Features

Primary navigation

• The Ultimate Film Chart
• By decade
• Alphabetically
• Complete list

A wet evening in 1912. Outside Covent Garden Opera House, Henry Higgins, professor of phonetics, is lurking with his notebook. He gets involved in an altercation with Eliza Doolittle, the Cockney flowergirl whose appalling accent he has been recording. Peace is made with the help of Colonel Pickering, late of the Indian Army, in whom Higgins is delighted to recognise a fellow enthusiast for language. In Eliza's hearing, Higgins boasts to Pickenng that within months he could pass her off as a duchess, “or a shop assistant, which requires better English". Next morning, Eliza turns up at his Wimpole Street house, prepared to pay a shilling a lesson towards her goal of a place in a shop. But Higgins is in the grip of a grander dream, and with Pickering's help he sets about the total transformation of Eliza. Her first public appearance, at his mother's box at Ascot, is a decidedly qualified success. Within months, however, Eliza is the rage of the season's grandest party. Returning from their triumph, Higgins and Pickering fondly congratulate each other, and entirely ignore Eliza. Flinging his slippers at Higgins, she departs into the night. She turns to Freddie Eynsford-Hill, her constant admirer; she goes back to Covent Garden, to find her dustman father sinking into marriage and middle-class morality; she takes refuge with Mrs. Higgins. Here Higgins finds and quarrels with her, admiring her new-found independence but still cherishing his own. Gloomily, however, he realises that he can't any longer manage without her: he has gone home, and is playing over his speech recordings of Eliza unregenerate, when she slips quietly into the room.

In one sense, it must all have been very easy: with the range of talent, taste and sheer professionalism at work, from Shaw onwards, Warners could hardly have made a film which would do less than please most of the people most of the time. Their $17,000,000 investment looks as safe as houses. In another sense, however, George Cukor was taking on quite a job, since merely to put the stage musical safely, tastefully and even charmingly on to the screen was not in the circumstances, quite enough. The task was to recreate it as a film. Cukor, who has achieved this in the past with so many adaptations, here directs with great tact, great care for the values of Shaw, Beaton and Lerner and Loewe, but a rather unnecessary circumspection. Scenes move at a steady, even pace, as though every word were worth its weight in gold (perhaps, in view of the price paid for the rights, it very nearly was). Especially, the decor tends to inhibit rather than to release the film. Cecil Beaton scores delightful effects - the stylised Ascot of black and white and grey, with even the grass faded to a silvery-green; the pale blue and white of Mrs. Higgins' room. One feels, however, that Beaton thinks in terms of the held stage picture, rather than the fleeting screen image. It is only in a couple of flashes during Stanley Holloway's rumbustious "Get Me To The Church On Time" that colour comes into its own as more than a pretty adjunct to decoration. Hoyningen-Huene, Cukor's usual colour consultant, is known to work on the principle that colour should be used sparingly but decisively. Here effects tend to be flat and fussy rather than light and liberating.

A stylised Ascot, but with real horses, and a stereophonic impression less of hooves than of a passing underground train; a stage Covent Garden, with road-menders and a suffragette band in attendance; "The Street Where You Live" framed through out-of-focus window-boxes: there isn't, quite, a style to hold it all together. What almost does this trick, however, is Rex Harrison's domineering, cantankerous Higgins, a performance definitive in its intelligence, bullying charm, and relish of every Shavian insult. Audrey Hepburn can't manage the guttersnipe, and is not the first Eliza to give the impression that it's the Cockney that has been learned from an elocutionist. But from the tea-table dialogue, done with dead-pan precision so that every awful word strikes home, she takes a firm hold on the part. Pygmalion, really, is a confidence trick, in that Shaw left out the real business of transforming Eliza, from the tea-party to the ball. The actress has to make an impossible transition work, and Miss Hepbum's fragile triumph and disconsolate rage are very touching. The score holds its appeal, in spite of some tinniness when the sound is at its most stereophonic. Ascot and the Embassy ball are as grand as they come, and Gladys Cooper and Stanley Holloway nobly hold up the different ends of the social scale. Taste and money can go no further; but talent - and especially these talents - might have.

Helper links

• Contact us
• Help
• Terms of use
• Privacy
• Linking
• Site map
• Accessibility/standards