Film Forum

(1957, Stanley Donen) Relentlessly thinking Pink, Kay Thompson’s Quality magazine honcho (based on Vogue legend Diana Vreeland) and her minions swarm a Greenwich Village bookshop, but Fred Astaire’s photographer “Dick Avery” (based on visual consultant Richard Avedon) thinks the overwhelmed clerk, gamine Audrey Hepburn, is just the right face for that “new look.” Empty, shallow modeling contract vs. turtle-necked professor Emile Flostre’s “Empathicalism?” Oh, there’s a trip to philosophical hotbed Paris thrown in… along with a score of Gershwin evergreens (and originals by Roger Edens); nightclub great/Eloise creator Thompson in one of only two major movie appearances; Astaire creating a courtyard bullfight with only a red-lined raincoat and an umbrella; Hepburn, in basic noir, letting herself go in a smokey bohemian boîte; the three performing together (in split screen) for the ebullient “Bonjour Paris!” – through stunning locations of a city that never looked more inviting; topped by the equally-locationed fashion shoot and its electrifying finale: Hepburn, a scarlet Givenchy gown, and the “Victory of Samothrace.” DCP. Approx. 103 min.

Reviews

“One of the last great musicals!”
– David Thomson

“Knocks most other musicals off the screen for its visual beauty, its witty panache, and its totally uncalculating charm… The charm is everywhere. Love triumphs over capitalist exploitation, joyless intellectualization and all things phony; and the thesis persuades because of the commitment and skill of the team and the lightness of the underrated Donen’s touch.”
– Time Out (London)