Saturday Night Cinema: My Fair Lady

The best stage musical of all time and one of the most loved romances.

I selected one of Hollywood's best-loved musicals for tonight's Saturday Nght Cinema — a special Passover treat, My Fair Lady, directed by the legendary George Cukor. The film stars Audrey Hepburn, the epitome of what every girl aspires to be, and she is brilliant. I love, love, love her.

Contrary to what current box-office would say, there was a time when
musicals were the most profitable “genre” in Hollywood. Beginning in the
late ‘30s and all the way up to the ‘70s, musicals were bona fide
blockbusters that drew the crowds to movie theaters on a weekly basis,
perhaps because they were always huge spectacles that demanded to be
seen in big screens.

My Fair Lady (1964)

Screen: Lots of Chocolates for Miss Eliza Doolittle: 'My Fair Lady' Bows at the Criterion

By BOSLEY CROWTHER

Published: October 22, 1964

AS Henry Higgins might have whooped, "By George, they've got it!"
They've made a superlative film from the musical stage show "My Fair
Lady"—a film that enchantingly conveys the rich endowments of the famous
stage production in a fresh and flowing cinematic form. The happiest
single thing about it is that Audrey Hepburn superbly justifies the
decision of the producer, Jack L. Warner, to get her to play the title
role that Julie Andrews so charmingly and popularly originated on the
stage.

All things considered, it is the brilliance of Miss Hepburn as the
Cockney waif who is transformed by Prof. Henry Higgins into an elegant
female facade that gives an extra touch of subtle magic and
individuality to the film, which had a bejeweled and bangled premiere at
the Criterion last night.

Other elements and values that are captured so exquisitely in this
film are but artful elaborations and intensifications of the stage
material as achieved by the special virtuosities and unique
flexibilities of the screen.

There are the basic libretto and music of Alan Jay Lerner and
Frederick Loewe, which were inspired by the wit and wisdom in the
dramatic comedy, "Pygmalion," of George Bernard Shaw. With Mr. Lerner
serving as the screen playwright, the structure and, indeed, the very
words of the musical play as it was performed on Broadway for six and a
half years are preserved. And every piece of music of the original score
is used.

There is punctilious duplication of the motifs and patterns of the
décor and the Edwardian costumes and scenery, which Cecil Beaton
designed for the stage. The only difference is that they're expanded.
For instance, the Covent Garden set becomes a stunningly populated
market, full of characters and movement in the film; and the embassy
ball, to which the heroine is transported Cin-derellalike, becomes a
dazzling array of regal splendor, as far as the eye can reach, when laid
out for ritualistic emphasis on the Super-Panavision color screen.
Since Mr. Beaton's decor was fresh and flawless, it is super-fresh and
flawless in the film.

In the role of Professor Higgins, Rex Harrison still displays the
egregious egotism and ferocity that he so vividly displayed on the
stage, and Stanley Holloway still comes through like thunder as Eliza's
antisocial dustman dad.

Yes, it's all here, the essence of the stage show—the pungent humor
and satiric wit of the conception of a linguistic expert making a lady
of a guttersnipe by teaching her manners and how to speak, the pomp and
mellow grace of a romantic and gone-forever age, the delightful
intoxication of music that sings in one's ears.

The added something is what Miss Hepburn brings—and what George Cukor as the director has been able to distill from the script.

For want of the scales of a jeweler, let's just say that what Miss
Hepburn brings is a fine sensitivity of feeling and a phenomenal
histrionic skill. Her Covent Garden flower girl is not just a doxy of
the streets. She's a terrifying example of the elemental self-assertion
of the female sex. When they try to plunge her into a bathtub, as they
do in an added scene, which is a wonderfully comical creation of montage
and pantomime, she fights with the fury of a tigress. She is not one to
submit to the still obscure customs and refinements of a society that
is alien to her.

But when she reaches the point where she can parrot the correct words
to describe the rain in Spain, she acknowledges the thrill of achieving
this bleak refinement with an electrical gleam in her eyes. And when
she celebrates the male approval she receives for accomplishing this
goal, she gives a delightful demonstration of ecstasy and energy by
racing about the Higgins mansion to the music of "I Could Have Danced
All Night."

It is true that Marni Nixon provides the lyric voice that seems to
emerge from Miss Hepburn, but it is an excellent voice, expertly
synchronized. And everything Miss Hepburn mimes to it is in sensitive
tune with the melodies and words.

Miss Hepburn is most expressive in the beautiful scenes where she
achieves the manners and speech of a lady, yet fails to achieve that one
thing she needs for a sense of belonging—that is, the recognition of
the man she loves.

She is dazzlingly beautiful and comic in the crisply satiric Ascot
scene played almost precisely as it was on the stage. She is stiffly
serene and distant at the embassy ball and almost unbearably poignant in
the later scenes when she hungers for love. Mr. Cukor has maneuvered
Miss Hepburn and Mr. Harrison so deftly in these scenes that she has one
perpetually alternating between chuckling laughter and dabbing the
moisture from one's eyes.

This is his singular triumph. He has packed such emotion into this
film—such an essence of feeling and compassion for a girl in an all
too-human bind—that he has made this rendition of "My Fair Lady" the
most eloquent and moving that has yet been done.

There are other delightful triumphs in it. Mr. Harrison's Higgins is
great—much sharper, more spirited and eventually more winning than I
recall it on the stage. Mr. Holloway's dustman is titanic, and when he
roars through his sardonic paean to middle-class morality in "Get Me to
the Church on Time," he and his bevy of boozers reach a high point of
the film.

Wilfrid Hyde White as Colonel Pickering, who is Higgins's urbane
associate; Mona Washburn as the Higgins housekeeper, Gladys Cooper as
Higgins's svelte mama and, indeed, everyone in the large cast is in true
and impeccable form.

Though it runs for three hours — or close to it — this "My Fair Lady"
seems to fly past like a breeze. Like Eliza's disposition to dancing,
it could go on, for all I'd care, all night.

The Cast

MY FAIR LADY, screenplay by Alan Jay Lerner, based
on the stage musical by Mr. Lerner and Frederick Loewe, from
"Pygmalion," by George Bernard Shaw; directed by George Cukor and
produced by Jack L. Warner. Presented by Warner Bros. Pictures. At the
Criterion Theater, Broadway and 45th Street. Running time: 170 minutes.

Eliza . . . . . Audrey Hepburn

Henry Higgins . . . . . Rex Harrison

Alfred Doolittle . . . . . Stanley Holloway

Colonel Pickering . . . . . Wilfrid Hyde White

Mrs. Higgins . . . . . Gladys Cooper

Freddie . . . . . Jeremy Brett

Zoltan Karpathy . . . . . Theodore Bikel

Mrs. Pearce . . . . . Mona Washbourne

Mrs. Eynsford-Hill . . . . . Isobel Elsom

Butler . . . . . John Holland

During the ‘60s alone, four musicals were named Best Picture by the
Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and twice as much received
Best Picture nominations. Titles such as West Side Story, Funny Girl and The Sound of Music, have entered the collective consciousness, even if nowadays audiences seem unable to process what made musicals so special.

One of the landmark movies made during the musicals’ golden era was My Fair Lady, an adaptation of the Lerner and Loewe stage show, which was itself an adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s timeless Pygmalion.
The simple story deals with the snobbish Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), a
misogynistic phonetics professor living in Edwardian London, who
believes a person’s way of speaking determines their place in society.
Bragging about his talents, Higgins goes as far as to say that he can
pass off any woman as a duchess, at an upcoming ball, just by teaching
her how to speak properly. Higgins chooses poor, flower-girl, Eliza
Dolittle (Audrey Hepburn) as his subject and most of the film devotes
itself to watching her transformation from an unkempt urchin to, well, a
fair lady.

Even if the story is quite simple the film, as directed by the
legendary George Cukor achieves various levels of depth, particularly
because of the way in which he turns it into a keen gender study. It’s
easy for people to merely concentrate on Higgins and his almost
positively Frankenstein-ian experiments on Eliza, but the story subtly
moves beyond that, even if Harrison’s gargantuan performance seems to
overpower the more delicate themes.

Cukor was always considered one of the best “women’s directors”,
because of the way in which he approached his actresses needs over
almost any other element in the production. His films feature some of
the most notable female performances of all time, including Katharine
Hepburn in The Philadelphia Story, Greta Garbo in Camille and Judy Garland in A Star is Born. He was so beloved by his actresses that, legend has it, Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland almost quit Gone With the Wind after Cukor was fired.

Historians have said that some of their best scenes in My Fair Lady
are Cukor’s work. Unlike many of his contemporary directors, however,
he never came up with an auteur vision or any sort of visual trademarks,
but he still remains an iconic figure, if only because women thrived
under his direction.

What then, you could ask yourself, did Cukor see in this story so
famous for its depiction of misogyny? For starters, he sets his entire
film in sets that create an initial rejection of reality. Through the
sets and elaborate costumes (mostly work of Cecil Beaton) the director
creates a barrier between his audience and the story at hand. We are
constantly reminded that the events on the screen not only take place in
a distant century, but they also reek of self-conscious artifice.

One of the most beautiful scenes in the film has Higgins taking Eliza
to a racecourse, which at first we could’ve confused for a fashion
show. The camera takes its time absorbing the richness in the costumes
and places the people watching the show as nothing else than objects of
our attention. They too are part of a horse race. By establishing these
parallels between old-fashioned values and cinema’s ability to convey
fantasty, Cukor is inviting us to disregard any of the moral clauses
invoked by Higgins and his kind.

Why then, you might wonder next, does the movie insist on delivering a
romance between Higgins and Eliza? The question might best be answered
by recurring to the excuse of Hollywood politics, since it would’ve been
impossible for Cukor to change the film’s central love story without
displeasing studio heads. In fact the movie borrows its ending not from
Shaw’s play, but from a previous movie version in which romance was the
road to happiness.

Cukor, however, doesn’t seem satisfied with this easy excuse and what
he does is subvert the notion of romance. Since he couldn’t change his
heroine’s fate, he takes the road less traveled and leads us to wonder
if love after all is something other than a financial transaction. The
lack of chemistry between Hepburn and Harrison is palpable (but then
again who could fall for Higgins?) and one can say that Cukor sabotaged
the screenplay’s romantic intentions with this very purpose. Almost
every romantic pursue in the film is marked by either disillusion,
ulterior economic motives or capriciousness.

Eliza is courted by the picture perfect Freddy Eynsford-Hill (Jeremy
Brett) who performs the breathtaking “On the Street Where You Live”
after realizing he loves her, but Eliza chooses to remain with the man
who first treated her as a guinea pig, perhaps aware that Freddy’s
beauty shall pass and she would have to share her life with someone
who’d become as detestable as Higgins or her own father (played by the
hilarious Stanely Holloway). By choosing economic security and peace of
mind, Eliza makes a choice that predates the deterministic feminism of
the Sex and the City gals: she chooses to love and protect herself over anyone else.

The main attraction is the movie itself which looks absolutely
astonishing in high definition. The Blu-ray edition pretty much recycled
bonus features from the 2-disc DVD edition released by Warner Brothers a
few years ago. It’s truly a shame they didn’t recycle that version’s
cover image as well… but anyway, features include a making-of
documentary which offers the behind the scenes backstabbing that went on
when Audrey was cast instead of Julie Andrews, as well as the tough
time Harrison gave the crew with his reluctance to be dubbed.

There are trailers, smaller features about the style and best of all
(and what once were the jewels on any release of this movie) are the
outtakes where Audrey does her own singing. Producers decided to use
Marni Nixon to dub her singing voice onscreen. Nixon shows up on the
feature commentary, and showing pure class, she does nothing but
compliment Hepburn.

The Truth Must be Told

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James Linnstrom II

11 years ago

What if Audrey Hepburn used a strong New Yawk accent in this movie?? Wouldn’t she be just like Pamela Geller in Victorian outfit?
Oh just kidding. We love you, Pamela.

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MA02169

11 years ago

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz

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James Linnstrom II

11 years ago

Sorry, I meant Edwardian…

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Cary

11 years ago

Good choice Pam. I have always felt that it was the pinnacle of hollywood musicals with a good sense of comedy.

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fern

11 years ago

Seen what they are doing to your ads Pamela?
https://twitter.com/oh_chai/status/315097505832517632

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Pamela Geller

11 years ago

Nah, these clowns just did a photoshop. All of my ads are up and running.
And ads use actual quotes 🙂

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fern

11 years ago

Fascists who call themselves ‘anti-fascists’ threatened Pub with violence to prevent suporters of the Scottish Defence League from using their pub as a meeting point prior to a demonstration
ROYAL Mile pub Deacon Brodie’s Tavern faked a gas leak to prevent members of far-right group the Scottish Defence League gathering for a meeting amid fears the premises would be smashed up, it has been claimed.
The pub used the excuse to close its doors as members of the SDL were planning to assemble for a demonstration on Saturday.
SDL supporters were due to gather in the historic pub before protesting outside an Islamophobia awareness conference held at Augustine United Church on nearby George IV Bridge.
A source close to the pub said that a member of the rival Unite Against Fascism group called Deacon Brodie’s and threatened that the 207-year-old institution would be attacked if they let the SDL in.
The insider said: “Deacon Brodie’s closed on Saturday under the pretence of a gas leak. But really it’s because the Scottish Defence League was going to have a meeting there and Unite Against Fascism called to tell the management that if it went ahead then they would smash up the pub.”
Later on Saturday, the rival groups were involved in a disturbance outside the conference.
On its official Facebook page, the SDL had confirmed Deacon Brodie’s as the location of its planned meeting.
After the pub was suddenly closed to the public, an SDL member wrote: “We got there and pub said was closed as gas leak was not best start to day.”
Jacqueline Henderson, manager at Deacon Brodie’s Tavern said she was not able to speak about the incident.
A spokeswoman from Mitchells and Butlers, the operator which runs the pub, said: “We took the decision to close the pub on Saturday morning and traded as normal from early afternoon. We are unable to comment any further.”
Scotia Gas Networks 
confirmed it had not received any phone call relating to a gas leak at the premises.
Campaigners from the SDL and Unite Against Fascism have a history of clashing.
In May last year, a massive police operation involving officers from five different forces prevented clashes between the SDL and anti-fascist demonstrators in the Capital. Around 80 members of the SDL gathered at Regent Road and marched to St Andrew’s House.
More than 300 people gathered for a counter-demonstration by Unite Against Fascism, who marched from the Grassmarket to St Andrew’s House.
more here: http://www.scotsman.com/edinburgh-evening-news/latest-news/pub-faked-gas-leak-to-prevent-sdl-meeting-1-2850100

0

fern

11 years ago

Fascists who call themselves ‘anti-fascists’ threatened Pub with violence to prevent suporters of the Scottish Defence League from using their pub as a meeting point prior to a demonstration
ROYAL Mile pub Deacon Brodie’s Tavern faked a gas leak to prevent members of far-right group the Scottish Defence League gathering for a meeting amid fears the premises would be smashed up, it has been claimed.
The pub used the excuse to close its doors as members of the SDL were planning to assemble for a demonstration on Saturday.
SDL supporters were due to gather in the historic pub before protesting outside an Islamophobia awareness conference held at Augustine United Church on nearby George IV Bridge.
A source close to the pub said that a member of the rival Unite Against Fascism group called Deacon Brodie’s and threatened that the 207-year-old institution would be attacked if they let the SDL in.
The insider said: “Deacon Brodie’s closed on Saturday under the pretence of a gas leak. But really it’s because the Scottish Defence League was going to have a meeting there and Unite Against Fascism called to tell the management that if it went ahead then they would smash up the pub.”
Later on Saturday, the rival groups were involved in a disturbance outside the conference.
On its official Facebook page, the SDL had confirmed Deacon Brodie’s as the location of its planned meeting.
After the pub was suddenly closed to the public, an SDL member wrote: “We got there and pub said was closed as gas leak was not best start to day.”
Jacqueline Henderson, manager at Deacon Brodie’s Tavern said she was not able to speak about the incident.
A spokeswoman from Mitchells and Butlers, the operator which runs the pub, said: “We took the decision to close the pub on Saturday morning and traded as normal from early afternoon. We are unable to comment any further.”
Scotia Gas Networks 
confirmed it had not received any phone call relating to a gas leak at the premises.
Campaigners from the SDL and Unite Against Fascism have a history of clashing.
In May last year, a massive police operation involving officers from five different forces prevented clashes between the SDL and anti-fascist demonstrators in the Capital. Around 80 members of the SDL gathered at Regent Road and marched to St Andrew’s House.
More than 300 people gathered for a counter-demonstration by Unite Against Fascism, who marched from the Grassmarket to St Andrew’s House.
more here: http://www.scotsman.com/edinburgh-evening-news/latest-news/pub-faked-gas-leak-to-prevent-sdl-meeting-1-2850100

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fern

11 years ago

Ok, good.

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fern

11 years ago

Something is happening during the sign in process. It hangs. Gives the impression nothing is happening, yet, obviously, something is happening cos it has double posted (as I tried twice).

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fern

11 years ago

ISRAEL
Sudanese man to be indicted for attempted rape of minor
Muhammad Sulima Hamed accused of long line of charges including indecent acts against minors and attempted rape; Prosecution: Series of violent events, unrestrained and uninhibited
The Prosecutor’s Office filed an indictment with the Tel Aviv District Court on Sunday against Sudanese citizen Muhammad Sulima Hamed, 21, for attempted rape during a break in at a Tel Aviv home two weeks ago.
The accused entered the home, attacked the mother, threatened her eight year old daughter with a knife and was only arrested after the father woke up and managed to take control of the perpetrator.
The attacker admits to charges of breaking and entering but denied the rape and sexual assault charges.
Hamed is accused of breaking and entering, indecent acts against a minor, attempted rape, intimidation, assault and additional charges.
At around 5 am Hamed broke into the family home of five in Tel Aviv. He came in through an open kitchen window, grabbing a knife as he went along. He then went in to a room where two children were sleeping, walked up to one of the girls, put a knife to her throat and threatened her: “Shhhh, be quiet and go to sleep.”
The girl became extremely alarmed, waking her brother. Hamed then turned to the boy, aimed the knife at him and said, “Close your eyes and go to sleep,” and covered him.
The Indictment reveals that the suspect tried to rape the girl while she cried and called out for help. The mother heard the cries through an intercom and rushed to the children’s room.
According to the indictment, when she reached the children’s room she saw the attacker bent over her daughter. The shocked mother tried to save her daughter by pulling at the attacker’s hair, and screaming “go away.” During the struggle, the attacker stabbed the mother in the stomach.
The mother did not pause in her attempts to remove the attacker in spite of her injury. She screamed out for the father who then rushed to the living room where the struggle continued.
more here: http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-4360393,00.html

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