Funny Face

1957, US, Stanley Donen, 103 min.
With Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, and Kay Thompson

Introduced by writer and actress Joan Juliet Buck

In a score liberally sprinkled with Gershwin tunes, a Richard Avedon type photographer (Astaire) and a hard-nosed magazine publisher (Thompson) stumble upon a dowdy shop clerk (Hepburn) who they try to transform into the glamor girl of the year. To do that, they have to persuade her to go to Paris, the city of lights”¦”Indeed, it is reasonable to reckon that you won’t see a prettier musical film—or one more extraordinarily stylish—during the balance of this year. If you do you may count yourself fortunate, for this is a picture with class in every considerable department on which this sort of picture depends.”—Bosley Crowther, The New York Times, March 1957

About the Speaker

Joan Juliet Buck was the editor-in-chief of French Vogue from 1994-2001, the only American ever to have edited a French magazine. She was Vogue“˜s movie critic from 1990 until 1994 and a member of the New York Film Festival Selection Committee, before a highly successful seven year run as editor-in-chief of French Vogue. She also acts: she was Elisabeth Brassart, the head of the Cordon Bleu cooking school, in Nora Ephron’s Julie and Julia, and in 2010 played Marguerite Duras in Irina Brook’s La Vie Materielle at La Mama,ETC. Her story “The Ghost of the Rue Jacob” is one of the hits of the Moth Radio show on NPR. She now writes for T, New York Times’s fashion magazine, W magazine, Newsweek/Daily Beast, among others.