Pygmalion (DVD)

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You know "Pygmalion." It's "My Fair Lady" without the songs. No, it's much more than that, of course. But it was the inspiration for Lerner and Loewe's 1956 musical. Written for the stage originally in 1912 by the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw, "Pygmalion" is itself based on the Greek myth of the sculptor and king of Cyprus who created a statue of ivory and then fell in love with it, a statue that was subsequently brought to life by the goddess Aphrodite. In the myth, Shaw found a perfect vehicle for commenting on the social customs of his time by allowing a speech teacher to transform a common, lower-class street person into an acceptable, upper-class socialite. With a screenplay by Shaw himself, the 1938 movie adaptation captures all of the charm, wit, and sophistication of the stage hit, and in Criterion's new transfer the movie blossoms anew.

The plot is by now familiar to most stage and filmgoers. A well-to-do professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, makes a bet with a friend and colleague, Colonel Pickering, that in six months or less he can turn a poor flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, a "gutter snipe" he calls her, into a duchess; he can pass her off as anybody he likes at an Ambassador's Reception (an Embassy Ball in the musical). Shaw's idea in this comedy of manners is that a person's status in life is not so much a product of who one is, but what one is; namely, how one appears to others. By teaching Eliza proper pronunciation, articulation, grammar, and etiquette, Higgins passes her off as a lady of the highest order. In fact, at the Reception an old pupil of Higgins, Count Aristid Karpathy, now a snobbish dialectician, declares Eliza a Hungarian princess! But in the course of their teacher-pupil relationship, Higgins and Eliza, despite their differing social backgrounds, become more attached to one another than they could ever have imagined.

Leslie Howard stars as Higgins. Even non film buffs will recognize him as the love-struck neighbor and ill-fated husband of Scarlet O'Hara in the movie version of "Gone With the Wind." He was not the author's first choice for Higgins, though. That distinction goes to an unlikely candidate, Charles Laughton. Thank heaven more sensible heads prevailed because Howard is thoroughly in tune with the role of the bossy, oppressive, overbearing, bullying, insensitive intellectual. Higgins' notion of class distinctions is never to observe them; he treats everyone equally rudely. The most moving scene in the film arrives when he comes to realize that even an ungracious old bachelor must have somebody to share his life. He has become "accustomed" to Eliza he finally concedes with feigned indifference. Howard may not make one forget entirely Rex Harrison in the part, but he is closer to Eliza's age than Harrison and makes the couple's romantic involvement more plausible.

As Eliza, British stage actress Wendy Hiller was Shaw's own pick. She may, indeed, make you forget Julie Andrews and Audry Hepburn. Hiller is especially good in the first half of the film as the impetuous lower-class flower girl with the Cockney accent. Her vulnerabilities, headstrong willfulness, and innocent openness are a delight. As her diction improves and she becomes more of a lady, the changes in her attitude and demeanor become more pronounced, perhaps too much so that it defies credibility even in a comedy. By the conclusion of the film, covering only a few months, she is a strong-willed woman fully capable of holding her own in any company; but, in fact, in her refinement she sounds a bit too much like one born to class rather than achieving it. Nevertheless, it is a pleasure to see her teaching the professor a thing or two about life by the story's climax.

The supporting cast is equally fine. Scott Sunderland is appropriately gallant and kindhearted as Col. Pickering. The difference between him and Higgins, Eliza explains, is that the Colonel treats every flower girl like a lady and Higgins treats every lady like a flower girl. Eliza words are, "The difference between a lady and a flower girl isn't how she behaves; it's how she's treated." Wilfrid Lawson plays Mr. Doolittle, Eliza's father, the shiftless dustman who describes himself in the end as a "victim of middle-class morality" when he finally weds Eliza's "step mother." Almost stealing the show, however, is Esme Percy as the pompous, slimy, conceited windbag, Karpathy. Oh, how we enjoy seeing the wind knocked from out of his sails.