My Fair Lady (1964) - film review

London in the late 1800s.  One evening, phonetics professor Henry Higgins encounters a flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, and is amused by her strong cockney accent. He bets his friend Colonel Pickering that, by changing the way she speaks, he will transform her into a lady.  Keen to improve her fortunes in life, Eliza agrees to undergo an intensive course of speech therapy, but she can have no idea of the ordeal that lies ahead.  And what will become of her if Professor Higgins does succeed...?

One of the very last of the great Hollywood musicals, My Fair Lady is a supremely elegant screen adaptation of the popular Lerner and Loewe stage musical, which was itself based on George Bernard Shaw’s stage play Pygmalion. The film was a huge commercial success, grossing over seventy million dollars, and virtually swept the board at the 1965 Academy Awards ceremony, winning eight Oscars including awards for Best Picture, Best Actor (Rex Harrison), Best Director and Best Cinematography.

The film certainly has plenty going for it, but it is far from flawless.  Audrey Hepburn is obviously miscast as street urchin Eliza Doolittle.  The part should have gone to Julie Andrews, who had played it opposite Rex Harrison in the original Broadway production, but the bosses at Warner Brothers’ weren’t prepared to take a risk on an actress who had yet to make her screen breakthrough.  The studio wouldn’t even gamble on Hepburn singing her own songs, and so all of her numbers were dubbed by Marni Nixon. Whilst Hepburn is decorative, she isn’t remotely convincing as the Cockney waif and her mimes to hers songs, which proclaim "look, I’m being dubbed!" all too clearly, are often unintentionally funny.

In common with the original stage musical, the film is way too long and could benefit from such judicious trimming.  Whilst some of the songs are undoubted classics – "I Could Have Danced All Night", "On The Street Where You Live" and "Get Me to the Church on Time" – many others are frankly as dull as ditch water and slow things down to an unbearable pace.  It doesn’t help that Rex Harrison has never sung a song in his life and wouldn’t know how to carry a tune even if someone were to give him a bucket.

On the plus side, the art design on My Fair Lady is stunning, and Cecil Beaton deserved the Oscars he won for his stunning set and costume designs, which evoke a fragrant Victorian fairyland which is a million miles from the grim reality portrayed so vividly in Dickens’ novels.  Stanley Holloway should have won the Best Supporting Oscar for his larger than life portrayal of Eliza’s father – his scenes are arguably the most entertaining in the film.  The sympathetic young beau playing Eliza’s amorous admirer is none other than Jeremy Brett, who would later find lasting fame as the definitive Sherlock Holmes in a long running British television series.  My Fair Lady may not be perfect but its artistic highs more than make up for its many failings.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

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