Lerner and Loewe made several amazingly good movies and a couple of not so good movies. My Fair Lady is their best. It is the story of a rich Victorian Gentleman-he’s just rich, don’t worry about how he got that, and a poor cockney girl who has to sell flowers for a living. Though it is not at all clear how selling flower came to be the standard profession of poor, honest girls.
The story of My Fair Lady is a long one, both in screen time, which is several months, and real time, which is about three hours. The songs are great, some of the best every put on the screen. From the poor dirty Eliza longing for a room with a fire to the self important Professor Higgins declaring that he Will Never Let A Woman in His Life. My Fair Lady was basically a really long video, before the concept of the video came and went as it has now.
The Wife hates Musicals, even My Fair Lady, as they don’t make any sense. People sing and dance and are accompanied by blaring music in the most unlikely of places. But I have always loved musicals.
My Fair Lady has a number of odd things going on it though. We have two main characters and a vast horde of lessor characters. The Main Characters are Professor Higgins, a bachelor grammarian who lives in a mansion in downtown London staffed by a couple of dozen servants. He lives alone in this massive house until a colleague from India shows up one day wanting to discus phonetics-and never leaves. At about the same time that this lessor fellow, Col Pickering, shows up, we met our second Main Character-flower girl Eliza. Eliza Doolittle lives in a basement flat surround by rather shady people, who are all covered in coal dust.
The point of the film is that Professor Higgins can turn the barely understandable Eliza Doolittle into a well spoken woman who can pass for a Duchess at The Embassy Ball.
The Broadway version of this show stared Julie Andrews as Eliza, not the rail thin waif Audrey Hepburn. I liked Julie Andrews, loved her in Mary Poppins, which is the film she made instead of My Fair Lady, but it is hard to watch My Fair Lady and image Julie Andrews playing the part. The fact that Julie Andrews can sing and they had to dub in a voice for Audrey Hepburn doesn’t really matter that much. Audrey Hepburn looks like a heartless guttersnipe, as the good Professor would say. Or maybe she looks more like a Duchess.
I love everything about this film, from the actors and the songs to the sets and the costumes. My favorite prop is a bright red alligator which sits in the background of many shots and is never referred to. The house is also filled with mounted butterflies, the small red reptile is just weird. Still, My Fair Lady is a film made the way a film should be made. Except for one minor detail.
At the end of My Fair Lady, our blow hard Professor Higgins is told my Eliza Doolittle that he will not be seeing her again. He is crushed by this, and mopes his way back home. Everywhere he looks he sees Eliza and to soothe his aching soul, he clicks on one of his many machines and plays back his first meeting with her. As My Fair Lady ends, Eliza walks quietly into the room and turns off the machine, then mimics her former low class accent-I washed ma face and hands before I come I did. The Professor responds by slumping down in his chair and asking for his slippers. Not much of an ending, is it? But after three hours of My Fair Lady, any ending is a good ending.
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