Reeling Backward: "Funny Face" (1957)

Most film observers consider "Funny Face" a beloved musical, but I'd place it toward the shallow end of director Stanley Donen's canon.

The story's pretty trite and predictable, the sort of thing where two people loathe each other right up until the moment they realize they're madly in love. Its view of male/female relationships hasn't aged particularly well. And it plays like a sendup of Beatnik culture by a bunch of squares who didn't realize they were about to be supplanted in popular culture.

Plus, it features several numbers by notable non-singer Audrey Hepburn, as well as Fred Astaire, an iconic dance-and-song man who never suffered any illusions about where his best talents lay.

Let's put it this way: I may have skipped ahead a bit during the many overlong hoofing scenes.

It was based on a Broadway musical from 1927 by George and Ira Gershwin that helped first make Astaire a star, playing opposite his sister, Adele. (Ewwww.) It was his first appearance in the top hat and tails that would become his signature look.

The story and most of the original songs were largely scrapped for the film version, written by Leonard Gershe, who actually wrote an earlier play that inspired "Funny Face."

Of course, Astaire was no spring chicken in 1957, creeping up on 60 and still trying a little too hard to hang with the cool kids. Hepburn was nearly 30 years his junior, though the onscreen contrast isn't too egregious. With the help of Hollywood makeup/lighting, his omnipresent toupee and a paucity of close-ups, Astaire reasonably passes for late 30s or early 40s.

He plays Dick Avery, star photographer for the fictional Quality magazine, the leading publication for women's fashion. Kay Thompson is Maggie Prescott, the domineering editor who's like a somewhat more benevolent version of Meryl Streep's Miranda Priestly from "The Devil Wears Prada." She's determined to base the entire magazine's identity around a single woman, one with intellect and ambition, but finds all the existing models too doltish to serve.

While taking over a bohemian book shop for an impromptu photo shoot, Dick notices the drab little clerk, Jo Stockton (Hepburn), has the hidden qualities of a girl who "thinks as well as she looks." They whisk her away to Paris for a photo shoot and launch of a major new fashion line by Paul Duval (Robert Flemyng), the world's most famous designer.

The running gag is that Jo is so intellectually bent that she keeps running away to cafes and lectures, and Dick has to chase her around to get her to come model. She's ensorcelled by the teachings of a French professor, Emile Flostre (Michel Auclair), but it turns out he's just a regular ol' meanie man who's interested in her for sex.

Jo's big obsession is "empathicalism," which I thought was a made-up word but is just a noun for the state of having empathy for others. Somehow Professor Flostre isn't empathic enough to tell that the woman he's putting moves on isn't interested, and he's rewarded with an expensive vase smashed over his head.

I did like some things about the movie. Thompson is a hoot as the charmingly snooty Maggie, who sings an opening number, "Think Pink!", forcing her small army of female hangers-on to don the aforementioned shade while swearing she wouldn't be caught dead doing so herself. It's nice to see a Golden Age era depiction of a 50ish woman where she's neither a mother or a lover.

Thompson was an intriguing figure who spent most of her showbiz career in the background as a musical director and vocal coach/arranger. She spent years promoting the career of Andy Williams -- and secretly canoodling with him, according to his autobiography -- and was the author of the "Eloise" series of children's books, based on her own childhood imaginary friend and alter ego.

None of the songs really stand out in one's memory, although "Bonjour, Paris!" comes closest, an energetic tromp through the city by the three main characters, converging on top of the Eiffel Tower. "'S Wonderful" was already a standard, though Astaire and Hepburn's duet of it lacks energy.

I did enjoy the slower, more romantic dance for "He Loves and She Loves," the culmination of a montage of Paris photo shoots that ends with her wearing a wedding dress. (The modern woman may be strong and independent, but she must eventually marry.)

They flit about in the gorgeous gardens outside an old church, and at one point dance onto a river raft, which carries them across the way so they can continue prancing on the other side. Lovely stuff.

Other musical numbers fall flat. Hepburn's free-form balletic dance moves in a free-thinking café is fun for about a minute, and then it just keeps going... and going. Thompson and Astaire doing the bumpkinish "Clap Yo' Hands" -- borrowed from another Gershwin play -- while impersonating a couple from Tallahassee is downright painful to watch.

After "Funny Face" and the subsequent "Silk Stockings" didn't fare very well at the box office, Astaire announced he was retiring from dancing on film. He continued to act in non-musical movies like "Ben-Hur" and "On the Beach," and did dance on television from time to time. He danced once more in a feature film, 1974's "The Towering Inferno," for which he received his only Oscar nomination.

As for Hepburn, she was right in the middle of a major phase of stardom that would continue for another decade or so before a self-imposed step-back from acting to focus on her family and humanitarian career.

Today it seems silly that Hepburn, one of the great beauties of the screen, could star in a movie premised on her being funny-looking. But she did break aesthetic barriers with her boyish haircuts and pixie-like features.

I wish I could say I found "Funny Face" as groundbreaking as its subject.

Reeling Backward: "Charade" (1963)

"Charade" has sometimes been described as "the best Hitchcock movie Hitchcock didn't direct," but I'm not sure if that's really fair. Hitch often included bits of puckish and morbid humor in his films, but when it came time for scaring people, he was deadly serious about his craft.

This 1963 romantic thriller, by contrast, is fizzy and fun. Though there are a few moments where Audrey Hepburn, as wan heroine Regina Lampert, aka "Reggie," is imperiled, they are fleeting and frightening only in that sort of way you know everything is going to be alright. After all, she's the star of the picture, and if anything really dire happened to her, the show would be over.

When I say Hepburn is the star, I mean truly that: she far outshines co-star Carey Grant, but she's meant to. He is the moon who basks in her reflected light; he reacts to her rather than the other way around. Romantically, she is clearly the pursuer and he the pursued prey, wielding the shield of propriety to fend off her advances: 'Come into your room? Alone? At this time of night? Heavens!'

In this way director Stanley Donen and screenwriter Peter Stone essentially made a proto-feminist feature film. In some sense Hollywood has backpedaled since then -- nowadays it's almost unthinkable to have a star of Grant's stature in a movie in which he plays second fiddle to an actress.

The basic plot is that she's a widow whose husband was murdered, and now three strangers are chasing her around Paris, claiming she has $250,000 that belongs to them. (That's about $2 million in today's dollars.) Grant shows up as Peter Joshua, a dashing stranger who gets embroiled in the intrigue. She falls for him hard, even when it turns out he's in cahoots with the criminals... sort of. It gets more complicated from there.

The film has an interesting progeny and legacy. Stone and Marc Behm wrote the spec screenplay, but no studio was interested. So Stone turned it into a book, and suddenly everyone in Hollywood wanted it. Thus he turned it back into a screenplay. (Behm got a story credit.)

When they released the film, Universal Pictures improperly copyrighted the movie, so "Charade" became part of the public domain immediately. The fact that anyone could release their own version of it on video, or play it on television, probably helped the film remain popular over the years. It didn't even get an "official" video release by Universal until the awful, unnecessary remake starring Mark Whalberg came out in 2002, when the original was tacked on to the DVD as a bonus feature.

There was also a brouhaha over Hepburn's utterance of the word "assassinated," which was changed to "eliminated" in the wake of JFK's murder.

The movie is a total lark, more comedy than anything else. But I adored the cartoonish villains, the Parisian locales and the genuine romantic chemistry between Hepburn and Grant.

"Do you know what's wrong with you?" she asks as they part at the end of their night. "No, what?" he responds, setting up endless possibilities of Hollywood riffs. Instead, she looks at him pensively and exhales, "...nothing!" A beautiful line, and again usually the sort of thing the guy says to the dame, not vice-versa.

Grant was 59 when the movie was made to Hepburn's 33, though as I've noted before he seemed to stop aging at 38, looking much the same until he was deep into his 60s. Still, he felt self-conscious about the age difference and had the filmmakers add in several self-deprecating references by his character.

Unlike most older stars who fade away or segue into crotchety grampa roles, Grant had a daughter, his only child, at the age of 62 and decided to retire from acting to become a full-time daddy. Apparently he was just as magical in his final role as all his onscreen ones; Jennifer Grant wrote a loving tribute.

The bad guys are:

• James Coburn as Tex, a tall, preening showboat with a Southern drawl and a mean disposition.
• George Kennedy as Scobie, who's even bigger and even meaner than Tex, plus he has hook/weapon prosthetic hand.
• Ned Glass as Neopold Gideon, an older intellectual type, a turncoat who tends to have sneezing fits when he's nervous or endangered.
• Walter Matthau as Hamilton Bartholomew, a shady CIA man who claims to be helping out Reggie but is actually after the money himself. I'm not really giving anything away here, since Matthau practically smokes with suspicion from his very first scene. Not to mention, despite ostensibly being the Paris bureau chief of a federal government division, he's never able to muster up any actual resources to assist her.

The trio of chase men are introduced in a terrific scene: they each show up to Reggie's husband's funeral, and make close inspections of the body to ensure he's really dead. Scobie even sticks a pin in it -- literally.

In another rarity of mainstream Hollywood films, it's actually Tex, rather than Peter or Reggie, who has a flash of insight and figures out what her husband did with the money.  

But then the bad guys start showing up dead one by one, so suspicion falls on Peter, whose real name turns out to be Alex Dyle... or is it Adam Canfield ... or maybe Brian Cruikshank. One of the cleverest lines of dialogue is the very end, when Reggie and ... her man have gotten engaged, and she proposes they have lots of boys, "so we can name them all after you."

"Charade" also marked the first collaboration between Henry Mancini and Johnny Mercer, earning an Oscar nomination for original song.

Part screwball comedy, part spy thriller, and a whole lot romantic, "Charade" is what nowadays we would call the perfect date movie. A lot of these movies are forgettable, but not this one.

Reeling Backward: "The Lavender Hill Mob" (1951)

The two gold bouillon thieves in "The Lavender Hill Mob" are criminal novices -- a workaday salaryman and a manufacturer of cheap souvenirs. That's how they manage to pull off the perfect crime -- by combining their unique set of skills and circumstances with the appearance of being the unlikeliest of suspects.

Alas, as rookies they manage to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, leading to their eventual capture.

The trouble for Henry "Dutch" Holland (Alec Guinness) and Alfred Pendlebury (Stanley Holloway) arrives after they've gotten off scott-free, having successfully smuggled a million English pounds worth of gold across the Chanel, melted down into the form of Eiffel Tower souvenirs.

While preparing to unload the goods, they spot a group of British schoolgirls who have inadvertently bought the little gold towers after the shopkeeper carelessly opened the wrong box.

Now, if Holland and Pendlebury had kept their wits about them, they would have let the girls go and chocked the loss of 30,000 pounds or so as an acceptable loss. Instead, they go into a frenzy of activity, convinced the towers must be reclaimed or else they'll be found out.

They chase the girls all over Paris and then London, drawing attention to themselves in a way that simply letting those six souvenirs gather dust on a shelf somewhere never would have.

Of course, screenwriter T.E.B. Clarke sets up an impossible chain of events, in which one of the girls intended to give her Eiffel Tower to her policeman friend, and it just so happened that the detective on the gold case was standing right there when she gave it over, and he had a handy-dandy chemical test ready to prove it was gold, etc. It's a pretty tall Jenga tower of unlikely events. Anyway, Holland and Pendlebury could've just hopped a flight to South America directly from Paris.

"Lavender" is an enjoyable caper, even if one does mind the contortions of the plot. Director Charles Crichton keeps things moving at a brisk pace -- even at a mere 81 minutes, the movie never seems like it's in a hurry.

The main appeal of the film is that Holland and Pendlebury are regular Englishmen who probably never would've thought of committing the heist of the century if they had never met. Pendlebury moves into Holland's boarding house, and after Holland learns his new friend has a foundry at his warehouse, it gives him an idea.

Holland has spent the last 20 years supervising the transfer of gold bouillon from foundry to bank every day, earning a reputation as a meticulous and scrupulously honest employee. Ironically, even though he's directly responsible for a tremendous amount of his company's wealth, Holland is dismissed by his supervisors as an unimaginative drone, and his tiny paycheck reflects their disdain.

The real joy of the movie is less about the caper than these two invisible men discovering the thrills of attempting something extraordinary -- even if it is felonious.

The film ends with Pendlebury captured by the police and Holland having made his escape to Rio de Janeiro and setting himself up as a wealthy playboy. It's all a ruse, though, since he only escaped with the six gold souvenirs, which funded one year of "a life to which I had been unaccustomed."

A young Audrey Hepburn can be glimpsed giving Holland a kiss at the beginning; even screen legends got their start playing nightclub girls, hotel receptionists and Frieda the cigarette girl.

3 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Robin and Marian"

Like "The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp," which was the Reeling Backward feature a few weeks ago, "Robin and Marian" is about growing old. Rather than using an unknown protagonist, the 1976 film boldly chose one of the most familiar cinematic heroes, Robin Hood, for a meditation on death and dying.

In Robin's case, he's not so much afraid of death as dying without a purpose. In the final scene, Robin has defeated the Sheriff of Nottingham in personal combat, but Marian, the love of his life, has fatally poisoned him (and herself, too). At first he is enraged, but then understanding washes over him: "I'll never have another day like this again, will I?"

Sometimes you have to die to allow your legend to live on.

Robin and Marian were played by Sean Connery and Audrey Hepburn, who were ages 45 and 46, respectively. Connery had worked steadily, but was in between his glory days as James Bond and his resurgence that began with 1987's "The Untouchables." Hepburn hadn't made a movie in nine years, and would only have three more film roles, all small supporting performances.

The story opens 20 years after the heyday of Robin and his merry men. He left Marian and Sherwood Forest to follow King Richard the Lionheart on the Crusades. Unlike the usual portrayals of Richard as a good and noble ruler, here he's played by Richard Harris as a power-mad despot.

In the opening sequence, he orders Robin to storm a ruined castle defended only by an old man and some children. When he refuses, Robin is thrown into chains along with his faithful friend Little John (played by Nicol Williamson, who would go on to play Merlin in "Excalibur" a few years later). Unfortunately for Richard, the old man contemptuously throws an arrow at him and, in some kind of freak display of physics, pierces him through the neck. He dies of his wounds shortly thereafter. (This account is actually fairly similar to the actual way Richard the Lionheart died.)

Robin and John make their way back to Sherwood, and chance upon Will Scarlett (Denholm Elliott) and Friar Tuck (Ronnie Barker). From them he learns that Marian joined the nunnery, and is set to be jailed because Prince John (Ian Holm) is in a dispute with the Pope and has ordered the suspension of all religious services.

Robin "rescues" Marian, which is to say he forcibly stops her from turning herself into the Sheriff's men by conking her over the head. From there the film builds toward the big showdown with the Sheriff (Robert Shaw).

Director Richard Lester paints a picture of faded glory, with the explicit lesson that trying to hang onto your youth is bound to end in the disaster. Robin is deluded about his own diminished ability to in combat -- a fight against a handful of soldiers on the Nottingham battlements devolves into a pair of middle-aged men holding their sides and huffing with exhaustion.

There's a great scene where Marian tends to Robin's wounds, and as she removes his shirt she sighs and talks wistfully about how young and sweet his body used to be. Now it's a flabby stretch of years and scars. But Robin is defiant: "You think I'm old? Old and gray?!"

The big fight scene between the Sheriff and Robin is presented not as a triumphant battle royale, but a pathetic attempt by a has-been to hang onto his own myth of greatness. Even the Sheriff pleads with him to give up the pitiful display.

Made after Vietnam and Watergate, when the country was tired of war and deceit, "Robin and Marian" is a sobering document about clutching too desperately on the past. We were ready to look ahead.

3.5 stars