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| Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) wagers that he can make a lady out of lowborn Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn)... and gets more than he bargained for. |
Release Date: Oct. 21, 1964. Running Time: 173 minutes. Screenplay: Alan Jay Lerner. Based on the musical by Alan Jay Lerner, based on the play, Pygmalion, by George Bernard Shaw. Producer: Jack L. Warner. Director: George Cukor.
THE PLOT:
Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) is a poor flower girl subsisting day to day in class conscious early 20th century London. She has a chance encounter with Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), a famed expert in phonetics. Higgins, a borderline misanthrope who prizes proper speech but thinks nothing of human feelings, reacts to Eliza's Cockney dialect with disgust. But before their conversation ends, he vows that given six months, he could pass her off as "a duchess at an embassy ball."
That statement lingers in Eliza's mind. The next day, she goes to the Professor's estate to receive lessons, for which she's prepared to pay as much as a shilling. Amused and intrigued by the prospect of a challenge, Higgins agrees to teach her with an end goal of taking her to a ball at Buckingham Palace.
The lessons commence, with Higgins pushing his new pupil/project hard enough to make a drill sergeant blanche. Gradually, Eliza starts making progress. At the same time, however, unexpected feelings develop - which may be the only thing that the eloquent but frosty Henry Higgins is totally unprepared for!
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| Eliza's first public appearance, at the Ascot Racecourse. It doesn't go well. |
AUDREY HEPBURN AS ELIZA DOOLITTE:
Hepburn was cast because producer Jack L. Warner didn't consider stage star Julie Andrews to be a big enough name to carry a movie. That same year saw Andrews become a bona fide film star with The Americanization of Emily and, most particularly, Mary Poppins - for which Andrews ended up winning a BAFTA, an Oscar, and a Golden Globe, caustically "thanking" Jack Warner in her acceptance speech.
Warner was dead wrong not to cast Andrews (though given Mary Poppins, it's hard to regret that). He was right, however, to cast Audrey Hepburn, who gives a fine performance in a difficult role. We see multiple versions of Eliza across the movie: the boisterous flower girl of the first Act; the lady of the Third Act; and the "not-quite-there" Eliza presented to the public at the Ascot Racecourse; in contrast to her final appearance, the Eliza at Ascot is stiff and mannered as she tries to retain the upper-class speech patterns that don't yet come naturally to her.
I think Hepburn overdoes the Cockney at the beginning, but I was impressed with her scenes later in the film. She does especially well with the last third, not only navigating some fine emotional scenes but also varying the accent, with Eliza switching (sometimes deliberately and sometimes not) between the upper-class speech Higgins has ingrained in her into moments of Cockney and back again.
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| Professor Higgins attempts to teach proper diction. |
REX HARRISON AS PROFESSOR HENRY HIGGINS:
Though Higgins is certainly a member of the upper class, he doesn't remotely fit in. He seems almost proud of this, showing up at Ascot in his usual tweed rather than a proper suit. He revels in offending people, and his mother laments that she immediately loses any friends who have the misfortune to meet him.
Higgins sneers at class distinctions in general. When Eliza accuses him of thinking of her as nothing but a poor flower girl, he is indignant. He insists that she's focusing on his brusqueness with her, rather than noticing that he treats everyone equally poorly. The only exception is Pickering, his friend and fellow language enthusiast.
Rex Harrison is splendid in the role, prickly enough to convey Higgins's lack of interest in social niceties, but with enough of a twinkle to keep the audience on his side even when he's being rude or selfish. He's brusque and self-absorbed, but he never actually comes across as ill-intentioned, and there's something admirable in his disdain for the very notion of "class." Harrison's comic timing is particularly good, throwing out disparaging quips in such an off-handed way that we gather that he's just saying whatever is in his mind - a delivery that remains consistent during both dialogue and musical sequences.
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| Higgins is first repelled, then fascinated, by Eliza's ne'er-do-well father (Stanley Holloway). |
OTHER CHARACTERS:
Alfred P. Doolittle: Stanley Holloway makes Eliza's ne'er-do-well father into the personification of affable self-gratification. When he learns of Eliza's new situation, he goes to Higgins to get a payoff. He wants five pounds to leave his daughter with the professor. Higgins is initially repelled. However, the more Alfred speaks, the more the professor is drawn in by his particular sort of eloquence. In the end, Higgins is so entranced that he offers ten... which Alfred refuses, on the grounds that five pounds is enough to enjoy, but ten pounds might tempt him to start saving. An amused Higgins writes to an acquaintance to declare Alfred as "one of the most original moralists in England."
Col. Pickering: In contrast to Higgins, Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White)'s default manner is entirely genial. Eliza compares their ways of interacting with her, noting that Pickering treated her "like a lady" even before her lessons began, while Higgins treats her "like a flower girl" even after she's mastered them. Pickering tries to restrain Higgins's worst instincts, and "Do be reasonable" almost becomes his catchphrase.
Mrs. Higgins: Gladys Cooper is extremely entertaining as Higgins's eternally exasperated mother. She makes a show of disdaining him, but when he announces that he's brought a girl with him to Ascot, she's momentarily elated... though only until he fills her in on his wager. She assists her son in his deception, but her sympathies are with Eliza. Even after their first meeting, she chides him and Pickering for treating her like an object, calling them out as "a pretty pair of babies playing with your live doll."
Freddy: I'm so accustomed to Jeremy Brett's Sherlock Holmes that I about did a double-take when he showed up in a role that is Holmes' polar opposite. Freddy is instantly lovestruck by Eliza, to the point that he spends (too) much of the movie basically stalking her on the street outside Higgins's home. His most memorable bit isn't his big song, but rather his reactions when Eliza sings, Show Me, to him, demanding that he stop wooing her with flowery words and actually prove his feelings through action. Outside of that, through no fault of Brett's, the character is too bland to make any significant impression.
Zoltan: Theodore Bikel only appears briefly, but he's memorably (and amusingly) seedy as Higgins's former student turned unwitting adversary. Zoltan is the one major obstacle Higgins and Eliza must overcome in their effort to pass her off as royalty. He's Higgins's former student, and - much to Higgins's disgust - he has used the skills he learned to effectively blackmail the wealthy and titled into keeping secret the undesirable parts of their backgrounds. While Higgins sneers at class distinctions, Zoltan maintains his lifestyle by exploiting the hypocrisy of them.
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| Higgins' rival linguist and former student, Zoltan (Theodore Bikel), tries to discover Eliza's origins. |
THOUGHTS:
"What could possibly matter more than to take a human being and change her into a different human being by creating a new speech for her? It's filling up the deepest gap that separates class from class and soul from soul!"
-Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) explains the deeper importance of his experiment.
My Fair Lady is based on George Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion. More specifically, it's a direct musical adaptation of the 1938 motion picture, Pygmalion. My Fair Lady's dialogue is, in places, word-for-word with the earlier film. It even retains the ending of that movie - an ending that Shaw himself disliked, as he did not want Higgins and Eliza to end up as a couple.
For the record, I think he was wrong. By the end, Eliza is too strong a personality for wet Freddy. Now a "tower of strength," in Higgins's words, she's a much better fit for the prickly professor. As a result, I find the ending created for the 1938 movie and retained for the musical version to be more satisfying than Shaw's own.
My Fair Lady is one of the more purely entertaining Best Picture winners. The observations about class differences lend a hint of substance; but for the most part, this is just a great entertainment. Good actors are cast as enjoyably quirky characters, and they are given plenty of witty dialogue to both speak and sing. The production is intimate enough for the viewer to feel close to the characters, but also features enough large-scale moments to provide the spectacle contemporary audiences would have expected.
It's also very funny, with some of the best barbs slipped right into the musical numbers. I think I laughed almost as many times during Higgins's opening number, Why Can't the English Learn to Speak?, as I did during the entirety of Tom Jones. Still more laughs come during Eliza's light-heartedly vengeful, Just You Wait - and the comic nature of the song's initial performance boosts the emotional impact of her later, more subdued version near the end.
In addition to the humor, there are some strong emotional beats, particularly in the final Act. After her transformation, Eliza returns to the street where she formerly sold flowers, only to find that she no longer belongs. The locals don't recognize her, and a flower seller not dissimilar to early Eliza sells her one of her wares, while everyone she runs into tells her that this is no place for someone like her. Lowborn and yet too "proper" for her former life, Eliza - much like Higgins himself - is left with nowhere that she truly fits.
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| The Ascot Gavotte: The upper class are introduced still, like mannequins, before beginning their carefully controlled movements. |
Director George Cukor makes flowers into a recurring visual. Eliza is introduced selling flowers, while the much later sale of that flower to Eliza signifies the permanence of her change in status. Just before she decides to ask for lessons from Higgins to change her life, we're given an extended cinematic moment showing flowers being unpacked to fill the stalls. Flowers adorn Ascot when Eliza makes her first (unsuccessful) public appearance. When a more resolved Eliza visits Higgins's mother near the end, the older woman is cutting flowers. Each major turn in her journey - from beginning it, to realizing that she's past the point of no return, to determining to stake out a future for herself - is literally adorned with flowers.
Cukor also uses a stagey conceit when introducing first the lower class that sell items on the street, then later the upper class at Ascot. In both instances, the members of these disparate classes freeze in place for a moment before going into motion. It's visually effective in both instances, with the street peddlers going from freeze frame to suddenly calling out their wares, and the upper-class idlers going from frozen mannequins to movements so controlled as to still seem artificial as they sing The Ascot Gavotte while watching a race.
I've previously noted my resistance to the musical genre. That barely applies here. The songs are catchy, often witty, and placed so that they advance plot and character without interfering with the pacing. I could nitpick that Alfred Doolittle's Get Me to the Church on Time is narratively unnecessary and briefly takes focus away from the Higgins/Eliza dynamic... but the performance is so enjoyable that it would be churlish to complain about it.
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| The Rain in Spain: Higgins, Eliza, and Pickering celebrate when she finally makes progress. |
REMAKES & RETELLINGS:
There have been many film and television versions of Pygmalion, too many to list comprehensively. Some of the major ones include:
Pygmalion (1935): The first film adaptation is not the better-known Leslie Howard version, but rather this German film adaptation from director Erich Engel.
Pygmalion (1938): The best-known non-musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's play, with Leslie Howard as Higgins and Wendy Hiller as Eliza. A massive success, this version formed the basis for both stage and film versions of My Fair Lady. It was nominated for several 1938 Oscars and won for Best Adapted Screenplay. Shaw sneered at his Oscar publicly, but he was said to later display the award in his home.
Pygmalion (1983): Made for cable television network Showtime, this version starred Peter O'Toole as Higgins and Margot Kidder as Eliza. I haven't seen this version, but it's supposedly much truer to Shaw's play than the earlier film versions were.
That's not even mentioning the many movies that have drawn direct inspiration from the story, ranging from the Oscar-nominated Educating Rita, to a Three Stooges short, to teen comedies such as Can't Buy Me Love and She's All That. It's fair to say that Pygmalion and My Fair Lady have had just a bit of an influence on generations of filmmakers.
OVERALL:
My Fair Lady is grand Hollywood entertainment. A musical version of a story that was already a classic at the time, it benefits from outstanding production values, a fine and witty script, and an excellent cast. There are Best Picture winners that I think are better - but at the same time, there are very few that I think are as much fun to watch.
Rating: 8/10.
Related Post: Singing Through a Time of Change - The Musical, The Best Picture Oscar, and the 1960s.
Best Picture - 1963: Tom Jones
Best Picture - 1965: The Sound of Music
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