Written by Leonard Gershe
Directed by Stanley Donen
Starring Audrey Hepburn, Fred Astaire, you don't care about anybody else.
Synopsis
sketchy old photographer for a fashion magazine comes up with a plan to rejuvenate the image of said fashion magazine ( ha. the irony) booky chicky poo becomes the new "smart" model. makeover. paris. love.
MOster
I think I should have liked this movie more than I did. This is one of two movies this week where I think we were witnessing an early iteration of a formula which has played out hundreds of times. That part of it was fine for me, I guess.
The acting was just fine here. Astaire and Hepburn are cast into types which they created, and while the supporting cast did their jobs pretty well they didn't make much of a difference at all. The woman who played the editor of the magazine was fine.
This is a Stanley Donen movie, and I absolutely loved Charade and I appreciated the similar tricks that he used both in the standard action and in the musical pieces. The area where this fell apart for me was in the musical interludes, however. I don't know that there were quite enough numbers to count as full on "musical," and with the exception of the first one in the darkroom (which was really cool) they all ran too long for me. Maybe they weren't actually too long. Maybe they just got boring. Maybe we were both in crappy moods. I don't know.
The rest of the production was pretty good, though some of the shots of Paris appeared to be in front of screens or on soundstages, but there were definitely some location shots as well. Costuming, by Edith Head, was first rate as always; and everything else looked as it should.
I'm not sure how strongly I recommend this one, and I think I'll give up on the 2 vs. 3 argument when we have it at 10:00.
Woman
admittedly i slept through most of this, but only because i was so disinterested and unimpressed by the first half an hour. i woke up intermittently throughout and tried to give it a chance, but sleep won every time. look, fred astaire may be fred astaire, but he ain't no looker. he was smarmy and old enough to be audrey hepburn's father, maybe even grandfather. the whole point to this movie was to get a model with brains, and hepburn's character was smart and philosophical, but everybody treated her like a child. especially her gross geriatric love interest. she, too, was no great shakes. it seemed, through my semi-conscious state, she wanted to be a model secretly, but then she was using the photo shoot in paris as an excuse to go philosophize with beatniks, and completely disrespected the fashion magazine editor by not showing up anywhere for anything. so maybe she deserved to be treated like a toddler, and marry a man who is apt to die before she got to the end of the church aisle. production numbers were too long and boring too. boo. i'm not a musical hater,usually i'm quite the opposite, but this was so eh. GROSS. boring.
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