G | 2h 50 min | Musical, Comedy | 1964
For a musical, 1964’s “My Fair Lady” isn’t about music at all. It’s about speech. It isn’t about singing. It’s about speaking. Yet magically, director George Cukor and producer Jack L. Warner make this magnificent British-American film about all these things, bringing to film the musical that first landed on Broadway in 1956.
Set in the early 20th century, the story revolves around a seemingly trivial bet, based on a fundamental belief.
Classy Flower Girl
So Higgins places a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White): Not only will Higgins train and turn an uncouth flower girl from the market, Eliza (Audrey Hepburn), into a lady, but he’ll also pass her off as an aristocrat.A gamely Pickering sponsors Eliza’s tutelage under Higgins, but all three of them are in for surprises. In some of the funniest scenes, Eliza nearly wilts under Higgins’s brutal schooling in vowels and pronunciation, before his bet takes on a bewildering twist.
This witty cinematic critique of elitism is based on Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw’s 1913 play “Pygmalion.” In the ancient Greek myth that inspired Shaw’s play, Pygmalion’s sculpture of a woman comes alive once he falls in love with it.
In the play, Shaw’s spoofing of English upper-class snootiness tells us that most aristocracy is inherited, seldom earned. And offered opportunity, even working classes can prove they’re no less.
In the film, Higgins’s exasperated cry “Why can’t a woman be like me?” is his aristocratic conceit that he has power to breathe “life” into the “lifeless” (the so-called uncultured working class). How? Simply by wishing that they become like him: superior, mannered, alive. Or by pouring into their mouths his life-giving nectar of artful language.
The film’s point is that “difference” doesn’t imply superiority any more than it implies inferiority. So it skewers our hypocrisies by examining stereotypical battles, real and imagined. Battles between the sexes, between the educated and unlettered, between those who are single and married.
Faithful to Shaw’s satirizing spirit, except in tone and tenor, screenwriter Alan Jay Lerner uses language as a metaphorical key. Language can unlock new knowledge, grant access to new privileges, and promise new freedoms. It can also blind and enslave.
An All-Time Great Musical
Frederick Loewe’s music is a delightful play of melody and mischief, elevating the viewing experience of audiences who are used to the more sober film “Pygmalion” (1938), which isn’t a musical anyway.
Every track in the soundtrack album is enjoyable, but some stand out.
The deliberately less melodic tracks led by Harrison, such as “Why Can’t the English Learn to Speak?,” “An Ordinary Man,” “You Did It,” and “I’ve Grown Accustomed to Her Face,” stand out for their wit even if some of the lines themselves are sheer nonsense.
The pedantic might point out that Harrison’s “singing” is actually a form of German expressionist voicing, “Sprechgesang” or “Sprechstimme,” which is a canny mix of singing while speaking. To ordinary listeners it won’t matter. Master of the phrase and pause, Harrison holds your attention every time he opens his mouth; sometimes, even when he closes it.
Harrison was adamant that he couldn’t authentically dub in a studio over his voice on the set. So, extraordinarily for that time, a radio microphone was used to lend his voice presence and power. And boy, does it show. No one would ever accuse Harrison of being a singer, but listen to how he makes every syllable ring out. Expectedly, Harrison won an Oscar for Best Actor, and Sound Director George Groves won an Oscar for Sound.
American soprano Marni Nixon sings most songs for the very British Hepburn, including the sweet “Wouldn’t It Be Loverly?” and the dreamy “I Could Have Danced All Night.” American baritone-tenor Bill Shirley sings the near-operatic “On The Street Where You Live” for a character played by the very British Jeremy Brett. The chorus sings the electrifying “Ascot Gavotte.”
Alexander Walker can’t be faulted for naming his biography of Harrison “Fatal Charm.” Harrison’s charisma is unlike Hepburn’s. His is imposing, hers incandescent. His forbidding aura is perfect for the austere Higgins, but her easy grace doesn’t quite sit with a rustic Eliza. However, as she morphs from rustic to refined Eliza, Hepburn’s queenly class dazzles just in time.
Years before Cukor’s film, stage producers too wrestled with this oddity when casting the exquisite Julie Andrews as Eliza in the Broadway and London stage productions. As with Hepburn, they cast Andrews also for her enviable diction, knowing how effortlessly she’d pass off as an aristocrat.
A Woman’s Place
Some contemporary observers lazily accuse Cukor’s film of being sexist. Others explain why it isn’t sexist even if it’s about sexism. Far from being sexist, it’s about a fiercely resilient woman from, sadly, a sexist epoch. In one scene, a remarkably perceptive Eliza says, “Apart from the things one can pick up, the difference between a lady and a flower girl isn’t how she behaves but how she is treated.”So, if you’re looking only at how Higgins treats Eliza, you’re missing entirely how Pickering does. Both men illustrate this lesson: Being cultured isn’t only what manners “you’re given” or what etiquette you acquire, important as they may be, but what “you give” others in the way you treat them.
Some critics conclude that with the plug-and-play building blocks that Shaw left behind through his playwright brilliance, any director, cast, and crew would have to be daft to ruin them, on stage or screen. They’re correct. Lerner, for instance, could more easily build on Shaw’s work to write a screenplay for the ages. And a script, after all, is the soul of a film.
But they’re also mistaken. Shaw’s building blocks are just that: building blocks. And whether they’re syllables in speech, notes in a song, or cast and crew on a film set, they need magic to come together as a monument.
In 1964, Warner Bros. brought a little more than magic to this monumental musical. The eight Oscars it won are the least of it.
