The Best Fictional Bookstores
Posted on July 5, 2017 at 8:00 am
Electric Literature has a delightful piece about the best bookstores in movies and books. People who write books love bookstores, and the ones they imagine are very enticing. “You’ve Got Mail” is all about bookstores, and this one is perfect — and just about to disappear. I’m sorry to say that I am pretty sure the big bookstore driving her out of business has probably since been itself eclipsed by Amazon.
Humphrey Bogart visited a bookstore that didn’t have what he was looking for in “The Big Sleep.”
Audrey Hepburn got her first kiss from Fred Astaire in a bookstore in “Funny Face.”
Certainly the movies’ most unusual bookstore scene was this one filmed backwards in “Top Secret!”
Hepburn became a star and won her first Oscar for playing a runaway princess who meets up with a handsome reporter (Gregory Peck). Peck loved to tell the story about how he surprised her in this scene. He did not tell her what he was going to do with his hand and that reaction from her is pure Audrey, no acting involved.
Hepburn plays Eliza Doolittle, the flower girl who wants to learn to speak English well enough to work in a flower shop and ends up enchanting royalty and, an even tougher task, the irascible Professor Higgins.
The most glamorous art thieves ever are Audrey Hepburn and Peter O’Toole in this glossy romantic comedy.
A chauffeur’s daughter dreams of marrying her employer’s handsome playboy son (William Holden) until his stern businessman brother (Humphrey Bogart) tries to distract her. This was Hepburn’s first film featuring gowns by the man who would become her signature designer, Givenchy. Their work together made her a fashion icon.
Hepburn plays Holly Golightly, a party girl trying to take care of herself in New York, but fighting her feelings for the writer downstairs.
Hepburn stars with Fred Astaire in a musical about a bookish girl who accepts a modeling job in Paris so she can meet her idol, a French philosopher, but finds herself falling for the urbane photographer to the music of George Gershwin.
One of the wisest, wittiest, and most romantic films of all time follows a young couple (Hepburn and Albert Finney) as they travel through Europe in different stages of their relationship, from meeting as young students to newlyweds, new parents, disappointed early middle-age, and the possibility of renewal.
Hepburn stars with Cary Grant in the most romantic thriller ever made, a sophisticated crime caper to a swoony Henry Mancini score.
