Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?

Having worked for Vogue for over a decade, William Klein was an intimate of the fashion world and its lush lunacy. His first feature film, Who Are You, Polly Maggoo? is a rude, rollicking industry satire in which the fashionistas get a riotous dressing down. Pretty Polly (played by model Dorothy MacGowan), a Brooklynite in Paris, is fresh off the runway when she is approached by the producers of the TV show “Who Are You?” What ensues is a Godardian tangle of media vultures, vamping models, and poor Polly spouting pert platitudes like “the surface is real, too.” Yet Polly is continually diminished, each shutter's click leaving her with a little less surface than before. Ironically, Klein's own photographic exuberance is on full display as gorgeous mugs mug in extravagant black-and-white compositions. The opening sequence with models draped in sheet-metal garb still clangs with originality as one magazine maven utters, “It's sex in tin cans.”

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