France
1966
101 minutes
Black and White
1.66:1
French
After a nearly decade as American Vogue‘s most subversive fashion photographer, William Klein made this wild, pseudovérité incursion into the world of Parisian haute couture. Elegant, scathing humor ties together the various strands of this alternately glamorous and grotesque portrait of American in Paris Polly Maggoo (Dorothy MacGowan), an Alice in Wonderland supermodel who becomes the pinup plaything of media hounds and the fragmented fantasy of haunted Prince Igor (Sami Frey). Klein’s first fiction film is a daring deflation of cultural pretensions and institutions, dressed up in brilliant black and white.
| Polly Maggoo | Dorothy MacGowan |
| Grégoire Pecque | Jean Rochefort |
| Prince Igor | Sami Frey |
| Miss Maxwell | Grayson Hall |
| Jean-Jacques Georges | Philippe Noiret |
| The Queen Mother | Alice Sapritch |
| Isidore Ducasse | Jacques Seiler |
| Prince’s spies | Pierre Baillot |
| Roland Topor |
| Director | William Klein |
| Producer | Robert Delpire |
| Screenplay | William Klein |
| Cinematography | Jean Boffety |
| Editing | Anne-Marie Cotret, Annie-France Lebrun and Jacqueline Simoni |
| Music | Michel Legrand |
| Costumes | Janine Klein |
I have never seen New York look so beautifully grand as it did during my trip to Paris this New Year’s. Maybe I should explain.It was my great fortune to be visiting the City of Light while the intensely illuminative exhibition Dans la nuit, des images was still on display. For this . . .
The Australian Centre for the Moving Image begins a retrospective of the film work of groundbreaking photographer and multimedia artist William Klein on January 22, and to accompany its fourteen-film program, critic and Criterion contributor Adrian Martin has written an essay on Klein’s filmography . . .
Top fashion models literally bleeding from sharp-edged aluminum dresses. A comic-strip American superhero oozing stigmata. A naked couple poked, prodded, and electroded for the delectation of the TV-viewing public. These are some of the images from the fiction films of American expatriate in . . .
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