Nevertheless, George Cukor\u2019s 1964 stage adaptation of My Fair Lady<\/em> remains a classic of movie musicals, and for good reason: the songs are memorable, the dances are thrilling, and the dialogue is razor-sharp. Rex Harrison (who originated the role on Broadway) stars as Professor Henry Higgins, a master of, in his words, \u201cSimple phonetics, the science of speech! That\u2019s my profession, and also my hobby.\u201d His introduction is a prototype for those scenes in \u201890s Matt Damon movies where he walked into a room or bar, and read everyone in it; here, eavesdropping on a gathered crowd, he\u2019s able to correctly guess everyone\u2019s background based on their dialects. \u201cI can place him within six miles,\u201d he brags. \u201cI can place him within two miles in London.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n But Eliza Doolittle, played by Audrey Hepburn (who, famously, did not<\/em> originate the role on Broadway), is a Cockney flower girl with a dialect that is less speech and more \u201ccrooning like a bilious pigeon.\u201d She\u2019s insulted by his cracks, but he also gets into her head \u2013 the idea that better speech equals a better life might be too simple to be true, but it suddenly feels like a skeleton key to her. She turns up at his impeccable home (\u201cHas she an interesting accent?\u201d \u201cSimply ghastly!\u201d \u201cGood, let\u2019s have her in!\u201d), and becomes the object of a wager between Higgins and fellow phonetics expert Hugh Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White): Higgins will teach her to \u201cspeak like a lady,\u201d and in doing so, \u201cI\u2019ll make a duchess of this draggle-tailed guttersnipe!\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n He also says, \u201cI\u2019ll make a queen of that barbarous wretch!\u201d and ya gotta give him this: he never runs out of nasty names for Eliza, who follows suit (\u201cI couldn\u2019t sleep here, missus,\u201d she says to his maid, when shown her room. \u201cIt\u2019s too good for the likes of me!\u201d). For the contemporary viewer, however, the oddest aspect of My Fair Lady <\/em>is that the earthy, Cockney community that she seeks to escape looks like a hell of a lot more fun than the fancy life she aspires to. We have plenty of time to reflect on that; the picture\u2019s main flaw is that most of the material concerning the father Eliza has left behind could go, \u201cGet Me to the Church on Time\u201d or no; we end up spending most of those scenes waiting for Cukor to get back to Eliza and Higgins.<\/p>\n\n\n\n What we get from their scenes, at first, is an extended battle of wills and wits, and it\u2019s not that she\u2019s an unwilling participant, but it takes quite some time to undo these habits. Higgins finally breaks through, and it\u2019s worth noting that they don\u2019t sing a duet – \u201cThe Rain in Spain Stays Mainly in the Plain\u201d (\u2018By George she\u2019s got it!\u201d) \u2013until they\u2019re finally in sync with each other. Of course, it\u2019s not quite as simple as one breakthrough; Higgins takes her to his mother\u2019s box at the races, where her slightly labored, precisely replicated \u201cHow<\/em> do you do<\/em>\u201d raises eyebrows, and she\u2019s ultimately unable to fully stifle her personality (bellowing \u201cC\u2019MON DOVER! MOVE YOUR BLOOMIN\u2019 ASS\u201d at a losing horse). Eliza and Pickering are both ready to give up after that fumble \u2013 yet Higgins is the one who still believes in her, because he\u2019s come to recognize her value.<\/p>\n\n\n\n And when she finally makes her big high society debut, she does too; the explicit affirmation of her \u201cbetters\u201d does give her some sense of confidence. But it\u2019s brief, and quickly thereafter, she sees things more clearly. \u201cI sold flowers, I didn\u2019t sell myself,\u201d she tells him. \u201cNow that you\u2019ve made a lady of me, I\u2019m not fit to sell anything else.\u201d It\u2019s a devastating line, and the bigger ideas at play here \u2013 of commodification of people, and selling oneself to survive \u2013 forge an unexpected connection to Hepburn\u2019s other iconic role of the era, Breakfast at Tiffany\u2019s.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n This is thorny stuff, in other words (given an extra jab by the fact that Higgins immediately returns to calling her \u201ca heartless gutter-snipe\u201d), and some of it is about both time and place; after all, the text is deeply rooted in Britain\u2019s all-consuming class system. And as far as time and place goes, one can\u2019t help but wonder if 1964 was the last moment My Fair Lady<\/em> could\u2019ve been made, released, and been the hit it was, since that was also the moment the Beatles took over the world, a quartet of working-class British lads with accordant accents and manners and sensibilities. And yet everyone, especially Brits, still loved them, just as Freddy is still taken by Eliza \u2013 because a) she looks like Audrey Hepburn, but also b) she\u2019s still charming and funny, and these surfaces ultimately don\u2019t matter. And soon enough, Higgins is taken too, as he walks through London trying and failing to talk-sing himself out of caring about her. (It remains funny that when Hepburn couldn\u2019t sing, they painstakingly dubbed Marni Nixon over her, and when Harrison couldn\u2019t sing, they shrugged and let him speak the lyrics.)<\/p>\n\n\n\n The outcome of their push-pull was also dictated by the times, which means (as is the case with so many films of the times) the ending lands with a bit of a thud these days. Yet there\u2019s still so much to love about My Fair Lady<\/em>, in the charisma of its leads and the charm of its songs, and most of all, the skill of the filmmaking craft. It\u2019s just so elegantly staged and blocked for camera, and the cutting is so smooth; there\u2019s a sleek professionalism and elevated craft that makes the current purveyors of the movie musical \u2013 your Robs Marshall, your Toms Hooper \u2013 seem even more incompetent. Once upon a time, they made musicals like this all the time<\/em>, and that seems even more foreign and distant than anything in the text. \u201cMy Fair Lady\u201d is now available on 4K Blu-ray<\/a>, and is streaming on Netflix<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" George Cukor\u2019s classic movie musical \u2013 now available on 4K disc and streaming on Netflix \u2013 is a stark reminder of how far the genre has fallen. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":531,"featured_media":16590,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1399,1430],"tags":[1431,1422],"class_list":["post-16588","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-looking-back","category-classic-corner","tag-classic-corner","tag-looking-back"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16588","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/531"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=16588"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16588\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":22282,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/16588\/revisions\/22282"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/16590"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=16588"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=16588"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=16588"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"https:\/\/crookedmarquee.com\/stage8\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/05\/my-fair-lady-1024x576.jpg\")
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