Aug 031964
 
3,5 reels

Professor Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), on a bet with Colonel Pickering (Wilfrid Hyde-White), takes in flower girl Eliza Doolittle (Audrey Hepburn) with the intention of teaching her proper English such that she could pass as a high class lady.

My Fair Lady is a nice film, a pleasant viewing experience. That sounds like I’m damning it with faint praise, which is the case only because it tends to be overrated. It’s well made, and beautifully filmed (if clearly set-bound). The songs are all wonderful. Hepburn is lovely, as she always is. Harrison is one of the better talk-singers and pulls off the role of Higgins admirably, even if he doesn’t equal Leslie Howard’s performance in the 1938 Pygmalion. It is one of the better Broadway musical to film adaptations.

It’s a good film, perhaps a very good film, but it isn’t a great one. Why not? The editing isn’t top rate, with some pacing problems, but that’s minor. Likewise some of the sets are less than they should be, but again, not a big deal. However, there are two items that matter, that keep it from being what it could have been. Firstly, it follows the stage musical, thus it has the same problem that it did: the ending. Pygmalion originally ended with Eliza leaving, with plans to marry Freddy. It’s the ending the entire play was moving toward. Shaw’s notes have Eliza and Freddy married, running a shop set up with money from Colonel Pickering. They all visit from time-to-time, though with some tenseness between Eliza and Higgans. But the theater wanted to make more money, and persuaded George Bernard Shaw to change the ending because it was assumed that people would buy more tickets if the two protagonists end up together, no matter that the entire play said they shouldn’t. So Shaw tacked on Eliza returning, changing nothing else, thus leaving it clear that she shouldn’t. The musical took the changed ending, as did the film. It’s stranger in the musical, since Freddy is given the one great romantic song, On the Street Where You Live, which is structurally odd since it leads to nothing.

The second issue is Hepburn. She is lovely, and always bewitching. I’ve no doubt she does a better job than almost any other actress could have, but then we’re looking at the difference between “very good” and “great” and in two ways, Hepburn is lacking. She is always elegant; either by talent or choice, she is incapable of being grungy. That elegance servers her when she’s supposed to be mistaken for royalty, but as a poor, dirty, guttersnipe, it doesn’t work. You always notice her, and she always seems like a princess.

Of course the biggest problem is that Hepburn doesn’t have a very good voice. She did an excellent rendition of Moon River in Breakfast at Tiffany’s, but that’s because the song was specifically written for her limited vocal range. The songs of My Fair Lady were not. She tried, but she wasn’t good enough, so her songs were dubbed by Marni Nixon. And listening to the now released Hepburn versions, they were right to dub her. Nixon has a strong voice and could hit the notes Hepburn couldn’t, but she wasn’t the same caliber of actress, or maybe it was just the distancing nature of dubbing that leaves the songs lacking in emotion. They sound the way you’d expect to hear them in a musical review—A Night With Mani Nixon and the Songs of Lerner and Loewe—instead of with the weight they needed in a narrative musical.

And yes, this does lead to Julie Andrews. As is well known, Andrews played Eliza on Broadway, but was passed over in favor of Hepburn as Jack Warne didn’t consider Andrews a big enough draw. So she was hired by Disney for Mary Poppins, became a big draw, and rightfully won the Oscar. Clearly Andrews would have been the better choice, but it didn’t have to be her, just someone who was a high quality singer and actress (granted, no one else is coming to mind besides Andrews, but I’m sure there’s someone). It’s easiest to hear the problem with direct comparisons, and luckily YouTube allows for that.

The first is the Marni Nixon dub of Show Me as heard in the film—nice singing, but emotionally lacking. (Try from :18-:28 seconds)

This is the Hepburn’s attempt. The emotions are there, but the notes are painful to listen to. (:49-48 is the same section)

Finally, here’s a version of July Andrews singing the same song. Her voice is even better than Nixon’s, and she has emotion to spare, which brings life to the role. (:31 to :45 in this version)

So, Hepburn/Nixon were good. Even very good. But “very good” isn’t enough for greatness. Which is fine. A good film is a good film, and this is nice. It just isn’t a masterpiece, and shouldn’t be elevated beyond it’s range, as was done in 1964 when it won the Best Picture Oscar over Doctor Strangelove.