Pygmalion (1938) - film review

Henry Higgins is a professor of phonetics for whom the rich variety of London accents holds a particular fascination.  Whilst navigating Covent Garden one evening, he encounters a flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, and is amused by her strong Cockney accent.  He bets his friend Colonel Pickering that he can transform her into a lady, merely by changing the way she speaks.  Keen to make a new start in life, Eliza willingly subjects herself to a series of torturous lessons which, in the end, have the desired result.  But although Eliza may talk like a lady, her conversation leaves much to be desired, as Henry discovers when he takes her to tea at his mother’s...

The definitive screen adaptation of George Bernard Shaw’s popular play Pygmalion is assuredly one of the high points of British cinema in the 1930s.  Anthony Asquith directed many great films but the ones for which he is best remembered are his adaptations of noteworthy stage plays, including The Browning Version (1951) and The Importance of Being Earnest (1952), as well as his superlative Pygmalion.

Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion had been a hit ever since it was first performed on the London stage in 1914, with Mrs Patrick Campbell (aged 49) playing the upwardly mobile Eliza Doolittle.  It was Shaw who suggested Wendy Hillier for the part of Eliza in the film, having seen her in a stage production of his play Saint Joan.  Shaw’s preference for the part of Professor Higgins was Charles Laughton, although producer Gabriel Pascal instead opted for Leslie Howard, a far more imaginative choice.

Shaw contributed to the screenplay adaptation but was thoroughly dismayed with the happy ending which Pascal insisted on.   This revised version of the play was the basis for the stage musical My Fair Lady by Lerner and Loewe, first performed in 1956, which was itself adapted for cinema in 1964, directed by George Cukor and starring Rex Harrison and Audrey Hepburn.  As impressive as Cukor’s film is, it is not a patch on Asquith’s Pygmalion.

Leslie Howard is as perfect for the part of the tyrannical and brutish Professor Henry as Wendy Hiller is in the various guises of Eliza Doolittle.   "You squashed cabbage leaf!" Howard snarls contemptuously, making it abundantly clear that he considers women to be somewhat lower down on the evolutionary scale than the humble pet goldfish.  Hiller makes the transformation from Cockney flower girl to well-mannered young lady with conviction and aplomb and is hilarious in her intermediate state at the legendary tea party scene.  "It’s my belief they done the old woman in..." Lady Eliza declares in her newly acquired received pronunciation, before dropping enough social clangers to sink the entire British navy.

Pygmalion is the greatest of Shaw’s social satires and a superlative comedy of manners, but Anthony Asquith’s film adaptation gives it substance and character that no stage production could ever match.  Harry Stradling’s slick and inventive photography vividly evokes the bygone era in which the film is set and is particularly effective in the montage sequences where Higgins’s relentless drilling of Eliza takes on the character of an expressionistic nightmare.  But it is ultimately the performances that sell this film – and not just those from the impeccable leads.  Wilfrid Lawson, Marie Lohr and Scott Sunderland are equally deserving of praise and give as much entertainment value.  This is a classic, in every sense of the word.

© filmsdefrance.com 2009

Write a review for this film...

What do you think of this film?