When linguist Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) happens upon flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) in Covent Garden he makes a bet with his new house guest Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White) that he could pass her off as a duchess within six months. Seeing an opportunity to improve herself and perhaps one day own her own flower shop Eliza agrees to the venture. 

My Fair Lady is a classic film with a lot of interesting history and one that I had never watched before from start to finish. In remedying that blip on my film viewing card as it were I have to say I found the film as equally awful as it was brilliant. In the main my issues came down to interpretation of the film’s themes and the fact that it seemed to go on for an incredible length of time. So much so that it still has an intermission inserted within its run time. 

The film is based on the 1913 play Pygmalion by George Bernard Shaw which was then turned into a Broadway musical in 1956 before moving to the West End in 1958. Both versions of the hugely successful musical saw Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews in the lead roles. But when Warner Brothers made the film in 1964 Jack Warner decided that Andrews was not enough of a movie star to reprise her role and picked Audrey Hepburn instead. To add further controversy and intrigue to that decision Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed over with Marni Nixon’s and Julie Andrews went on to take the role of Mary Poppins that year winning the Oscar for Best Actress. I am sure Jack Warner felt vindicated with My Fair Lady winning eight Oscars including Picture, Director and Actor for Harrison. 

The age gap between the actors is immediately obvious with Harrison being twenty-one years Hepburn’s senior. Although Julie Andrews who starred alongside him in the theatre was even younger still. The dynamic of Harrison’s character being an older, richer and more powerful man is very much an antiquated one but I continually had to remind myself that this is a film set in 1912 and that this was an integral part of the plot. In fact it is worth coming to my issues with the interpretation of the plot that I had at this point. Rex Harrison’s character is elitist, misogynistic and classist. On the whole he is an awful man and the story seemingly knows this. All of his songs are about how much of a genius he is, how much better he is than other people and how inferior women are to men. Doolittle on the other hand gets songs about being an independent woman and the fact that the world would very much go on without Henry Higgins. But then the ending (spoiler alert for a fifty-eight year old film that has been in multiple musical theatre runs) has Doolittle accept him as a partner. 

So is the film misogynistic or about misogyny and the manner in which women have to work within those constraints? It is also interesting to me that my limited expectations around the Pygmalion story is one of true love but actually here it seems to have opened my eyes to the fact that it is about men’s view that they are superior than women. 

Essentially what I think I am saying is that I never actually understood the plot and theme of Pygmalion. That my naive opinion was that it was a representation of how love could cross social divides. But actually it is more of a scathing attack on how humans treat each other differently based on those social divides. It also is very much impossible to have a happy ending given the time it is set in. Eliza has a choice of marrying an idiot, living with her father who was horrible to her or staying with Higgins. 

That being said then, is the film enjoyable? The songs are good and feature many that I recognise despite never watching all of the film before. The likes of, “Wouldn’t it be loverly”, “With a little bit of luck”, “On the street where you live”, “Could have danced all night” and “Just you wait” are all thoroughly enjoyable. There is some dark humour in having the servants at Higgins home sing about how hard Higgins has to work to improve Eliza. Whilst the scene at Ascot was the most impressive for me, the costumes were amazing and the whole scene felt staged as though it was on stage and stylistically was very impressive. But then there is the issue that it runs at 170 minutes long and given how horrible everyone is to Eliza it does drag quite a lot. 

I think the lesson learned for me is not to make assumptions about plot based on other adaptations and if it was not for the running time I might immediately return to this to see if I might appreciate it more with that in mind.