for. She also did her own singing in this movie, something she wasn’t allowed to do in “My Fair Lady” later on.
Something that’s rather interesting about Fred Astaire. His career spanned decades, but his facial features never really seemed to change that much. As a result, he was often paired with much younger leading ladies and it didn’t look odd—case in point, Audrey Hepburn. She was thirty years younger than him in this movie, and yet the age difference didn’t stand out. But then, she was often cast across from older men—Cary Grant in “Charade” and Gary Cooper in “Love in the Afternoon,” just to name a few.