Best Picture: # 37
Original Release Date: December 25, 1964
Rating: G
Runtime: 2 hours, 50 minutes
Director: George Cukor
Quick Impressions:
I’ve had a long love affair with My Fair Lady. I first saw it on stage when I was seven. My gifted class took a special evening field trip to see it performed by a local theater company. We were pretty far off Broadway in Lake of the Ozarks, Missouri, but still, I found the evening magical, the musical enchanting. I wore my most loverly dress and sat in wonder, gazing up in delight at the stage. At one point, I was so enraptured that I turned to my friend sitting beside me to gush, “Oh Nicholas! Isn’t this amazing?!?!” I was aghast (and crushed) to find him fast asleep with his mouth hanging open.
Of course, My Fair Lady couldn’t have failed to charm me, the girl who at age three became obsessed with Oliver! I watched that film as often as I could, listened to an original cast recording of the Broadway show to fall asleep, and pretended I was Nancy with such relentless dedication that my father got a little freaked out by my persistent cockney accent and penchant for “stealing” his stuff and redistributing it among my gang of stuffed animals strategically hidden around the house.
So My Fair Lady held a unique appeal for me. It tapped into my primal obsession with cockney accents. Granted, Eliza is “a good girl,” who makes a perfectly respectable living selling flowers. She’s not quite Nancy. But for my entire young childhood, I was as desperate to perfect my cockney accent as Eliza is to lose hers. She wants to sound more genteel, like a lady in a shop. I wanted to sound like a draggle-tailed guttersnipe. So naturally, I was completely fascinated by this musical that featured not only colorful cockney characters but also a professor of phonetics with the power to change people’s accents. The whole show is about changing who you are by altering (among other things) the way you speak. I was hooked. (Yes, I know that it’s about a whole lot of more sophisticated things, too, but as a kid, I was in it for the cockney accents.)
Plus, the show has excellent, catchy songs that are both extremely euphonic and full of clever lyrics. I know Jack Warner has basically gotten almost sixty years of bashing for casting Audrey Hepburn instead of Julie Andrews (who originated the role on Broadway) and then not letting Hepburn sing the part herself. (And I’m not saying his choices weren’t strange. That was definitely quite a(n avoidable!) debacle. But honestly, the show itself is so good as written that it doesn’t particularly matter who plays Eliza. I mean, I first saw My Fair Lady as a community theater production in a small town in Missouri, and it absolutely knocked my socks off.
Strong source material helps. My senior year of high school, our Academic Decathlon literary selection was George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, the play on which the Lerner and Loewe musical is based. (When we read the play out loud as a group, I was our designated Eliza, which thrilled me to no end. How I would have loved the opportunity to play the part on stage!) (Of course, I really wanted to be Nancy, but Eliza Doolittle would have done!)
I saw a professional touring production of My Fair Lady when I was high school, too. The part of Henry Higgins was played by Rex Harrison’s son Noel Harrison. The program notes said he tried to make the role his own, playing it his own way and not imitating his famous father. (I think he should have imitated his famous father.) The highlight of that production for me was seeing Eliza’s father played by Clive Revill (who sang the part of Fagin on that record I used to listen to to fall asleep and was in The Empire Strikes Back for a couple of decades). I can’t remember who played Eliza. (Honestly, I think that anyone could play Eliza!) (I mean, I did it!)
Back in my teenage years, I often claimed My Fair Lady as my second favorite movie (after Oliver!). (It often gave up its slot to Bringing Up Baby, but then eventually, it would worm its way back in.) For whatever reason, My Fair Lady is irresistible to me. Because of its length, I don’t intentionally watch it very often, but basically any time it happens to be on, I can’t resist getting sucked in. It always calls to me.
So naturally, I was quite eager to share this film with my daughter. (I was a bit nervous, though. My daughter tends to have a low opinion of the way the male characters behave and present themselves in most older movies, and, of course, Henry Higgins is intended to be a rude, arrogant misogynist.)
The Plot:
When prickly professor of phonetics Henry Higgins happens across cockney flower girl Eliza Doolittle, he is instantly taken with her…accent. Higgins is fascinated by all of the dialects of English that exist in the London area alone. He makes an offhand remark to Colonel Hugh Pickering that Eliza could be a lady selling flowers in a shop if only he were to teach her to speak with a more upper class accent. Unable to stop thinking about his comment, Eliza soon takes a taxi to his home to ask Professor Higgins to give her lessons in speech, to make her fit to be a lady in a flower shop as he boasted he could. She offers to pay, but Higgins and Pickering don’t want money. They’re intrigued by what a challenge transforming Eliza would be, and Pickering bets Higgins that he can’t pull it off. For the next several weeks, Higgins relentlessly drills Eliza in speech and elocution nearly twenty-four/seven. Finally one night something clicks. Eliza suddenly recites, “The rain in Spain stays mainly on the plain,” perfectly correctly again and again. Later, she is successfully able to pass herself off as a lady, first at a horserace (where she wins the instant admiration of a young gentleman named Freddy Eynsford-Hill) and later at the Embassy ball. After Eliza’s triumph, Higgins and Pickering begin excitedly congratulating each other, but they say nothing of her efforts, leaving Eliza disillusioned and resentful. Do they even see her as human, or was she just an experiment? Now that her speech and deportment no longer match her station, what is she supposed to do with the rest of her life?
The Good:
Anytime people talk about My Fair Lady, it’s always Julie Andrews! Audrey Hepburn! Marnie Nixon! (Mary Poppins!) The distracting debacle of Jack Warner whimsically bungling the casting of the leading lady completely overshadows something that really ought to get more attention–Rex Harrison’s Oscar winning lead performance as Professor Henry Higgins.
I’ve heard Rex Harrison was a bit of a jerk in real life, but I don’t know him personally, so I can’t address that. What I can say is that his performance is brilliant. The actor seems made for the role. (No one could play it better, and perhaps he couldn’t play anything else as well.)
If you choose not to watch My Fair Lady, you will miss a brilliant, iconic, Oscar-winning performance by Rex Harrison who also played the role on Broadway. Stanley Holloway (another original Broadway cast member) is magnificent, too, as Eliza’s lovable scoundrel of a father. Why on Earth Jack Warner didn’t also bring their co-star on the stage along into the film cast is really beyond me. Well, I mean, I understand his reasoning. Julie Andrews was relatively unknown at the time, and Audrey Hepburn was a huge movie star. I get it. To me, though, if something works, you should keep it as intact as possible. But I don’t run a movie studio.
Now I’m certainly not knocking Audrey Hepburn. Please don’t get that idea. (Like most people) I love Julie Andrews, but I love Audrey Hepburn, too. Who doesn’t love Audrey Hepburn? (I suspect that an intense dislike of Audrey Hepburn would point to a defect in a person’s character. Besides being talented, beautiful, and graceful, she was also a fine human being.) Actually, I think Hepburn’s performance here is underrated (or, at the very least, overshadowed). (I know many people rate it very highly, but what people most often discuss about it is that her singing is dubbed by Marnie Nixon, which probably cost her an Oscar nomination.) But Hepburn makes a fantastic Eliza. Forget her singing voice! (It’s not her fault they won’t let us hear it!) Her acting is top notch, particularly her non-verbal acting, the emotion she conveys in her facial expressions. I wish I could have seen Julie Andrews, but I have always loved Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle!
Gladys Cooper makes another great addition to the cast as Higgins’s mother. (Unlike Hepburn, she was nominated for an Oscar, and I don’t think she ever sings. Does she?) Wilfrid Hyde-White, a welcome addition to any cast, is good as Colonel Pickering. And I like Mona Washbourne as Mrs. Pearce, too. (I was going to call her “the no-nonsense Mrs. Pearce,” but the housekeeper actually puts up with a staggering amount of nonsense on a daily basis.)
Best Scene:
My Fair Lady contains one of my favorite scenes in any movie, a moment that so resonated with me in adolescence that I would often tear up just recalling it.
I moved a lot when I was a kid.
A lot!
I went to thirteen schools!
After Eliza’s triumph at the ball and fight with Higgins, she realizes that she has changed. She is not the same girl that she was. She can never go home again. Just to be sure, she goes back to visit her old neighborhood, still flooded with all of the people she so recently knew. Nobody recognizes her.
As a teen, I felt the realization that she has there so poignantly. This scene really spoke to me. I could relate. I had experienced that same painful moment myself so many times before. (You know how it is. Maybe you don’t. You are forced to move. You miss your old home. You cling to memories of people there, build them up in your mind. When you get the chance to visit these cherished people and places again, everyone has forgotten you.)
People always seem to want to discuss the ending of My Fair Lady. Nobody seems satisfied with it. My daughter hated it, and George Bernard Shaw wasn’t a fan, either. I’ve heard so many arguments about whether Eliza should end up with Higgins or whether she should, instead, run off and marry Freddy. Frankly, when I was young, a moment like this felt far truer, more relevant, and more important to me than which guy Eliza ended up with romantically in the end. I don’t really look to fiction for dating advice. Profound personal connections with the material like this are what make me love a film.
We can never go back. We have to go forward in life.
Best Scene Visually:
I don’t think I ever fully appreciated the visual aesthetic of this film until my most recent viewing. The evolving use of flowers as the story develops is so artful, so thoughtful. This is such a perfectly crafted movie. It’s unapologetic about being shot on a soundstage. It doesn’t pretend to be reality. Instead, it shows us a beautifully illustrated story.
One moment near the end of the film stands out to me. When Eliza meets with Higgins in the conservatory at his mother’s house, we see that she is wearing a pink dress, fashioned in the front so that it resembles an opening, blooming rose. As the story opens, Eliza is a poor girl selling flowers. Now she has become a flower herself, and she is in full bloom. The symbolism is brilliant. Many other key scenes feature flowers. At some moments, the action is even framed by flowers. The film quite deservedly won Oscars for cinematography, art direction, and costume design. The whole movie is presented to us in a way that is both gorgeous and thoughtful. But the rose dress is absolute perfection.
Best Action Sequence:
My daughter loved the sequence at the races. I agree that it’s one of the most charming parts of the film. The so-called “action” the participants describe here is simply hilarious, and Eliza’s stab at small talk always makes me laugh. (I hope that doesn’t make me like Freddy!)
Best Song:
Every song in this movie is phenomenal. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a musical with a stronger group of songs, top to bottom. (That’s probably a lie. Until I got married, the original cast albums of Broadway shows were my favorite thing to listen to.) Yes, there are many other great musicals. But so many musicals have a lot of filler types of songs. Not only is every number in My Fair Lady so infectiously singable, but the lyrics advance the story so meaningfully, too. There’s also a perfect mix of songs that sound euphonic and lovely (usually sung by Eliza and Freddy) and songs with clever lyrics spoken by Henry Higgins. (Eliza’s father’s songs possess both of these fine qualities. They’re funny earworms.)
My least favorite song is probably “You Did It,” because I just don’t like the tune much. However, its lack of musical elegance is made up for by how well the scene is played by all the actors, particularly Audrey Hepburn, who really did deserve an Oscar nomination for showing us Eliza’s reaction to the men’s almost unbelievably obliviously cruel pomposity! (I don’t think it’s fair to punish Hepburn for not singing the songs. She didn’t get to make that choice. Plus, she did sing the songs. She can’t help it if they won’t let us hear her voice. And she performs every song with such gusto.)
As a child, my favorite song was “Just You Wait,” followed closely by “With a Little Bit of Luck.” But of course, that’s because I found them so funny and I had a thing for cockney accents. When I was very young, I missed the humor in “Ascot Gavotte” and found the number incredibly boring. Now I find it nearly laugh out loud hilarious. Even my daughter laughed out loud as I pointed out the ironic contrast between their behavior and their words.
If you’re just going around singing, “I Could Have Danced All Night” and “On the Street Where You Live” are hard to beat.
Honestly, so many of these songs are standouts. My personal favorites may be be the two Henry Higgins songs “I’m an Ordinary Man” and “A Hymn to Him.” His misogyny tickles me. It’s hard to despise Higgins because he’s so open and oblivious about his faults. His behavior is sketchy, and his thoughts are awful, but the fact that he reveals his interior monologue so willingly gives him a vulnerability that makes him more sympathetic than he probably ought to be.
The Negatives:
I try to judge movies based on what they’re actually trying to offer the audience, not what I think they ought to be instead. But it is pretty hard to watch this one without thinking, “I wish I had seen Julie Andrews play Eliza.”
Audrey Hepburn’s voice wasn’t strong enough? There’s an easy fix for that. Instead, cast the woman who originated the role! That cuts out so many steps. Julie Andrews has the chops to act the part and sing it. We know, because she actually did that on stage (which is harder than doing it for a film). The story places so much conspicuous emphasis on Eliza’s voice. Imagine if the talented actress who brought the character to life could continue her performance by performing the songs in her own distinctive voice!
My runner-up wish is that I could have heard Audrey Hepburn perform the songs herself. (As I write that, I now can’t shake the feeling that I have heard her perform some of them. Were the recordings she made ever used as bonus tracks on a CD?) I know Hepburn can sing. I’ve heard her sing. Marnie Nixon has a wonderful voice, no question, but Hepburn’s own voice (while, admittedly, neither as strong nor as clear) is not so weak that it would have made the film unbearable. (If Lucille Ball can sing her own songs in Mame, surely it would have been okay to let Hepburn sing for Eliza!) It is worth noting that when I watched the movie as a young child, my favorite song was “Just You Wait,” specifically the first part of the song. As an adult, I heard that it is this part of this song Hepburn actually sings herself. If the small bit that Hepburn sings herself jumps out as one of the movie’s most captivating moments, that tells you something. Who cares if her voice is perfect! Her voice is hers, and she’s a good enough actress to sell the song without a voice like Marnie Nixon’s. (Rex Harrison speaks his songs, for crying out loud! Of course, I suppose the entire cast can’t go around speaking their songs! That would be weird.)
I have heard a lot of other people over the years complain that Hepburn is not terribly convincing as the pre-transformation Eliza. But I disagree. True, the actress possesses extraordinary, enviable elegance and grace. But I think if some audience members don’t believe her as the ill-mannered cockney flower girl, it’s because of preconceptions of Hepburn they’re bringing with them to their viewing. Her performance is not at fault. When I was a child, I adored her as the pre-transformation Eliza. I was too young to think, “But that’s Audrey Hepburn! No one would believe she’s a draggle-tailed guttersnipe!” If she’s not convincing to some people, the fault lies in their preconceptions, not her performance. In fact, Hepburn’s fine performance makes it possible to see that Eliza does not fundamentally change. Through consistent emotive reactions, facial expressions, and body language, Hepburn reveals that the core of Eliza’s personality does not change (though she does gain some valuable education and experience.) Watch with the sound down. She’s the same person, start to finish, and that we can tell is to Hepburn’s credit.
The cast member that really baffles me is Jeremy Brett. He’s great as Sherlock Holmes, and I’m sure he’s a fine actor in general, but why in the world did they cast him as a character who basically just marches up and down singing a song, then not let him sing the song? Why didn’t they just cast a strong singer in the role? I’m sure there were plenty of young actors in 1964 who could be vaguely handsome and sing simultaneously. I understand dubbing Hepburn. She has so many songs and brings star appeal whether or not she’s the one singing them. But Jeremy Brett certainly is no Audrey Hepburn. (I’m not trying to insult him. I’m just saying he didn’t have the name recognition, the box office clout.) All Freddy does is hang around and sing and say that he wrote letters. Do we really need two people to play this part?
And here’s something that bothers me not about the musical, but about its reception. Anytime I discuss My Fair Lady with anyone, it always seems to come down to the question of should Eliza end up with Henry Higgins or Freddy. (My daughter’s answer, incidentally, is an enthusiastic, disgusted none of the above.) From my point of view, this question is not important.
I watch Harrison memorably talk through his songs (that distinctive lilt! that over-the-top misogyny!) and think, “If only I could write lines this good and have an actor deliver them this well!” When I was younger, I really was not much concerned about patterning my romantic life after characters in musicals and plays. With musicals especially–if they work, they work. They engender an emotional response (usually a positive one) that has nothing to do with who’s dating whom and everything to do with the songs and how well they’re performed.
I don’t quite understand why people get so hung up on deciding if all the characters in films set a good example in the way they choose partners and maintain relationships. I mean, when you look at the Mona Lisa, you don’t immediately ask, “Is she seeing someone? I hope he’s treating her well.” It’s weird to approach art this way to me.
In Higgins’s case, he is intended as an example of exactly the sort of person he is. Henry Higgins is just awful, insufferable. That’s what makes him such a wonderful character. (When I read Othello, I love Iago, too. It’s not because I think he’s morally good or want to date him.)
When I was younger, I always argued that yes, Eliza should wind up with Higgins, not running off to marry Freddy, not because Higgins is the superior partner for her but because that is a neater ending for a musical that has a more comedic than tragic tone up to that point. If Eliza declared that she would marry Freddy, and then she really did disappear, and Higgins just stood around like an idiot, crying in disbelief, “Marry Freddy! Marry Freddy?!” the show’s audience would be disappointed.
My Fair Lady is not Pygmalion. George Bernard Shaw wasn’t trying to write a crowd pleasing musical. He had completely different goals. The ending of Pygmalion is meant to evoke different feelings than the ending of My Fair Lady.
I’m not saying, as a woman, that Henry Higgins would make a wonderful husband. I’m saying, as a writer, that Eliza returning to Higgins makes a better ending for this musical. Notice, too, that her return is not celebrated with a passionate embrace. The film really doesn’t insist that we believe Eliza and Higgins are in love. (It just allows people to believe that if they want to.) But it does suggest that Eliza and Higgins somehow belong together. And since the entire show is about the two of them, this makes sense to me.
(I should stop here, but I’d really like to add that marrying Freddy is a horrible idea. Freddy doesn’t love the real Eliza. He doesn’t know the real Eliza. He doesn’t even see Eliza, doesn’t notice her, until Higgins remakes her to conform with polite society’s image of a charming lady. I also find it a bit of a red flag that with no encouragement, Freddy writes her ten thousand letters and paces back and forth in front of her house for days on end. Their relationship is just a one-sided conversation between Freddy and his imagined idea of Eliza.) (Plus he doesn’t even do his own singing! Actually, I guess that’s one thing they have in common.)
Pygmalion ends with the suggestion that Eliza will marry Freddy because that is what most confounds Higgins. He “creates” a woman. He falls in love with his creation. But then she won’t have him. He finds out she isn’t actually his creation at all. He can’t control her.
But My Fair Lady is about more than just criticizing an unfair, illogical class system and the ingrained misogyny and arrogance of men who play God with other human lives. Like Pygmalion, it is about those things, but there’s an added dimension, too. My Fair Lady gives us a lovely, sweet, charming Eliza, a flower girl who has dreams of a beautiful life, someone we want to see attain the happiness she dreams of. We don’t want her to run off with the first idiot who comes along. Yes, taking a cockney flower girl and turning her into a lady should have disastrous results. Once Eliza has changed, she will not fit into her old social class, but she doesn’t know how to live in any other social class, either. Realistically, her end should be fairly tragic. But that’s not what the audience wants to see. The character this musical gives us deserves better than a realistic ending. We like her. It would be better for her story to end in dramatic tragedy (such as suicide) than in the promise of a bleak, unhappy future with Freddy. And we’d prefer that her story doesn’t end in tragedy. It just makes sense for her to go back to Higgins. Where else is she supposed to go–especially in the time remaining in the film?
I just want to be clear that I don’t think that Henry Higgins is love interest of the year. Still, I don’t think that all fictional characters need be virtuous. I love Rex Harrison’s performance. Higgins gets all the best lines, and Harrison really sells them.
Now, I’ll admit that when I was younger, I felt a certain affinity for him. When he says that line about “have you ever seen me treat anyone else better” I sort of see his point. As a young woman who also found social niceties baffling, stressful, and ridiculous, I used to feel some sympathy for Higgins, more than I do now. These days, I tend to think he’s awfully old not to have gotten past some of his hangups. Plus there’s no excuse for cruelty. He often seems oblivious to a degree, but he’s old enough to learn to treat others with greater delicacy, despite his limitations and inclinations. I definitely wouldn’t fall in love with him myself–on purpose. But I do find him so entertaining. And I do wonder how many people who laugh at his grotesque misogyny are able to appreciate the fact that society caters to ideas like his, which are just as ugly even when couched in more palatable delivery.
(Speaking of misogyny, isn’t it weird that so many leading men were like, “Oh no no no. I won’t play that part. Either he plays it or no one,” when offered Rex Harrison’s and Stanley Holloway’s parts, and yet there was no question of this happening with Julie Andrews. Maybe that’s not misogyny, exactly, but it’s something related.)
Eliza doesn’t have to marry Higgins. Maybe they could start a detective agency together. Romantically, Higgins may be a better fit for Pickering. It’s quite hard to say what the exact dynamic is in that household because we don’t get to see it for very long. But I do know that Shaw wants his audience to feel something different at the end than the effect this musical is trying to achieve.
Overall:
I love My Fair Lady and would be happy to watch it, anytime. I’ve certainly listened to the songs enough. I know every word. It took all my willpower not to sing along while dancing around the room, but I thought that might detract from my daughter’s viewing experience. (We’ve already started The Sound of Music, and sadly, my restraint is slipping. I can’t be expected to control myself forever!) If you haven’t seen My Fair Lady, you should definitely watch it. As musicals go, it’s one of the very best. It didn’t crack my daughter’s top ten, but she did like it. I’m now dying to show her the movie Her, which I think she might like a little better, but I can’t quite decide if she’s old enough.