Fred Astaire, Audrey Hepburn & Kay Thompson - Funny Face [Original Sound Track Recording] (1996)

By the mid-'50s, Hollywood's manhandling of Broadway musicals had become less common, as songwriter/producers like Rodgers & Hammerstein saw to it that the film adaptations of their shows were more faithful to the stage productions, especially with regard to their music. So, it should be noted that the 1957 movie Funny Face, with music credited to George & Ira Gershwin and a starring role for Fred Astaire, all principal figures in the 1927 Broadway musical of the same name, is very much a throwback to Hollywood's old way of doing things; it bears very little relationship to the show. The real moving force behind the movie is its producer, Roger Edens. Edens, a veteran of the MGM studio (though here working at Paramount), is a long-time contriver of "special material" and no respecter of the words or music of other songwriters. In this case, he found a story called Wedding Day, based on an unproduced musical by Leonard Gershe, and decided to graft at least some of the Gershwin songs from Funny Face to it. The story, set in the present, concerns a fashion photographer based on Richard Avedon (Astaire), a fashion magazine editor based on Carmel Snow of Harpers Bizarre (MGM song coach and night club entertainer Kay Thompson, making a rare onscreen appearance), and a bohemian bookstore-employee-turned-fashion-model (Audrey Hepburn) who set off to Paris for a photo shoot. Plenty of Paris fashions, plenty of Astaire dancing, and some shallow lampooning of French philosophy (with Existentialism turned into Emphaticalism, and Jean-Paul Sartre into the libidinous Professor Flostre) ensue. Along the way, Edens writes some of his own mediocre music ("Think Pink," "Bonjour, Paris!") and, more objectionably, rewrites many of Ira Gershwin's lyrics and even some of George Gershwin's music (not all of which is actually from the Funny Face stage show anyway). The result is not likely to make any Gershwin fan happy. The attributes of the soundtrack album come from Astaire, who is typically effective, and Thompson, who would have been a much more appropriate romantic partner for him. Hepburn, 30 years Astaire's junior, but nevertheless matched to him at the end, can carry a tune, but just. (Gershwin fans noting that the composer has not previously been known to have written a song called "Basal Metabolism" should be reassured that this is simply Edens' title for an instrumental version of "How Long Has This Been Going On?")