A lot of firsts this week! Last night: my first Audrey Hepburn movie. I can’t believe I’ve lived twenty years without exposing myself to this great actress. Actually now that I think about it, I saw the first five minutes of Roman Holiday a few months ago… too much narration.
So apparently My Fair Lady is just George Bernard Shaw’s play Pygmalion but with singing? Oh my god I just looked it up and Pygmalion was the Greek guy who fell in love with a statue he made. I’m an idiot. Everything makes sense. Okay. So My Fair Lady is about a pompous, self-righteous, misogynistic elocution professor named Henry Higgins who takes a bet to turn a flower girl from the slums and pass her off as a duchess at an embassy ball. That girl turns out to be Eliza Doolittle, played by Audrey Hepburn.
In the beginning, Eliza is incoherent in her Cockney accent. Like literally, I wish there were subtitles. But Higgins makes a point of treating her like garbage, and the film continues its entire three hours with him seeing her as nothing more than what he calls “baggage."
Yes. He is both of those things. But anyway, the movie is awesome because it’s just one of those classic movie musicals that makes you feel almost as if it’s a live show. The scene where Higgins tests Doolittle’s newly learned upper class accent out at the race tracks is probably the best.
But her process is not without its obstacles. Higgins is rude, aggressive, and stubborn. He works her almost to death in the beginning with hardly any results.
And un-ladylike Eliza is definitely entertaining to listen to.
That scream is her reaction to everything. So anyway. The film actually does make a lot of poignant statements about upward class mobility and the cyclical nature of an under-educated society, but I’m going to have to give most of that credit to Shaw. The film itself is very dazzling and entertaining without the statements about socioeconomic obstacles and intellectual inequality. Mainly because Audrey Hepburn.
Also I’d like to point out that Audrey Hepburn’s singing was deemed too rough for audiences to hear, so all of her singing but one song "Just You Wait” was dubbed. Which is always disappointing, and probably explains why she didn’t get an Oscar nomination. The film did win Best Picture though. Julie Andrews (who actually played Eliza Doolittle on Broadway) actually won for Best Actress that year for Mary Poppins, and then was nominated again the next year for Sound of Music. Can’t beat that.
Last point: My first ever experience with My Fair Lady and its plot came a whopping 10 years ago, in the Disney movie, Confessions of A Teenage Drama Queen. That girl… was her.
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