Funny Face – Paramount Centennial Collection

Funny Face – Paramount Centennial Collection

Funny, And Enjoyable

I’m not a big fan of musicals, but for Funny Face it’s hard not to make an exception. Funny Face tells the story of Jo Stockton, played by Audrey Hepburn, a young, timid bookstore clerk who is conservative and practical. She meets Fred Astaire’s character, Dick Avery, a fashion photographer, early in the film after he and his group of models come to her store to do a shoot. When the shoot is finished, the store is left in terrible shape and Dick decides to stay behind to help Jo clean up the mess. At the time, Jo acknowledges that she thinks the entire modeling business is just silly. Her idea of the business begins to change after Dick and his colleague and director of women’s magazine Quality inspect the photos from the shoot. In one of the shots, Jo is seen in the background, and the two are captivated by her appearance. They’re able to convince Jo to leave behind her small town and fly out to Paris, something she really wanted to do, to give the modeling business a chance. In time, she comes to like it and Dick Avery, and when it’s all said and done, you have a classic romantic-comedy-musical, if you will, to enjoy.

Funny Face has clearly stood the test of time as a truly classic film, and it’s one of my favorites from Hepburn’s career.

Centennial Collection

Funny Film comes to the Centennial Collection as entry number four. Like the other Centennial Collection releases, it features the distinctive gold and black artwork and gold discs. The first disc contains the film while the second disc includes several extras, which I will list shortly. In terms of quality, Funny Face looks and sounds great, better than you might expect for a film created over fifty years ago; the colors are vibrant, the picture is sharp, and the sounds are more than sufficient.

For extra features, you get:

-Kay Thompson: Think Pink

-This Is VistaVision

-Fashion Photographers Exposed

-The Fashion Designer And His Muse

-Parisian Dreams

-Paramount In the 50s: Retrospective Featurette

-Original Theatrical Trailer

-Photo Galleries

As you can see, some of the extras aren’t specifically about the film itself, also something that we’ve seen in previous Centennial Collection releases; this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s worth noting. Overall, the extra features are welcomed, but I would have personally traded in a lot of these for a good, solid documentary piece about the movie itself.

With that, let’s get to the summary.