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My Fair Lady

In her book Down from the Pedestal: Moving Beyond Idealized Images of Womanhood, Maxine Harris argues how "the images of [young] womanhood which tempt and ultimately trap women are images of male fantasies and desires." She names as one of the archetypal images of young womanhood the Free Spirit, "tamed, guided, and even remade by her experienced and powerful rescuer" and best emblematized in George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion. Alan Jay Lerner (book and lyrics) and Frederick Loewe (music) later adapted Pygmalion into the 1956 stage musical comedy My Fair Lady, starring Rex Harrison as Professor Henry Higgins, the professor who, as per Harris, "falls in love with his own creation...fiesty working-class flower girl" Eliza Doolittle (Julie Andrews). Hollywood replaced Andrews with Audrey Hepburn for the well-nigh-irresistible 1964 film version of My Fair Lady, which comedically softens Shaw's ending but nevertheless nearly single-handedly transcends the material's sexist leaning through the sheer humanism of Hepburn's deeply felt performance.

While ostensibly inspired by the Greek myth of Pygmalion and Galatea (popularized by the Roman poet Ovid in his Metamorphoses), both Pygmalion and its largely faithful musical adaptation share much in common with Shakespeare's social satire The Taming of the Shrew, in which a brutish man apparently (but not quite) refashions a free-spirited woman into a socially palatable feminine model and object of male desire, ultimately betting on his ability to do so (this plot preceded by a pre-postmodern Induction that predicts Harris by implicitly framing this "play within a play" as a male fantasy). In George Cukor's film of My Fair Lady, Harrison gives a stunningly honed performance as a psychologically hapless, self-awareness-lacking, but weirdly likeable "confirmed old bachelor," understood to appear civilized while actually being badly behaved. Hepburn's Doolittle, afflicted with brassy Cockney speech, succumbs to the literally patronizing higher-class promise of that cunning linguist Higgins, who insists that his dialect coaching and lessons in grammar, manner, and elocution will transform Eliza into a lady employable in a flower shop or, as he crows, "She's so deliciously low, so horribly dirty. I'll take it. I'll make a duchess of this draggle-tailed guttersnipe."

Lest we forget, My Fair Lady is a golden-age-of-Broadway musical entertainment, and it hums along with Lerner and Loewe's delightful songs (the music expertly supervised and conducted for the film by Andre Previn). Cukor's film still stands tall as one of the last great pageants of the golden age of Hollywood, boasting costumes, scenery, and production designed by Cecil Beaton, and choreography by Hermes Pan, all captured in widescreen, high-resolution Super Panavision 70. Yes, Harrison is notoriously talk-singing, but his razor-sharp delivery works like gangbusters for the role, the actor owning the screen in his peak performance. Every Higgins number (and all of his nasty dialogue) paints the character as a blithe, self-absorbed, sadistic jerk, though a consistently amusing one. To those willing consciously to parse a musical entertainment like this one, it's apparent that it's Harrison who's charming and that Higgins is more or less a monster. The professor nearly becomes worthy of his student as he begins, clumsily, to admit and articulate to himself ("I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face") and to Eliza that he likes her, though not aloud for the right reasons or confessing a shred of vulnerability.

By contrast, Eliza exhibits credible personal growth, albeit prodded by her reactions to Higgins. Though Eliza's singing voice is supplied mostly by the great Marni Nixon, Hepburn gives a master class in musical-theater acting with a turn characterized by rather astonishing emotional continuity, delineating Eliza's well-rounded arc by expressing humble dreams ("Wouldn't It Be Loverly?"), chastened defiance ("Just You Wait"), pride of accomplishment and wonder of possibility ("I Could Have Danced All Night," not necessarily a love song though certainly a "romantic" one), sexual—and male gender—frustration ("Show Me") and, climactically, prideful self-actualization ("Without You").

Given this dramatic throughline, it's all the more bothersome that My Fair Lady feels obligated—pre-Sexual Revolution, lest we forget—to jettison Shaw's partially corrective, if not outright feminist, ending. It's easier to see why Henry falls for Eliza than her for him, since Lerner expends less dramatic energy on the latter. Meeting Lerner halfway, we can infer Eliza's depth of gratitude for her teacher, easily transferrable in psychological terms to romantic attraction, and her weakness to the indefinable pull of the incorrigible Higgins' roguish, imperious, playfully insulting manner, which gives new meaning to "charm offensive." Lerner implies her true motivation is to teach Higgins what he so needs to learn about civility, especially between the sexes, but in the end, he still stands his ground and she succumbs, the story ending with a wink and a smile as the rascal winner takes it all. My Fair Lady risks being as insensitive as its male protagonist by playing for romance a woman's "boys will be boys" acceptance of male-dominant verbal abuse, even though the bark is most certainly worse than the bite.

And so the film's last thirty seconds diminish what's come before, but not enough to invalidate those two hours and 45 minutes of their classic status (last year, Time's Charlotte Alter argued that even those thirty seconds are permissible because 1912, but job applications or even a return to the streets would be more in keeping with Eliza's evolved pride of self). From the lush Overture to the brisk Finale, My Fair Lady entertains with grander-than-life musical-comedy finesse and vivid characters (lest we forget Wilfrid Hyde-White's dotty Colonel Hugh Pickering, pre-Sherlock Holmes Jeremy Brett's besotted Freddy Eynsford-Hill, Theodore Bikel's self-satisfied Zoltan Karpathy or, bless us, Stanley Holloway's prancing hustler Alfred P. Doolittle). With a little bit of luck, My Fair Lady will retain its power, undimmed in fifty years, to delight, making debate over its depictions of gender roles and the effect of class on identity not so much vexing as just two more of the classic musical's loverly fascinations.