My Fair Lady

I first saw My Fair Lady (the film) in 1965. It was a work of grace and beauty and flowers and elegant dress. Rex Harrison’s wit and Audrey Hepburn’s emaciated beauty. There was much about the film that I did not notice in 1965 that is glaringly evident today. The lip-synching, for one. Audrey Hepburn lip-synched to someone else’s singing, and she never quite managed to pull the illusion off. Freddy who sings “The Street Where You Live” also can’t lip-synch.

Then there is the class conflict—the lower class of Eliza Doolittle vs. the elite and educated upper class of Henry Higgins. The film is clearly told from that upper-class point of view. We laugh at Eliza’s cockney speech, her faulty mannerisms, her limited knowledge, and her father’s self-posturing antics.

It’s also told from a male point of view. A number of songs in the film (e.g., “Why Can’t A Woman Be More Like a Man”) complain of how exasperating women are. They recall the incredible “How to Handle a Woman” of Camelot.

It has been quite a while since I read Shaw’s Pygmalion, but my sense is that the musical wholly overlooks many of the issues the play examines.

In what may be the central scene of the film, the breakthrough scene where Eliza learns to pronounce English correctly, she behaves like a marionette. The same is true in the horse race scene and at the ball where Higgins wins his bet. Clearly, the director intends for her actions to come across in this way, though Hepburn’s acting style is inclined in this direction to begin with.

Musicals are difficult to translate to screen. They are rhetorical conventions. They make no pretense of simulating reality and instead create opportunity after opportunity for characters to break into song. Because of the tradition of musical reviews, musical drama works better on stage than in film. The film My Fair Lady musical is over long and stiff. Rex Harrison is loud and overbearing as Henry Higgins—as he is supposed to be. Hepburn does as well as could be expected given her lip-synching and her characteristic frozen demeanor. The musical numbers—some of them—are good. But the film really grinds to a halt in the last forty minutes.

Eliza’s decision to return to Henry Higgins was probably a much desired outcome when the film first appeared in 1964, and when the play on which it was based premiered in 1956. Today it no longer makes sense, especially given her final argument with Higgins. The ending certainly flies in the face of what Shaw intended in Pygmalion.

The film as a whole is an irrelevant archaism.