User Reviews

What a joy: all the witty pleasure of "My Fair Lady" without the tiresome bursting into song. Lovely as that production certainly was, beautifully as it was restored, I find I much prefer the rapid-fire dry wit of this 1938 production of George Bernard Shaw's 1916 play.

The story is a satire on class and language: two linguists bet cynically on the transformation of a Covent Garden flower seller into a fine lady through speech and appearance alone. Bent on immediate success, they fail to consider the consequences, and their once-unwashed protégée teaches them the casual selfishness of their act. (* * small spoilers from here * *) It's also a rather modern romance, though I've read that Shaw hated this aspect of it and tried hard to neuter the theatre-goers' burgeoning castle in the air, through an afterword. It clearly didn't stick, which is why "My Fair Lady" got made and remains the much-adored classic it is today. Poor old Shaw – I don't feel very sorry for him, though: I'm romantic too.

Leslie Howard's wonderfully eccentric and flawed Professor Higgins soon had me hanging on his every word, snorting with laughter as line after memorable line came rattling out at classic 30's/40's breakneck speed. I'm British and have at least one eccentric uncle, and I can testify that his portrayal isn't at all over the top. His alternately adoring and despairing mother treats him with weary tolerance; but she's kinder than he is; less wilful and less blind – like his friend Colonel Pickering. But with Higgins' many faults come great wit and intelligence, penetration, a constant challenge to anyone who cares to meet him half way.

But…in an intensely class-conscious England where one minutely 'knew one's place', for all his boastful assertions, he's part of the same rigid social system that is more 1888 than 1938. He goes to the embassy balls, he knows just what to wear, he delights that his protégée is "talking to a Duchess"; and his magnificently arrogant and idle "you might marry, you know…I daresay my mother could find you someone" is something he'd never have said to a woman he truly thought of as an equal. But their need is symbiotic: for her to leave him, and make him recognise her as an equal, she needed his education.

I love the point where she articulates to him how she sees their relationship. The camera, having previously been very British (i.e. it thinks it's still at a play, fixed-distance, unswerving), suddenly swoons vertiginously close to Eliza while she tells him how much she loved being with him "all friendly-like", and not because she wanted him to 'make love to her'. The camera switches back to Higgins, forced off his guard by this unexpected honesty and quiet dignity. "That's exactly how I feel", he says, and then, after a baffled pause, "and….Eliza you're a fool." Only that's exactly what at that moment she isn't: and we all know it. It's a crucial moment in the film: it's funny and sad, and so is this story, really, whichever ending you choose (Shaw's, or the film's, or any ending the viewer wishes to dream up).

And Wendy Hiller! I'd never before known of her as a sparkling young actress. Of course she doesn't have that pearly, matinée beauty – she has something better: the way emotions wash across her face; bright eyes and high cheekbones and a fleeting, occasional beauty that disappears when you look too hard for it. Hiller herself, I believe, had elocution lessons, and her Eliza's transformation is never absolutely entire: you always know that she's playing a part – beautifully – which of course is just what 'well-bred' people are themselves carefully trained to do - look no further than the Queen for a modern-day example of this. Even innate poshness doesn't equip a girl sufficiently to 'carry yourself off' as a Duchess, or a 'consort battleship' as Higgins charmingly puts it. No wonder Shaw himself championed Hiller. I've been loving watching her lately in Powell & Pressburger's outstanding 1945 "I Know Where I'm Going!" I defy Shaw: I think they do love each other, but not with swirly-music romantic love. Theirs is more like the relationship of two artists, two dominant personalities who will fight a great deal, but may just produce great work, if they can stay together without cracking. For once, the cosy doors into the future are opening, not closing, and the future is unknown. Shaw's scenario was I think a signpost to the world we now live in, where Britain claims to be a meritocracy, nurturing its class awareness on the sly; and where the traditional sanctity of marriage is giving way to something more fluid and egalitarian.

I prefer this to the much-enjoyed 1964 musical, My Fair Lady. The delightfully lavish musical says as much in roughly double the time. Howard and Hiller are brilliant here, as are Harrison and Hepburn in My Fair Lady. I can't favor one pair over the other. However, Esme Percy as the Count is more amusing than his counterpart, Theodore Bikel.

I agree with the controversial ending. Eliza had come too far to leave Higgins for Freddy, a comparative dolt. To my mind, it wraps up this witty picture appropriately. There is no telling how many more great Leslie Howard roles there would have been, had he not been a casualty of that awful dustup World War II.

Gabriel Pascal's production of G.B Shaw's acclaimed play is an excellent film adaptation, staying true to it's source material and Shaw's original intentions. It's a lot more faithful to Shaw's vision and less romantic and 'Hollywood' than the later re-working, 'My Fair Lady', which is probably the better known of the two films.

This succeeds because the casting is perfect. Leslie Howard was never better as Higgins, he seems to be really enjoying his role here. Wendy Hiller makes a great Eliza, much better than Audrey Hepburn, in my opinion. Hepburn was simply too glamorous for the role, and when she played the Cockney flower girl (with THAT accent) it is thoroughly unconvincing. Hiller's unconventional beauty and air of the natural, the normal, suits the role. She is very believable, as is Howard.

It also succeeds because it is kept so...how can I put it...English! I'm not English myself (a proud Aussie, thank you), but when these sorts of plays and novels are committed to the screen, they should be as faithful as possible, and that includes the casting and sets. 'Pygalmion' succeeds in looking, and feeling, very English indeed.

Shaw's interest in phonetics and the 'science of speech' is interestingly conveyed, as is Eliza's position. Do these two men (Higgins and Pickering) have any claim on this lowly guttersnipe flower-girl? No, you say. But who does, and does anyone care either way? It's an intriguing play and a very good film.

Highly recommended 9/10.

Pygmalion

This is a movie adaptation of the play by George Bernard Shaw; Shaw rewrote the play for the screen and, in my very humble opinion, messed it up. It still is worth watching, though, for people who enjoy intelligence and wit in their movies.

We all know the story: 'Enry 'Iggins (ably played by Leslie Howard) picks a flower girl from the gutter (Eliza Doolittle, played admirably by Wendy Hiller), teaches her manners and an upper class dialect, then shows her off in society where she fools everyone. Wendy Hiller was, again in my humble opinion, the best actress of Shaw's time to play his heroines. She was 27 or 28 at the time this movie was made, and she reminds me of Maggie Gyllenhaal in "The Secretary." Hiller really shines as the flower girl with more than spunk.

The problem with the movie is that Shaw changed the ending. He also added a dance scene and a character, but they pass without objection. The ending, however, completely changes the play. Shaw had his views, and he was very definite about them. He attacked society and its hypocrisy at every opportunity, and his attacks were more impressive because of their popularity. Among his plays were "Mrs. Warren's Profession" (she was a prostitute, shocking at the time), "Arms and the Man," "Major Barbara," and "Candida." Shaw was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1925.

In "Pygmalion," Shaw punctured middle class morality and England's class system. One of the funniest scenes in the movie takes place after Higgins has taught Eliza the niceties of pronunciation but not of conversation. He takes her to his mother's home, where she meets and converses with Higgins's mother and her friends. Shaw places her interests and vocabulary in the gutter (so to speak), but gives her the precise pronunciation of the upper class as she talks about her aunt being fed gin to revive her until someone done her in. The dialogue is excellent, and the cast perfectly shows the blank-faced confusion of the upper class as they maintain their mannered aplomb.

The movie is mostly a witty social satire; you can ignore the social satire which is dated and just enjoy the wit and sparks flying between Eliza and Henry. If you pay attention to the dialogue, you'll be rewarded. However, when we get to the end, the dialogue becomes didactic and things tended to drag a little for me, although Hiller's interpretation of Eliza's lines makes them ring with pride and independence: "I won't be coaxed round as if I was a baby or a puppy. If I can't have kindness, I'll have independence." I'm very disappointed by the ending, though.

SPOILERS---------------

In the play, there is a poor but upper class character named Freddy who worships Eliza. After Henry shows Eliza off at a royal party, Henry takes full credit for having produced a clever parrot from a guttersnipe. Eliza is outraged that her hard work and personal effort, to say nothing of her native intelligence, are unnoticed by Henry. They argue, giving Shaw's view of the world, and Eliza leaves Henry for Freddy. This is the ending as it should be, although it gives lie to the title.* For the movie, Eliza leaves with Freddy but returns to Henry and fetches his slippers. I can't believe Shaw wrote this, but there it is in black and white. It gives the movie what I presume audiences saw as a happy ending. (The final shot reminds me of the end of "The Man Who Fell to Earth," by the way.) It's not enough of a travesty to wreck the whole movie for me, but it was a disappointment nonetheless.

*The story of Pygmalion is given in Ovid's "Metamorphoses." In that story, Pygmalion is an artist who lives on an island. None of the women there meet his standards of virtue, and he carves a likeness of his perfect woman in ivory. The statue is so beautiful he falls in love with it and prays to Venus for the statue to live. Venus hears his plea and grants it, giving life to Galatea. They marry and live happily ever after.

In the mid-1990s I followed the "Shakespeare authorship question." One of the "doubters" of the traditional "Man from Stratford" was one of the stars of this movie, Leslie Howard (Prof. Higgins).

One of the "authorship" arguments is how could a commoner from the country, in a society when the noble elite were so closed-off against such people, have known so much about the inner life of the noble class as to be able to present -- to an audience of nobles -- noble characters that convinced them that the characters were authentic.

In 1938's "Pygmalion" Prof. Henry Higgins takes a lower-class cockney girl, Eliza Doolittle, and transforms her into a young woman who can pass so convincingly as a member of the upper class that she can fool a ballroom full of real nobles at an embassy reception.

What Henry Higgins is doing is creating a fictional noblewoman whom real noblemen and women will accept as one of themselves.

Which is exactly what Shakespeare was doing: creating fictional noble characters whom, when presented to an audience of real nobles, would be accepted by those nobles as one of themselves.

And what was the most difficult problem Higgins faced? Stripping away from Eliza errors born of ignorance of how members of that class act in their private encounters: actions and words and behaviors erroneous for a person born and bred to a status of nobility.

There is a scene in which Higgins introduces Eliza to a social group of the upper class for the very first time. It is a tea afternoon hosted by his mother. It is soon apparent that while Eliza has learned vocabulary and diction, the subjects she introduces to speak about, and the facts of her life and relatives that she reports, expose her as not of the upper class. It is her errors that expose her.

Higgins thereupon embarks on a detailed program of teaching her the proper substance and content of what it is to be upper class. Watch Higgins as he teaches Eliza how to curtsy and dance without errors, as he orders the right hair-dressers and the right dress-makers and rents the right jewelry. He makes no errors that expose the fiction. He knows how to curtsy and dance and the hair and clothes and jewels because he was born to the class in which people curtsy and dance. This is the key point: he is able to do this only because he himself is a born member of that class. Only a born member of the class will have the innate, instinctive, detailed knowledge to identify every single moment when Eliza goes off-character and does or says something, or does or says it in a particular way, that will expose her as a false, fictional character, not noble, not even upper class.

This is what Shakespeare knew. Shakespeare presented dozens of noble major characters (and including minor characters, hundreds) to an audience of real nobles. He did, dozens and dozens of times, what Henry Higgins in Pygmalion did but once. And his noble characters had no betraying errors, were always accepted by nobles as authentic nobles. Not once did he present a noble character who rang false. Shakespeare never did this with lower-class characters; they are all caricatures. He had to have been born to the noble class in order to create fictional nobles whom real nobles would accept as real.

Writers who try to create fictional characters who are part of the same real-world social class or group as the intended readers of the novel, or audience members of the play, are acutely aware of the danger of ignorantly including in the character elements that make the character ring false, as not really being part of the intended class or group that comprises the readership or audience. They fear making errors such as did Eliza Doolittle in her tea with Henry Higgins' mother. Professors and others who have never attempted to create a fictional character who can pass as real in an elite milieu do not realize the difficulty and danger of humiliating failure in this effort.

The problem is particularly insurmountable when the real-world group of which the fictional character is supposed to be a part happens to be, in the real world, socially exclusive and closed-off to outsiders. In the world of Henry Higgins, the upper-class Higgins is able to conduct research among the lower-classes because the lower-classes are exposed, in public, in the streets. But a lower-class person could never do the reverse, and conduct research among the upper-classes, because the upper-classes are protected by buildings and servants. A lower-class person cannot get any proximity to them to observe them as they speak and behave, unless voluntarily admitted by an upper-class person, and even then that access will be limited by the boundaries set by the upper-class person who has given admittance.

A writer who presents -- to an audience of earls and dukes -- a private conversation between an earl and a duke, must be a writer who knows what things are NOT said and NOT done in such conversations, in order to present a conversation that convinces real earls and dukes. That is what it takes to pass-off an Eliza Doolittle to nobles as a noble herself -- as portrayed in the grand climatic ball.

Now when I watch the ball scene, and see Eliza enter the room, ascend the stairs, and convince real duchesses and nobles that she is, in fact, a Hungarian royal princess, under the escort and gaze of Henry Higgins, I feel I am seeing Shakespeare escorting and watching one of his own fictional nobles advance into the gaze and evaluation of real nobles, there to find acceptance by them as one of their own.

The character of Professor Higgins is a pompous, arrogant, thoughtless. selfish and completely unlikable character and it beggars belief that anyone could find anything about him worth caring about. And what is worse, he never redeems himself. George Bernard Shaw is far too enamoured with the sound of his own words to have been allowed to write the screenplay. There is good writing here no doubt, but most of the scenes are interminably long and verbose and continue long after the point has been made. Wendy Hiller is an absolute joy both to watch and listen to. Her performance is outstanding, but sadly not enough to save the movie from the endlessly annoying droning of Professor Higgins.

PYGMALION is based on George Bernard Shaw's reinterpretation of the Greek myth about Pygmalion. In this old tale, Pygmalion is an artist and creates a statue of "the perfect woman" that is so beautiful that he falls in love with it. The gods see what has occurred and take pity, so they turn Galatea (the statue) into a real woman and they live happily ever after. In his play, Shaw injects quite a bit of humor into the tale, as instead of the smitten Pygmalion, Henry Higgins is a misogynistic (and possibly gay) man who only comes to care for his "creation" (Eliza Doolittle) when it is too late. By his boorish ways, he's driven this "perfect" lady out of his life forever. Oddly, however, in both this 1938 version and its remake (MY FAIR LADY), the ending was changed and Eliza inexplicably returns to an unrepentant and annoying Higgins--even though this undoes most of the fourth act of the play!!

If you have already seen MY FAIR LADY, then you will most likely recognize that this later film is practically word-for-word the 1938 film in many places. As for the songs, they make MY FAIR LADY a wonderful film but without them, this earlier film is still just as good--just different. The biggest difference is the mood. Because of the songs (some of which are very humorous), MY FAIR LADY is definitely a lighter and more breezy film. Also, while Henry Higgins often repeats the exact same dialog in the latter film, because of Rex Harrison's age and more irascible style, it comes off a more silly and cute. While some might hate the more somber and sad mood of PYGMALION, I like it just as much as the film tends to be a bit more believable. Here Higgins is much more believable as a potential lover of Eliza--and the sexual tension is therefore greater.

My overall verdict is that PYGMALION (1938) and MY FAIR LADY are about equally delightful and fun. They are different enough that I think you should see both and while I like the Higgins and Pickering of MY FAIR LADY more, I think Wendy Hiller and the rest of the cast of the original film are at least as good as the originals. While Leslie Howard is excellent, because of his age he is so different from the older and nastier interpretation by Rex Harrison. And, you just can't beat Wilfred Hyde-White as Pickering--he's so cute and sweet.

Regardless of which one you watch (or perhaps both), I still can't give either a 10 simply because the ending makes little sense and is a letdown. The bottom line is that Shaw understood this and got it right in the play, but the movie folks in the UK and Hollywood just couldn't stand not tacking a happy ending onto the film. Too bad, as Doolittle and Higgins NOT getting together at the end seems more true to the characters and makes the film more of a tragedy--and make for a much more poignant film.