clearclassics: Funny Face and women’s magazines.

I usually write about books on this blog, but the wider cultural atmosphere of the literary period I am most interested in also intrigues me, so I throw in the odd film too.

I love women’s magazines (especially old ones from half a century ago) so much that I wrote a book about them. This gave me an excuse for looking at Woman’s Life, Woman’s Mirror, Model Housekeeping and Woman’s Way, the Irish titles, in our National Library Reading Room (one of my favourite places in Ireland with its wooden desks, green-shaded lamps and sky through high windows) and the British Woman’s Realm in the very different and almost equally attractive but (I didn’t know at the time) doomed Colindale, the British Library’s newspaper and periodical collection just before they moved it somewhere not reachable by the Northern Line. I also read bound copies of Woman’s Own in the basement of the IPC building in Southwark, in London.

If you like the women’s magazine aesthetic of the 1950s and 60s, then the opening credits and the Think Pink sequence of Funny Face, Stanley Donen’s 1956 film partly set in a (fictional) women’s magazine, will be a delight. If you are a reverent existentialist and the parody of Jean-Paul Sartre as the randy ’emphaticalist’ Emile Flostreau offends you, bear in mind that the magazine world is subjected to even more ridicule than the world of French philosophy. (Although maybe he isn’t meant to be Sartre, because there is a reference in song to the real existentialist.) Filmed on location in Paris, this film was also, like the James Bond films from the early 1960s, virtual travel for people who might never afford to visit beautiful places and who depended on films to bring them there.

The beautiful and talented Audrey Hepburn, as philosophy student Jo, has the ‘funny face’ of the title – dubbed so by the magazine editor because it does not conform to the beauty standards of the 1950s. Her rather unlikely love interest, photographer Dick Avery, played by Fred Astaire, tells her that he loves her funny face. I could watch Audrey Hepburn forever, and I think she’s a very underrated actor, but for me the real star of the film is Kay Thompson, who plays Maggie Prescott. The editor of Quality magazine, tall and imposing, she tramples confidently and charmingly over other people’s property and priorities. The film opens when Prescott summons all her writers and editors to tell them that the forthcoming issue of Quality is dull, depressing and dreary, and that if she lets it appear,she is failing the American woman. ‘O no Miss Prescott you mustn’t say that!’ her all-female workforce (more on that later) chorus. Then she spots a swatch of colour when an aide leans over to light her cigarette and decides, in song, that the answer to all this dullness is to turn the whole magazine pink. ‘Think Pink,’ she advises, ‘on the long and lonely road ahead’. This is the utter genius of the film, the way it understands the grandiloquence and ephemerality of women’s magazine discourse; no sooner has everything gone pink than Prescott is moving on to her next obsesion – fashion for women who don’t like fashion. Much later in the film, in Paris, Prescott and Jo tie on headscarves and do a zany little song and dance routine parodying magazines’ contradictory advice to women – ‘On how to be lovely/you’ve got to be happy..’ Prescott is probably based on Carmel Snow, the legendary editor of American Harper’s Bazaar from the 1930s to the 1950s – and down at the bottom-right corner in small print, Carmel Snow is thanked in the opening credits.

Jo is enticed to come to Paris to model Duval’s collection, on which Quality is getting an exclusive, and she agrees to do so, (even though it is against her principles,) because it will bring her nearer her dream of meeting the father of ’empathicalism’, Flostreau. The fictional Duval’s costumes were designed by Givenchy and the fashion shoots where Jo models the costumes are breath-taking, in that lovely 1950s colour. There is a gorgeous scene with a tweed suit in a railway station, and another with balloons – but really, you have to watch it. If you think fashion shoots can be an art form – I do – these scenes are worth watching the film for.

The love story between Dick and Jo (shades of the Famous Five) is the least satisfactory part of the film. Before they go to Paris, he kisses her, uninvited, on a ladder in the bookshop he is helping her to tidy after Prescott and her team have trampled it shamelessly (they invaded it to do a photo-shoot). When he has gone she sings ‘How Long Has This Been Going On?’ which is a great Gershwin song, but not in this context. How long has what been going on? He kisses her because he thinks she ‘wants’ to be kissed – after all, all women always want to be kissed, don’t they? Somehow, although they have some really good dances – including a barely visible one in his darkroom – the love story does not ring true. There’s the age-difference for one thing, although this was a staple of 1950s films involving Hepburn, think of Sabrina Fair, another ‘transformed by France’ film, which put her opposite Humphrey Bogart. But there is also the dialogue where Dick gets all the ‘best’ lines, i.e, the smart, slick answers which date the film absolutely. Still, Astaire is a joy to watch, even his normal movements have such grace.

The only part of the film I don’t like is the closing sequence, all soft-focus near a chapel with a river and a raft where Jo is modelling the kind of ballet-length wedding-dress with a wide skirt popular in the 1950s that made tall women look like giraffes in tutus and small women look like spinning tops. She looks much, much better in the earlier Givenchy outfits or even in the smock and skirt she wore in New York before her ‘transformation’. The song at the wedding-dress stage is ‘ ‘Swonderful’. ‘Srubbish, to my mind.

So what, if not Dick Avery, do I want for Jo? I want her to go back to New York as the literary editor of Quality magazine. Eminent authors on both sides of the Atlantic, from Virginia Woolf to Sylvia Plath, wrote stories and columns for women’s magazines up to the 1960s at least. Part of the pleasure of researching women’s magazines is coming across short stories or opinion pieces by these authors. Also, women’s magazines by the 1950s were worlds run by women. Someone commented online that Prescott, the editor in this film, is the original Miranda Priestley, the uber-bitch magazine editor in The Devil Wears Prada, allegedly based on the current American Vogue editor, Anna Wintour. But Prescott, played by Thompson, although she veers from dictator to darling and back again in the blink of an eye, is not a bitch; she is, however, a recognisable type of strong,even overbearing woman in an era when women could exercise authority only in very selected fields and were often absolutists in those fields. Think hospital matrons, school principals and Reverend Mothers.When Prescott summons all her editors and journalists at the start of the film, they mill into her office, a fluttering flock but an all-female flock. These are powerful professional women whose corseted curves bely their steely strength. They have worked their way up to these prestigious positions. They might look like ‘girls’, they might even call themselves ‘girls’, but ‘girls’ they emphatically are not.

Wikipedia tells me that Kay Thompson, who also wrote the celebrated Eloise books for children, spent most of her life as a vocal coach. She uses her own strong yet pleasant voice to great effect in Funny Face. What a pity we didn’t see more of her in the world of films.

Caitriona Clear,Women’s Voices in Ireland: women’s magazines in the 1950s and ’60s (London: Bloomsbury 2016)

clearclassics is usually about books from the first three-fifths of the twentieth century, but occasionally it veers into film and other kinds of culture. I often append a section called ‘Recent Reads’, in which I discuss books I’ve read recently that I really, really like; I haven’t stopped reading, but I haven’t read any books recently that fire me up in that way and I don’t want to write critical reviews – there is enough negativity out there already. But I am delighted to see Claire Gleeson’s book which I mentioned recently, Show Me Where It Hurts, short-listed for an award.