My Fair Lady (DVD)

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Eliza's father is played by the indefatigable Stanley Holloway, who, as he did on Broadway, all but steals the show with his two cockney music hall numbers, "With a Little Bit of Luck" and "Get Me to the Church on Time." In other notable parts, fans of English television's Sherlock Holmes will be tickled to see the late Jeremy Brett playing Eliza's young, lovesick, high-society admirer, Freddy Eynsford-Hill, and singing "On the Street Where You Live" (uncredited singing voice courtesy of Bill Shirley). Wilfrid Hyde-White plays Col. Pickering; Gladys Cooper plays the Professor's mother; and Theodore Bikel plays the deliciously unctuous Zoltan Karpathy ("Oozing charm from every pore, He oiled his way around the floor").

The songs, cast, dialogue, direction, costumes, and set designs combine to make "My Fair Lady" one of the all-time great movie musicals in Hollywood history.

Video:
Warner Bros. again present the film in its original Super Panavision 70 scope, an anamorphic widescreen measuring an approximately 2.20:1 ratio. Using a slightly higher bit rate in this newest transfer of the 1994 restored print, the colors are more beautiful than ever, even deeper and richer than in the earlier DVD copy. As before, the brightest colors and the black-and-white contrasts in scenes like the Embassy Ball and the Ascot Races are spectacular. After thirty years of neglect, the film stock had apparently deteriorated considerably, and it was the job of the restorers to render the picture quality as close as possible to what it was in 1964. Obviously, they succeeded beyond expectation. However, the first DVD transfer displayed a higher-than-average number of horizontal line fluctuations, which I'm happy to say have mostly disappeared in this new presentation. There are still some evidences of edge enhancement and minor color bleed-through, but it's nothing serious.

Audio:
The movie's six-track master soundtrack was restored in a Dolby Digital 5.1 remix for the previous edition and remains good. At least I assume it's the same DD 5.1 track since I could hear no changes from the older DVD transfer, and I suspect the engineers left this area alone. The vocals still have a very slightly pinched quality, a little high and raspy at times, but they are concerns so minor as to go mostly unnoticed unless one expects up-to-the-minute audiophile sonics. The surround channels are used mainly for ambiance enhancement, providing a flattering bloom to the musical acoustic.

Extras:
Disc one contains the widescreen feature presentation, of course, plus a feature-length audio commentary with art director Gene Allen, singer Marni Nixon, and restorers Robert A. Harris and James C. Katz that affords the kind of behind-the-scenes insights that movie buffs adore. There are fifty scene selections; English and French spoken languages; and English, French, and Spanish subtitles.

Disc two contains the bonus materials. Most important is a 1994 making-of documentary, "More Loverly Than Ever: My Fair Lady Then and Now," hosted by the film's costar, the late Jeremy Brett. It's fifty-seven minutes long and contains a wealth of material on the movie's filming and the movie's restoration, embracing before and after comparisons and comments from just about everyone still living who had anything to do with the production. About the only thing odd I found in it is that while there is much discussion of the beauty of the widescreen restoration, the documentary itself is in a 1.33:1 ratio and the movie excerpts used as illustrations are in pan-and-scan.

Next, there is a series of vintage featurettes, including twenty-three minutes of the 1963 production kickoff dinner; nine minutes of the film's Los Angeles première on October 28, 1964; some Academy Awards ceremony highlights from April, 1965; Rex Harrison's Golden Globe acceptance speech; audio only of George Cukor directing the Baroness Rothschild scene; and a nine-minute promo, "The Fairest Fair Lady." Following these featurettes are two alternative Audrey Hepburn vocal tracks, "Show Me" and "Wouldn't It Be Loverly?" These long-thought-lost musical numbers demonstrate Hepburn's highly expressive singing voice, but one can readily hear that Ms. Nixon's voice is smoother, fuller, more cultivated, and more wide ranging. The studio probably made the right decision in dubbing over Hepburn's songs. Next are three "Show Me" galleries of black-and-white stills, color stills, and general publicity stills, followed by comments on the movie and on film preservation from Andrew Lloyd Webber and Martin Scorsese. Finally, there are trailers for several Lerner and Lowe musicals, including the original 1964 "My Fair Lady" trailer and the 1994 re-release trailer, plus trailers for "Brigadoon," "Camelot," and "Gigi." The two-disc set comes packaged in a foldout, cardboard-and-plastic box, complete with scene indexes for the feature presentation and the bonus items, all housed in a tastefully attractive slipcase.

Parting Thoughts:
Certainly, for the person who has always considered owning "My Fair Lady" on disc, this new two-disc edition makes an attractive proposition. Then, too, for the person who already owns the previous DVD transfer, the new edition with its slightly better video quality and additional bonus items may be equally attractive. The set is not inexpensive, but it does offer the buyer a generous return on his investment.

As pure entertainment "My Fair Lady" makes other musicals seem almost crude by comparison, and it deserves to be the standard by which others are judged. Movie fans' concerns about Julie Andrews notwithstanding, both the film and WB's new special-edition DVD set are absolutely loverly.

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