My Fair Lady

#32 in my ranking of Best Picture winners at the Oscars.

I swear, this 4K disc might be the best in my entire collection. It’s gorgeous and makes the film look brand new.

After the success of Gigi, Hollywood worked to bring the popular Lerner-Loewe musical that preceded Gigi the film on the stage, My Fair Lady, based on the George Bernard Shaw play Pygmalion. Bringing in old, practiced hand George Cukor to direct from a script by Alan Jay Lerner (with the songs written by Frederick Loewe), Warner Brothers successfully brought one of the most delightful translations of musical theater to the screen. I saw translation, not adaptation, because there is precious little attempt to make the film cinematic in any way. It’s not a problem for the viewing experience at all which is an absolute delight, but it does irk me slightly.

Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) is a cockney flower girl on the streets of London who meets Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) as she tries to ply her wares outside a theater. Higgins, a linguist, is delighted by the unique construction of her language while also disgusted at how no one can seemingly speak English correctly (“Why Can’t the English Learn to Speak?”). He meets a fellow student of tongues in Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), recently returned from India with tales of their dialects. Off the cuff, Higgins announces that he could turn the gutter rat of a flower girl into a duchess simply by altering her mode of speech. This idea sits with Eliza, cast aside after the conversation, and she begins to feed her dreams of rising above her station to go no further than own a flower shop, perhaps even just work in one, so she goes to Higgins’ house (he considerately, for the plot, announces his address in public) and demands that he give her lessons on diction. After some back and forth, he agrees on the condition that she stay with him at his house, along with Pickering, for six months and dedicate herself fully to her studies.

In terms of the lack of cinematic flair in the film, you have to start talking about set design. The sets are big, vertical, and deep, but they also end up being used like very large theatrical stages rather than a movie set. Roughly half of the film takes place in Higgins’ study, and we almost never the fourth wall, mostly only ever seeing the back wall lined with books. It is a very good set with wonderful detail, but in a three-hour film, it becomes the smallest bit frustrating. Of course, that’s not what matters. What matters is what happens on it, and what happens on it is wonderful.

Higgins (reportedly a character that Shaw based on himself) is a caustic wit who treats everyone as beneath him, and he has a way about him that is witty and funny. Up against him is Pickering, a more earnest soul who ends up being the shoulder that Eliza will cry on from time to time when Higgins’ tortures to get the right formation of sounds from her mouth become too much. The efforts he puts her through just to form vowels correctly, like hooking her up to a machine that measures the tones she makes along a white sheet of paper, are just the right level of ridiculous. The variety of efforts that Higgins employs, from the machine to another that measures her formation of the letter H through feeding a flame, as well as the variety of things he has her say (the rains in Spain, and such), allow for a look into the depth of her issues with speaking English the way Higgins wants as well as providing a wealth of material for the music. The strain on the young woman ends up so much that she dreams of ordering King Edward VII to execute Higgins.  It’s a fun moment in a film full of fun moments.

The turn is, of course, when Eliza begins to speak more correctly, and Higgins tests her out by taking her to the races where his mother (Gladys Cooper) has a box. This is the first real break in the film since it focused in so fully on Higgins’ study, and it’s a wonderfully large and very theatrical set with a wide open green space and a fence populated with pristinely dressed men and women who sing about their excitement while barely moving and gliding through each other with precision, and into this bumbles Higgins, unconcerned with the mores of the higher classes. He informs his mother of the situation, and in comes Eliza, carrying the right pronunciation but still holding onto many of her bon mots from the lower classes, entertaining the young man Freddy (Jeremy Brett), even when she completely drops the pretense and screams in support of her horse. More work is to be done…which gets skipped over right to Higgins and Pickering taking Eliza to a ball where the Queen of Transylvania is in attendance.

Her education has gone so well that even a fellow linguist, Higgins’ former student Zoltan (Theodore Bikel), who uses his knowledge of languages to provide gossip about the true origins of people pretending to be part of the upper classes (the Greek ambassador is actually American! Scandal! Titter!), and he misidentifies Eliza as a Romanian princess. Higgins has won. He has tricked the world that a penniless flower girl from the slums of London is a great lady. Everyone congratulate Professor Higgins, while ignoring Eliza.

The fact is that Higgins has pushed Eliza out of her class, but she’s still not of the upper classes that she purportedly belongs to now, and it’s a surprisingly affecting idea. She goes back to where she sold flowers, and no one recognizes her. She doesn’t have an income to actually support the kind of lifestyle of the wealthy. Who is she now? Higgins has changed her, but he hasn’t provided for her. Where is she to go?

One aspect of this film I’ve ignored up to this point is Eliza’s father, Alfred (Stanley Holloway), an itinerant drunk and charming older fellow who hits Eliza up for half a crown and later “sells” Eliza to Higgins for five pounds. He disappears from the movie for a long time until he returns at the end, suddenly wealthy and forced to marry Eliza’s mother. He is ancillary in a purely plot sense in that his actions never actually affect the movement of the central storyline, but he does function as an interesting counterpoint to Eliza’s journey. Both are thrust from their poverty into a new class, and neither has any real idea of how they should act. He ends his final night of freedom as an unmarried man essentially in a celebratory funeral (he gets carried away, holding a flower, like he’s in a casket), getting drunk and having his one final run with the ladies. Eliza is going the other direction, from high to low, and she ends up caught between her more modest dreams of running a flower shop (perhaps with Freddy) and maybe finding a way to live life with Higgins again.

Shaw’s original ending had Eliza running away with Freddy, but publishers and the adaptation into the musical took the alternate ending approach where Eliza and Higgins end up together. I think the proper ending to the story is Shaw’s original intention, but the actual ending as it plays out in the musical is actually quite delightful, finding a way for Higgins to express his attachment to Eliza without betraying his character and getting mushily emotional.

In terms of performances, the central one in Hepburn is a winner. It’s disappointing that she didn’t get to sing herself (there are a handful of lines where it’s Hepburn instead of Mami Nixon, and she’s quite good though the transitions are jarring), but she has such wonderful control of her facial muscles, especially early in the film as the street rat. Harrison is also really fun as Higgins, speaking through his songs and just obviously enjoying the experience of bringing his stage role to the screen. The supporting cast is quite nice, though I feel bad for Holloway because he will always be overshadowed in my mind by a high school performance I saw in Lakeland, Florida where the kid gave the performance of a life. Holloway is fun, but he almost seems lethargic in comparison, and that’s not really his fault. Also, no one is going to have this problem but me.

So, I rankle slightly at the set-bound nature of the filming and think the ending feels very slightly off. That’s the extent of my issues, and they are super minor. The rest of the film is an absolute delight. An exploration of class using likeable, fun characters all set to wonderful music and lovingly performed by everyone involved. In terms of musical that won Best Picture, this might be the best.

Rating: 4/4