AllMovie

The Paris fashion scene is rendered in broad, cartoonish glory by director Stanley Donen in Audrey Hepburn's first attempt at a major studio musical. Hepburn's American naif is discovered in a bookstore by photographer Dick Avery (played by Fred Astaire, in a deliberate homage to Richard Avedon), who romances her into the role of his It girl. Donen satirizes the fashion industry as gently as he did the movie business in Singin' in the Rain, poking fun at the milieu without diminishing its escapist glamour. The candy-colored sets and stellar George Gershwin and Ira Gershwin songbook -- including S'wonderful and Kay Thompson's witty rendition of Think Pink -- are Funny Face's most lasting qualities. The musical's strengths are enough to make one overlook the preposterous gulf between the ages of the two leads, or the script's facile, anti-intellectual subplot.