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| My Fair Lady (1964) | |
| Background
The non-musical version of the play, from Shaw's own screenplay, was first filmed in Britain as Pygmalion (1938) by co-directors Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard (who also co-starred with Dame Wendy Hiller). The tale is about a poor 'guttersnipe' Cockney flower girl heroine (Hepburn), who is trained by a misogynistic, arrogant bachelor linguistics expert (Higgins) to speak properly within six months - the result of a daring challenge and casual bet. During her elocution lessons, her unrepentant, calculating drunk father (Holloway) appears for handouts, and she makes an embarrassing first appearance at the opening day Ascot Races, but she catches the eye of high-born but poor Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Brett). Although she experiences personal triumph within the Edwardian high society at an Embassy Ball, and wins her teacher's love, she storms off after being transformed - only to return by film's end. Warner Bros.' musical romantic comedy was expensive-to-produce (at $17 million) - their most expensive film to date, partially due to the fact that the studio had to pay $5.5 million for film rights to the popular Broadway hit. It turned out to be one of the top five most successful films in 1964 - a combination of clever lyrics and singable tunes, with a great lead and supporting cast, and lavishly-designed theatrical sets and costumes. Alan Jay Lerner, who was responsible for the screenplay, co-wrote the music and lyrics with Frederick (Fritz) Loewe. Producer Jack Warner's will prevailed and the Cockney flower vendor character played by little-known Julie Andrews on Broadway was replaced by well-known, non-singing 'Cinderella' actress Audrey Hepburn (whose voice was dubbed by Marnie Nixon although Hepburn sang her own tracks) - to guarantee greater box-office business. Ironically, Julie Andrews was awarded a Best Actress Academy Award for her role in Disney's competing film Mary Poppins, and Hepburn failed to receive a nomination for her part. [During her acceptance speech, Andrews thanked Jack Warner "for making this possible."] Rex Harrison reprised his legendary stage performance on celluloid as the linguistics professor with a unique 'non-singing' vocal style. Lerner and Loewe's score for the musical includes some of the best known songs and lyrics ever: "The Rain in Spain," "I Could Have Danced All Night," "On the Street Where You Live," "I'm Getting Married in the Morning," "With a Little Bit of Luck," and "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face." George Cukor, a veteran 'women's director,' made a sumptuous, glamorous, brilliant Technicolor film with well-loved tunes - it was honored with twelve Academy Award nominations and eight wins, including Best Picture, Best Actor (Rex Harrison), Best Director (Cukor's only Best Director award in his career), Best Color Cinematography (in widescreen 70 mm), Best Color Art Direction/Set Decoration, Best Sound, Best Score (Andre Previn), and Best Color Costume Design (Cecil Beaton). The four losing categories were Best Supporting Actor and Actress (Stanley Holloway and Gladys Cooper), Best Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium, and Best Film Editing. In the decade of the 60s, My Fair Lady joined two other highly praised, big box-office films when it won the Academy Award for Best Picture (as did West Side Story (1961) and The Sound of Music (1965)). Plot SynopsisThe title credits and musical overture from the film are accompanied by colorful, dazzling close-ups of spring flowers - which happen to line the stairway of the Covent Garden Opera house. Elegantly-dressed, high-society opera-goers are leaving after a performance and heading for horse-drawn cabs and motorized vehicles. They begin bustling about to find shelter when rain begins to fall. Street vendors cover their wares in the marketplace. Young Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Jeremy Brett) collides with Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn), a disheveled Cockney flower vendor, while looking for a cab for his mother Mrs. Eynsford-Hill (Isobel Elsom). Eliza accuses both of them of ruining her "full day's wages" of scattered violets that are now trod in the mud: "Well, if you'd done your duty by him as a mother should, you wouldn't let him spoil a poor girl's flowers and then run away without payin'." When Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) gives Eliza some coins, but isn't given flowers in return, Eliza is cautioned by a bystander that a suspicious character behind a pillar, Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), is "takin' down ev'ry blessed word you're sayin'." She immediately assumes that she is in trouble for selling flowers illegally - she defends herself as a "respectable girl," arguing to bystanders that she did nothing wrong: "Well, I'm makin' an honest livin'." Higgins appears and calms her down by showing her his notebook with strange shorthand symbols, and he reads back to her from his notes what she said with the exact same exaggerated pronounciation: "I say, capt'n; n' baw ya flahr orf a pore gel." Eliza is even more startled when Higgins identifies her birthplace in "Lisson Grove" - she bursts into tears:
After thoughtfully predicting that Pickering is from "Cheltenham, Harrow, Cambridge, and er - India," Higgins explains his perennial search for British dialects and his talent for knowing speech patterns and their corresponding locations - he is a phonetics expert: "Simple phonetics. The science of speech. That's my profession, also my hobby. Anyone can spot an Irishman or a Yorkshireman by his brogue, but I can place a man within six miles. I can place him within two miles in London. Sometimes within two streets." And he brutally criticizes Eliza's ugly "detestable boo-hooing" and crude pronunciations:
While she indignantly belly-aches at his insults with loud, grating utterances such as "Ah-ah-aw-aw-oo-oo!", he delivers a well-aimed tirade at the deterioration of the English language. To the snobby, intolerant Higgins, ignorance, inarticulateness, dialects and unrefined language produce a "verbal class distinction," much the same way as money ensures advantages and a higher class of living, in "Why Can't the English Learn to Speak":
So the Professor makes an initial challenge toward Pickering which becomes the cornerstone of the film's plot. He wagers with the Colonel that within six months, he can teach Eliza Doolittle to speak articulately so that she will be transformed into a pure-speaking lady, so that no one will suspect her Cockney origins when she is passed off as a duchess at an Embassy Ball. She will become a proper, aristocratic lady just by being taught proper English:
The Colonel ("the author of Spoken Sanscrit"), as it turns out, has journeyed from India to meet "Henry Higgins, author of Higgins' Universal Alphabet." Now acquainted with each other after their chance meeting, Higgins invites Pickering to his home at 27A Wimpole Street and they wander off speaking about the 147 "distinct languages" or Indian dialects. Among the other street vendors, Eliza has had her interest piqued in becoming a lady. With her untutored manner, she sings and dances with them about her dreams in "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?":
Early the next morning, Eliza's hard-drinking, disreputable, scruffy-looking father Alfred (Stanley Holloway) is looking for his daughter in the Covent Garden market area - boasting to his friends Jamie (John Alderson) and Harry (John McLiam) that he deserves a paternal handout:
Although at first, Eliza resists giving her father any of her hard-earned money: "Y'ain't gonna take me hard-earned wages and pass 'em on to a bloody pub-keeper," she relents. Because of her "bit o' luck" the previous night when Higgins generously threw coins into her flower basket, she gives her father a half-crown. After Eliza hears the church bells peal, she is reminded of Higgins' appraisal that she is condemned by every syllable she speaks, and his equally promising words about how he could transform her speech differences under his tutelage. In Higgins' study at his residence on Wimpole Street, the professor and his houseguest are studying vowel sounds produced from a vibrating tuning fork taken from a rack full of tuning forks. They also listen to a phonograph playing recorded phonetic sounds when Eliza appears at the Higgins front door. The maid Mrs. Pearce (Mona Washbourne) admits her into the study, thinking she is one of Higgins' subjects of "business" study: "Well, she's quite a common girl, sir. Very common indeed. I should have sent her away only I thought perhaps you wanted her to talk into your machine." But when Eliza makes her entrance, Higgins brusquely dismisses her: "Oh, no, no, no. This is the girl I jotted down last night. She's no use. I've got all the records I want of the Lisson Grove lingo. I'm not gonna waste another cylinder on that. Now be off with you, I don't want you." Eliza begs to be taught to speak well enough to work at a flower shop. She announces that she has decided to hire Higgins to give her elocution lessons, but Higgins is very uninterested:
Pickering convinces Higgins that it would make an interesting challenge to actually teach Eliza how to speak - to change her from a drab 'guttersnipe' into a beautiful woman through language education:
And Higgins optimistically predicts that she will become an attractive lady to the men in town: "By george, Eliza, the streets will be strewn with the bodies of men shooting themselves for your sake before I've done with you." When she resists his cold insults and stomps out, he tempts her back with chocolates: "Think of it, Eliza. Think of chocolates, and taxis, and gold, and diamonds!" And then to answer Pickering's questions about the six month "experiment in teaching" while she is in his hands, Higgins describes what will happen - tongue in cheek:
As Eliza is dragged upstairs to the bathroom to her uncertain fate by Mrs. Pearce, screaming: "If I'd known what I would've let myself in for I wouldn't have come here. I've always been a good girl, I have, and I won't be put upon," Higgins reiterates his confidence in the wager: "In six months, in three if she has a good ear and a quick tongue, I'll take her anywhere and I'll pass her off as anything. I'll make a queen of that barbarous wretch." The unwashed Cockney girl is led into a fancy new bedroom, while a maid runs water into a bathtub in the adjoining bathroom. Mrs. Pearce admonishes: "You know, you can't be a nice girl inside if you're dirty outside." Eliza is overwhelmed and in awe of the fancy room: "It's too good for the likes of me. I shall be afraid to touch anything. I ain't a duchess yet, you know." Two serving girls and Higgin's housekeeper enter the bathroom, shut the door behind them, and wrestle Eliza to take her clothes off and plunge her into the steaming bathtub. Her screams of protest resound throughout the residence: "Get your hands off me! No! I won't! Let go of me!" While the two maids carry off Eliza's clothes, Higgins is asked by the morally-responsible Pickering if he will take advantage of Eliza under the circumstances: "I hope it's clearly understood that no advantage is to be taken of her position...This is no trifling matter. Are you a man of good character where women are concerned?" The confirmed, aloof, hyper-logical bachelor/professor expresses his feelings about women in words and song: "I find the moment that a woman makes friends with me, she becomes jealous, exacting, suspicious, and a damned nuisance. And I find the moment that I make friends with a woman, I become selfish and tyrannical. So here I am, a confirmed old bachelor, and likely to remain so." The snobbish professor contemptuously sings-talks that he is a "quiet living man" without the need for a woman in "An Ordinary Man":
In another line, he confirms his incorrigible bachelorhood and his impatience and distaste for creatures of the female sex: "Let a woman in your life and you're plunging in a knife. Let the others of my sex tie the knot around their necks, I'd prefer a new edition of the Spanish Inquisition than to ever let a woman in my life." In Covent Garden after being thrown out of a pub, a besotted, lazy Doolittle and his friends ponder how to escape work. Eliza's father, a dustman and scoundrel, answers the question by singing: "With A Little Bit O' Luck", explaining in part, how he lives a life of unwedded bliss:
An old Cockney woman calls out to Alfred from a basement-level window where Eliza used to reside (three days earlier) that he is a lucky man because his daughter is being 'kept' by a wealthy man:
Alfred celebrates his luck by finishing up his song: "A man was made to help support his children, which is the right and proper thing to do. A man was made to help support his children but, with a little bit o' luck, with a little bit o' luck, they'll go out and start supporting you!" |
My
Fair Lady (1964) was experienced director George Cukor's film
musical adaptation of George Bernard Shaw's 1913 staged play Pygmalion that
had played successfully on Broadway from March 15, 1956 to 1962.
Shaw's plot in his 1912 play was derived from Latin poet Ovid's
story (in the Metamorphoses)
about a character named Pygmalion who fell in love with a beautiful
ivory statue of a woman. In later Greek tradition, his prayers
to Venus that the beloved statue - Galatea - would come to life
came true so that they could marry.