I had both the original Broadway cast and the movie version on audio cassettes when I went to teach English in Czechoslovakia more than 20 years ago. Living in a small town an hour from Prague, my evening entertainment options were somewhat limited,* and by the time I left I had learned both tapes by heart.
*I also had the themes for almost every Spaghetti Western ever made and fell asleep most nights listening to Once upon a Time in the West.
Trivia: the Ascot scenes in the movie gave Truman Capote the idea for his black & white ball.
Many musicals that work fantastically on stage don’t work on film. IMHO, My Fair Lady is one. It should also be noted that, quite independently of MHO, the movie version was a huge box office and critical success that won several Oscars and was nominated for several more, so, good thing for Warner Brothers my opinion in 2014 didn’t really carry much weight in 1965.
My favorite performance in the film is Stanley Holloway as Doolittle, who along with Rex Harrison was a carryover from the original Broadway and London casts. His music hall background gave an authenticity and vibrance and rascally charm to the role that a more refined actor would probably have lacked, and Doolittle would be an easy character to hate.* Even though he’s a bit old for the part (the actor was in his early '70s) he had enough twinkle in his eye to still pull it off.
Next to him I liked Wilfrid Hyde-White, who was not a Broadway carryover but was perfect for Pickering. Most of the rest of the cast was capable as well.
Here comes the blasphemy: while Rex Harrison has become almost one-and-the-same with Henry Higgins, but I wasn’t blown away by his performance. For one thing, his age was more of a factor than Holloway’s- you can get away with a lot on stage, but while he was a handsome man in his late 50s he did look like he was in his late 50s, and Higgins is supposed to be significantly younger than that (35-50 probably). Also, he’s a bit tan and too neat, and he also sometimes has the air of somebody who has performed this role a thousand times- he doesn’t really punch some of his key lines.**
But Audrey Hepburn, who I loved in Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Robin and Marian and several other performances, sinks the movie performance wise. She was a fine actress in many vehicles, but this was whatever the opposite is of the role she was born to play: Matthew McConnaughey would have made as convincing a Higgins as she did Eliza. The fact that she didn’t do her own singing hurt it, but the fact that she VERY OBVIOUSLY didn’t do her own singing (bad synching and way different sounding voice) really hurt it. Her voice in the flower girl scenes was entirely too contrived: Eliza’s accent is pivotal to the character like almost no other major role in theater, and it’s easy to go overboard, and she did.
But I think what hurt the movie most was what I call the “Up Close and Personal” and “Too Realistic” effects. I’m sure there are alternative and better recognized terms for these problems and I’d love to learn them, but here’s what I mean:
-Up Close & Personal:
Sometimes costumes and makeup and appearances that work fine on a stage many yards away just don’t work in close-ups that are required for a movie, and Eliza’s one. Here’s a photo from a stage production of MFL- note how you have the notion of Eliza being a bit dirty and her clothes a bit ragged due to poverty and a sooty city, but it’s not overwhelming.
Closeup of Audrey in the same role: Eliza’s “wretched clothes and dirty face” are a bit too overpowering- this is full on poverty, though at the same time through that full on poverty there’s glorious cheekbones and marvelous poise. (Anne Hathaway had a similar problem in Devil Wears Prada- the fact that there’s no uglying her up diminishes from the great caterpillar to butterfly transformation that’s supposed to take place.)
There are similar problems with the lines on Higgins’ face and the visually stunning but also way too busy ballroom scene (which, incidentally, goes on WAY too long and much longer on film than in the stage play) and Ascot.
Also, note Higgins’ study from various stage productions: gives you the idea of who lives there, but doesn’t overpower. The movie set, with every single knick-knack and foot of books obviously done by a decorator and with far more detail than a stage, does. It overpowers the actors to a degree.
And the “too realistic”: all musicals require suspension of disbelief since ordinarily people don’t burst out singing and dancing in daily life, and so it’s fine if the set is not super realistic, and in fact I LOVE clever staging and transitionings. In this clip of “Show Me!” from the 2001 London revival, in just two minutes Higgins’ townhouse disappears, Eliza and Freddy catch the Underground and move all the way across London, a suffragettes rally appears to imply the section of London into which they’ve alighted, and it all works splendidly to demonstrate Eliza and Freddy moving through the city in far faster time than it would actually take, exposition and transition and very charming at both. There’s nothing real about the movement of the subway, but you know exactly what they’re going for and you don’t mind in the least that it’s implication rather than realism.
In the movie the same number is real time action and even though it’s obviously a set it’s a very detailed set and it just isn’t as understated and “fun”. It’s striving for a realism that isn’t there. (Les Miserables suffered hugely from this problem, imo: there’s a lot you look the other way at on stage because you understand the need for quick exposition and scene changes, but when you actually see the dirty bricks and the mud on the streets it’s not as much fun.)
I hope this made some sense, but ultimately the movie just doesn’t stand the test of time, for which I blame a surprisingly joyless staging, a miscast lead actress (while obviously it begged for Julie Andrews, it needed a singer at very least), and, of course, Barack Obama.
*Trivia about Holloway and the role:
-Julie Andrews was actually living with Holloway and his family when she auditioned for Eliza and had a real life father-daughter type relationship with him than their stage characters had
-The role was offered to Jimmy Cagney, but he had retired from films a few years before, plus he was a major fan of Holloway’s from having seen the Broadway show
-Holloway was the paternal grandfather of model/actress Sophie Dahl (whose grandmother was Patricia Neal)
**When Doper Eve of blessed memory was researching her book on Kay Kendall (the third of Harrison’s six wives) she said that she did not find anyone with anything nice to say about Harrison. One person called him “a bastard’s bastard”- perhaps particularly damning considering that person was his son.
And has anybody else ever wondered if Sheldon Cooper is based in part on Henry Higgins?
Brilliant, mannerless, socially awkward but onconcerned about it, emotionally clueless, asexual and intellectual but with an occasional vulnerable point.
I’ve written before that I always assumed Higgins was at least latently gay as Shaw portrayed him and that this was the meaning of “not all men are confirmed bachelors like me and the colonel”. Lerner/Harrison punched the attraction to Eliza a bit more, but it’s still not sizzling, and could easily be done away with altogether from his end.
Not merely in love . . . but absolutely, permanently head-over-heels in love!
A stalker would never say “People stop and stare, they don’t bother me!” The last thing a stalker wants is to draw attention to himself.
And don’t get me started on “Baby, it’s cold outside.”
I hear “I’m getting married in the morning” every time I hear somebody’s married. Insta-earworm.
Then again, for me its greatest value was that it taught me how to decipher Cockney accents and its derivatives. That’s come in handy many, many times, from that bobby who pronounced Park Lane as “pork loin” to my Jamaican landlady asking “af yu seen my heggs?”
I love this movie but there’s one scene I CAN. NOT. WATCH.
I’m surprised no one has mentioned it yet.
It’s the scene when Higgins’ housekeeper and maid take Eliza to the bath.
Hepburn plays way too much horror as they attempt to strip her and force her into the bath, the whole scene (which I believe was supposed to be comedic) plays as a traumatizing violent assault.
Ouch. Very disturbing. Can’t watch it.
Oh, and “On The Street Where You Live” is one of the best songs in Musical Theater history, but it is definitely a stalker song!
In love, maybe, but not with Eliza. He barely knows her, and what he does know of her is an act. He’s in love with the idealized version of Eliza that he’s built up in his own mind. Totally stalker.
Thank you.
I loved the Broadway cast recording in high school. (Might I still own it? Time to fire up the old victrola.) And, yes, in those days you’d see scenes from Broadway hits on Ed Sullivan & hear the tunes on the radio.
That love is one reason I read most of Shaw’s plays. Shaw himself had a hand in the 1938 film of Pygmalion. He approved some plot changes that made it to the musical–but not Eliza’s return to Higgins at the end. However, the age difference between Leslie Howard & Wendy Hiller was not that great–I could see them as a couple. It’s not as though they kissed…
The movie suffered from the contrast between the aging Rex Harrison & the lovely Audrey Hepburn. She actually recorded “All I Want” rather well & was hurt they didn’t use it–no, they stuck to Marnie Nixon’s vocals throughout. Definitely, Julie Andrews should have reprised her role–but she was not a “movie star” yet. Jeremy Brett sang quite well, but I believe they dubbed somebody else singing “On the Street Where You Life.” Stalker? Such a total upper class twit would never actually harm anybody…
Cecil Beaton did the art direction–costumes & sets. They are absolutely gorgeous but the gorgeousness gets in the way of the story. And it does all move rather slowly…the wit & the music are not quite enough to keep it afloat.
(I’ve always thought the relationship between brilliant, difficult Henry Higgins & courtly Colonel Pickering, just back from service in the East, an echo of Sherlock Holmes & John Watson. Two other famous London flatmates.)
By the way, MTV’s The State had the absolutely best ever reinterpretation of “Ascot Gavotte”.
(of course, they used porcupines so it’s a bit different)
As a confirmed bachelor myself, allow me to assure you that it does not necessarily equate with being homosexual, nor does having a male houseguest or roommate.
As was pointed out in a recent documentary on Sherlock Holmes, the male dynamic was quite different a hundred years ago, and no one would have automatically made such an assumption the way people do today.
Latent, shmatent. All sorts of latent things lurk in our psyches without affecting our day-to-day behavior.
Good point. A lot of people say I am latently intelligently, but to just look at me you’d never know it.
No assurance needed. Personally I am both a confirmed bachelor AND gay, but I understand that the two are not synonymous.
In Higgins’s case, however, I think it may have been a euphemism. While I don’t think that he and Pickering are involved, the fact that his mother is so thrilled for him to bring a woman around, even if she is a flower girl, says he has reached middle age not just as a bachelor but with no interest at all in women, and gay is probably more common than asexual.
Things I remember from Pygmalion that are not an NFL:
-The Eynsford-Hill family is very aristocratic but penniless and barely holding on by their fingertips to what they have, but Freddie still does not work because a job is beneath him.
-Henry has a brother (referred to but unseen) who is a minister.
-Eliza has many brothers and sisters, referenced by Dolittle but unseen. His current common-law wife is her sixth stepmother.
-The play ends with everybody going to attend Alfred’s wedding.
-In the follow up, Freddy and Eliza become essentially working-class, while Alfred plays recklessly with his money and becomes fantastically rich (and happy again- he liked being undeserving poor and he likes being very rich, but he hated being middle-class.)
I always thought one of the saddest scenes in musical theater was when Eliza goes back to the Covent Garden people who were her friends in the opening scene and she realizes that she no longer fits in with them anymore than she fits in with the aristocracy. (My mother always said this was how she felt when she went back to her hillbilly hometown after college.)
I think a great retelling of Pygmalion would work with a ghetto black lady wanting to get ahead but held back by her accent and grammar, but whose transformation costs her a large part of her identity. Then perhaps it would have more of the poignancy of Eliza in the early 20th century. Today, largely because of the plays, a Cockney flower girl is more cute and quaint than a “prisoner of the gutters condemned by every syllable she utters”. You don’t really appreciate just how impoverished she is or how desperate she is to break the cycle. (A pity that Tyler Perry is so talentless as it would be a perfect vehicle for his studios in Atlanta.)
Steve McQueen (of 12 Years a Slave fame, not Papillon), is black, talented, and British. Nothing is ever a pity when Tyler Perry loses out on work.
My apologies if someone already said this – I did a quick scan and didn’t see it.
My Fair Lady isn’t a Rogers and Hammerstein musical – the book is by Alan Jay Lerner and the music by Frederick Loewe (the same guys who gave us Camelot, Gigi, Brigadoon, and others.)
I was fortunate in that I did not see MFL until after I’d read Shaw’s play, and seen an excellent stage interpretation of it.
As noted above, the play was filmed with Wendy Hiller and Leslie Howard. The play version I’d read had Shaw’s own interpretation of how it should be filmed. The Hiller/Howard film didn’t stick to this, I was chagrined to note, especially in that they changed the ending to having Eliza stay with Higgins. This despite a lengthy postscript to the play in which Shaw tells us what happened afterwards. It further confused me when Lerner, in the published version of the My Fair Lady script, took credit for changing the ending, when it had already been done before.
I have to admit that I’m not a big fan of the music in MFL, either. I am grateful that they kept big blocks of Shaw’s script unchanged, but Lerner’s excisions and additions don’t work for me.
MUCH better quality and no captions! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MTpD0mQ4LUM
The “at home” scene is at 40:56.
I was always irked by the fact that most of the singing was dubbed. On-set sound was not fantastic at the time, and almost all singing in films was overdubbed in post, but for My Fair Lady, many in the cast were dubbed by other people. Audrey Hepburn, as mentioned, was dubbed by Marni Nixon, who provided a singing voice for many leading ladies at the time. The one I don’t quite get, though, is that they dubbed Jeremy Brett with Bill Shirley. Brett had a lovely voice. Not a clue why they didn’t use it.
Ah, excellent! 
The singing is actually recorded first in most cases even today, with the actors singing along with or lip syncing to the pre-recorded track during shooting. This isn’t so much because of the quality of on-set sound (although that is a factor) but because it’s hard on the performers to belt it out for take after take.
Linky?
I’m aware that MFL isn’t a Rodgers and Hammerstein work, I absolutely love R&H and it seems like Lerner and Lowe don’t work quite as well for me. I need to give Camelot another listen, I remember liking it quite a lot.
