Oscars Retrospective: My Fair Lady (37th Academy Awards Review)

I've Grown Accustomed To Her Face~Frederick Loewe, vocals by Rex Harrison - My Fair Lady

        True to the zeitgeist of the ongoing British Invasion, My Fair Lady was the third Academy Award winner in a row to be a British tale. Though, unlike Lawrence of Arabia (1962) and Tom Jones (1963), My Fair Lady was an American production, it just revolved around a British-set story, perfectly exemplifying the phrase “If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.” And, like many other classic musicals, it was such a beloved and iconic story that has been parodied and imitated so many times that many may not know that these tropes come from this movie.
        Based on a highly successful Broadway musical which itself was based on an earlier play and movie called Pygmalion (play: 1913, movie: 1938) (the title was presumably changed because Pygmalion is a terrible title), My Fair Lady revolves around a phonetics teacher named Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison) who is obsessed with the learned differences in accents, particularly the stark difference in the upper-class and lower-class English accent. He finds the subject so fascinating, in fact, that he bets a friend and colleague (Wilfrid Hyde-White) that, given enough time and practice, he could teach even the lowest-class street urchin to sound like a grand duchess.
        This conversation is overheard by a homeless flower girl named Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn, singing voice dubbed by Marni Nixon) who shows up to Higgins’ mansion, offering herself as a test subject, hoping that shaking off her thick cockney accent will allow her to open a more respectable business. The rest of the movie is then these two’s classes together, with a lot of the dialogue having fun with the diction and slang of the different dialects of English.
        My Fair Lady stands out from the crowd a bit in terms of the early 60s musical epics by just how relatively small-scale it is. ("Relatively" being the key word here as it was the third-most expensive film ever made up to that point; supposedly producer Jack Warner had the sets bulldozed to put a stop to director George Cukor’s constant reshoots). The last musical to win the Oscar was West Side Story (1961) and that film was such a landmark and explosion of song and dance that it presented a new gold standard by which movie musicals could be judged. While West Side Story and other movies like The Sound of Music (1965) or Oliver! (1968) had such big numbers and many interwoven subplots that ultimately boil over, My Fair Lady is more of a fun romantic-comedy with some classist commentary. While it’s not without its share of musical moments, the majority of the film is Higgins and Doolittle just sitting around and talking to each other. With a set-up like that, this movie really lives or dies by its two leads and they are both excellent.

        Rex Harrison was a character actor who had been around the block a few times by the time this came out (in fact, he was about 20 years older than Audrey Hepburn which makes their romance in the movie a little odd but, eh, different times). He usually played imperious roles such as the ghost in The Ghost and Mrs. Muir (1947) and Julius Caesar in Cleopatra (1963), being the only actor to escape that disaster with his reputation largely intact. While he was good at these roles (although he was certainly no Charlton Heston), Professor Higgins seems like the role that he was born to play. Granted, the fact that he had been playing the character on stage for over a decade by this point certainly helped, but Harrison was also notorious for having the tendency to being a rude diva to most people he met and then overcompensating with his graciousness which isn’t too far of a cry from the character.
        With that said, his role as Professor Higgins is probably the more important of this pair. That’s not to undercut Hepburn’s work but making a protagonist who’s a total jerk is one of those things that is always a fine needle to thread, especially in a romantic-comedy. How many movies have we seen over the years where a character is such a jerk that we honestly don’t want to see them actually learn their lesson and become better people? Especially ones who behave as rudely as he does?
        The clever out they have in this regard is by Harrison playing the character as being far too smart for his own good. He is so obsessed with elocution and phonetics and has spent so much time in his library that the actual art of connecting with another human being is something that is almost completely foreign to him. That aforementioned imperiousness is a key part to the character’s success and Harrison clearly knows that the more self-righteous he comes off, the funnier he becomes because he’s too naïve to realize that he’s the butt of his own jokes. It’s one of those charming little satires about academia where if you’ve ever been around that world, you’ve met professors like this: someone who knows their subject inside and out but makes for a very poor teacher.
        If Rex Harrison is the comic relief, then Audrey Hepburn as Eliza Doolittle is the heart and soul of the picture. Similar to Harrison, and unlike many other leading ladies in Hollywood history, Hepburn was able to combine character acting with the typical rom-com plot. Both Eliza Doolittle and Breakfast at Tiffany’s’ (1961) Holly Golightly are genuinely fun and memorable characters even if you were to take the drama out of their pictures. I also admire just how absolutely filthy they make her look at the beginning of the film. I know it’s to make her appearance at the end of the movie that much more impactful but, still, considering how vain most actors and actresses are, especially at the Hollywood level, it shows a real dedication to the craft to ugly yourself up this much.

She looks like she smells of urine and bad decisions.

        The popularity of Eliza Doolittle and My Fair Lady does present a fascinating time capsule to ask the question of just how British the British Invasion actually was. What do I mean by this? While it is a distinctly British story in the setting, characters and, of course, the accents, My Fair Lady still feels like a pretty American fairy tale. Granted, the idea of classism being dictated by someone’s accent is a more British ideal but the whole “someone in the lower class rising up to the rich life through hard work” is much more in the vein of Americana. Thus, there is an interesting discussion to be had on the culture effects of this film. Sure, the settings of a lot of the films in the British Invasion were British but were the values being imparted actually British or American? Was America’s post-WWII cultural dominance ever really that impacted by the British Invasion?
        While Hepburn is great, she would prove to be the more controversial of the two leads. Unlike Harrison, Hepburn had never performed My Fair Lady on Broadway, instead having been contracted because of her success in Breakfast at Tiffany’s while Harrison’s opposite in the play was a Broadway-exclusive unknown at the time. (In case you’re wondering why the Professor Higgins’ part wasn’t recast as well, it’s because Harrison was only cast after talks with Peter O’Toole and Cary Grant fell through, both of which are very interesting to imagine in this role instead of Harrison. Harrison was also only given half of Hepburn’s salary despite having been an older, more established actor.)
        We’re going to go into more detail of this in part 2 but, in a bizarre twist of fate, the actress who originally played Eliza Doolittle on Broadway would be picked up for another Hollywood musical that would end up being My Fair Lady’s biggest competition at the Oscars that year. There was (and still is) a lot of crossover between Academy snobs and theater snobs and the race for Best Picture and Best Leading Actress was especially vile in the tabloids and gossip trades this year, especially once it came out that Hepburn’s singing voice was dubbed by another actress. So much so that Audrey Hepburn was deliberately snubbed for the Oscar for Best Actress to punish her for taking the spotlight from “genuine talent”. Which, damn, that is ice cold. It’s also pretty unfair since her performance is excellent.
        It’s actually a little mystifying why they felt obliged to dub Hepburn. I’m sure that she wasn’t a classically trained singer but neither was Rex Harrison. My Fair Lady’s musical numbers fall under the umbrella of musicals where the primary style is “speak-to-sing.” In other words, the songs don’t feel rhythmically like songs but still have musical accompaniment and rhyming. It’s hard to describe but if you compare a song from West Side Story to one from Gigi (1958) (or the below clip), you’ll notice a difference in the cadence and how the characters sound. This is a style of music that is more suited for movie actors than theater actors as, even if you don’t have a range of vocals that musical theater truly demands, you would still be able to do most of these songs. Considering how Hepburn was able to change her voice over the course of the movie, it seems like matching Harrison’s (lack of) vocal range would've been perfectly doable for her.

        While the chemistry between the two leads is excellent and what the success of the movie ultimately comes down to, and seeing Eliza prettied up at the end of the movie with perfect elocution is very rewarding, My Fair Lady isn’t a perfect film. The big problem is that there’s a lot of filler in the movie. That’s the thing about a lot of these old Hollywood epics: they were so obsessed with being so long that they would include anything into the story, even if it didn't add all that much to it. This is another of those debates of storytelling in what constitutes filler, especially if it’s adding atmosphere, character development etc. but you can notice movies that are truly tightly written by how quickly they move and how well they’re paced. When you watch a truly well-paced film, especially a long one, they can be over in the blink of an eye because of how engrossing and efficient they are in their storytelling. My Fair Lady is not one of those movies.
        For example, there’s a lot of time dedicated to a subplot revolving around Eliza’s father, Alfred Doolittle (Stanley Holloway), undertaking her same journey off-camera. When this character was first introduced, I thought that he was going to be the villain of the movie, that sort of terrible parent who has a “How dare you think you’re better than me?” complex. And he’s not that (although the character also doesn’t seem to particularly care about his daughter all that much either but she doesn’t seem bothered by this fact). So is he then the comic relief? I guess but he doesn’t say or do anything funny either. No witticisms, no dry jokes, no bizarre POVs on the world, not even a slapstick gag. He just pops into the movie every now and then, shakes down Professor Higgins for some money and then leaves.
        Even weirder is that he’s responsible for the best and most elaborate musical number in the movie, “Get Me To The Church On Time,” which serves as his signoff near the end. It’s a great musical number and shows the highest production values of anywhere else in the movie. But after a certain point, you start wondering why we’re spending so much time and energy here. It’s not funny, it’s not for one of the main characters, you could literally cut both it and the character out of the movie and nothing would change.

        A lot of My Fair Lady is like that. Now, in fairness, this is nowhere near the worst movie of its time period in terms of dragging on needlessly and, back then, audiences would’ve been more forgiving of long lengths and slower paces in movies (think about it, your only alternative for entertainment was television and a pack of cards; our generation does tend to value our time more for better and for worse). On the other hand, you do notice that the movie is 3 hours, especially considering how most of the movie is just two characters talking in a library. The truly best epics like Lawrence of Arabia (1962) or The Godfather (1972) never feel their length and My Fair Lady is not even close to that level.
        In conclusion, these are two very lovable characters as the leads and it’s a very fairy tale-like story. Everyone loves to imagine the idea of going from the lower-class to the upper-class and being able to fit right in and there is something very endearing about how hard Eliza stumbles while still always trying her best. The two have great chemistry with each other and it feels very rewarding every time Eliza makes a breakthrough in her elocution. You just start noticing the time near the end and it would’ve been stronger if they cut down on some of the side-characters and kept the focus on Professor Higgins and Eliza Doolittle.
        But, at the end of the day, these aren’t movie-ruining issues. My Fair Lady still works as a great romance and remains quite beloved by movie musical aficionados. But could it be called movie of the year?

In case you missed it:

1st Academy Awards (1927/28): Wings/Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans: Part 1, Part 2

2nd Academy Awards (1928/29): The Broadway Melody: Part 1, Part 2

3rd Academy Awards (1929/30): All Quiet on the Western Front: Part 1, Part 2

4th Academy Awards (1930/31): Cimarron: Part 1, Part 2

5th Academy Awards (1931/32): Grand Hotel: Part 1, Part 2

6th Academy Awards (1932/33): Cavalcade: Part 1, Part 2

7th Academy Awards (1934): It Happened One Night: Part 1, Part 2

8th Academy Awards (1935): Mutiny on the Bounty: Part 1, Part 2

9th Academy Awards (1936): The Great Ziegfeld: Part 1, Part 2

10th Academy Awards (1937): The Life of Emile Zola: Part 1, Part 2

11th Academy Awards (1938): You Can't Take It With You: Part 1, Part 2

12th Academy Awards (1939): Gone With the Wind: Part 1, Part 2

13th Academy Awards (1940): Rebecca: Part 1, Part 2

14th Academy Awards (1941): How Green Was My Valley: Part 1, Part 2

15th Academy Awards (1942): Mrs. Miniver: Part 1, Part 2

16th Academy Awards (1943): Casablanca: Part 1, Part 2

17th Academy Awards (1944): Going My Way: Part 1, Part 2

18th Academy Awards (1945): The Lost Weekend: Part 1, Part 2

19th Academy Awards (1946): The Best Years of Our Lives: Part 1, Part 2

20th Academy Awards (1947): Gentleman's Agreement: Part 1, Part 2

21st Academy Awards (1948): Hamlet: Part 1, Part 2

22nd Academy Awards (1949): All The King's Men: Part 1, Part 2

23rd Academy Awards (1950): All About Eve: Part 1, Part 2

24th Academy Awards (1951): An American in Paris: Part 1, Part 2

25th Academy Awards (1952): The Greatest Show on Earth: Part 1, Part 2

26th Academy Awards (1953): From Here to Eternity: Part 1, Part 2

27th Academy Awards (1954): On the Waterfront: Part 1, Part 2

28th Academy Awards (1955): Marty: Part 1, Part 2

29th Academy Awards (1956): Around the World in 80 Days: Part 1, Part 2

30th Academy Awards (1957): The Bridge on the River Kwai: Part 1, Part 2

31st Academy Awards (1958): Gigi: Part 1, Part 2

32nd Academy Awards (1959): Ben-Hur: Part 1, Part 2

33rd Academy Awards (1960): The Apartment: Part 1, Part 2

34th Academy Awards (1961): West Side Story: Part 1, Part 2

35th Academy Awards (1962): Lawrence of Arabia: Part 1, Part 2 

36th Academy Awards (1963): Tom Jones: Part 1, Part 2