Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?

After nearly a 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.

France
1966
101 minutes
Black & White
1.66:1
French

Available In

Collector's Set

The Delirious Fictions of William Klein

DVD Box Set

3 Discs

$35.96

Cast & Credits

Cast

Dorothy MacGowan: Polly Maggoo
Jean Rochefort: Grégoire Pecque
Sami Frey: Prince Igor
Grayson Hall: Miss Maxwell
Philippe Noiret: Jean-Jacques Georges
Alice Sapritch: The Queen Mother
Jacques Seiler: Isidore Ducasse
Pierre Baillot: Prince’s spies
Roland Topor

Credits

Director: William Klein
Producer: Robert Delpire
Screenplay: William Klein
Cinematography: Jean Boffety
Editing: Anne-Marie Cotret
Editing: Annie-France Lebrun
Editing: Jacqueline Simoni
Music: Michel Legrand
Costumes: Janine Klein

Related Films

1/5

2/5

3/5

4/5

5/5

Current

Retail Nightmare: A Trip Inside Peter Strickland’s Sensorium

The director behind such audaciously stylized fantasias as The Duke of Burgundy and In Fabric looks back on his formative experiences at repertory movie theaters and department stores.

By Hillary Weston

Interviews — Dec 23, 2019

From the Eclipse Shelf: Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?

There’s fashion forward and then there are the gonzo styles featured in William Klein’s surreal and savage Who Are You, Polly Maggoo?. A poke to the ribs of 1960s haute couture and a skewering of media pretension, Klein’s visually daring …

Short Takes — May 8, 2013

Explore

Delphine Seyrig

Actor

Thanks to the two most famous roles of her career—the enigmatic woman referred to only as A in Alain Resnais’ _Last Year at Marienbad_ and the middle-aged widow stuck in domestic routine in Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles—Delphine Seyrig is often thought of as an inscrutable performer. But this versatile French actress was also capable of great emotional immediacy and openness in her roles. The daughter of an archaeologist, Seyrig was a cosmopolite at a young age, having already lived in Lebanon, New York, and the south of France by the time she was twenty. She then studied acting in both France and the United States (at the Actors Studio). Her first screen performance was in the 1958 beat generation short Pull My Daisy, also featuring Jack Kerouac and Allan Ginsberg, shot in New York. A few years later, Last Year at Marienbad—in which Seyrig plays a woman wandering the fever-dream-like interior of a château, where she may or may not have been before—made her an icon of the French New Wave. She would go on appear in films by François Truffaut (Stolen Kisses, one of her most romantic parts), William Klein (she was never more delightfully off-kilter than in the satiric Mr. Freedom), Luis Buñuel (as the ever-gracious hostess in The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie), Joseph Losey, Jacques Demy, Akerman, and other important film directors of the sixties and seventies. She died in 1990, at fifty-eight.