My Fair Lady

1964 "The loverliest motion picture of them all!"
7.7| 2h50m| G| en| More Info
Released: 21 October 1964 Released
Producted By: Warner Bros. Pictures
Country: United States of America
Budget: 0
Revenue: 0
Official Website:
Info

A snobbish phonetics professor agrees to a wager that he can take a flower girl and make her presentable in high society.

Genre

Drama, Comedy, Music

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My Fair Lady (1964) is now streaming with subscription on Paramount+

Director

George Cukor

Production Companies

Warner Bros. Pictures

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My Fair Lady Audience Reviews

Moustroll Good movie but grossly overrated
Afouotos Although it has its amusing moments, in eneral the plot does not convince.
InformationRap This is one of the few movies I've ever seen where the whole audience broke into spontaneous, loud applause a third of the way in.
Brenda The plot isn't so bad, but the pace of storytelling is too slow which makes people bored. Certain moments are so obvious and unnecessary for the main plot. I would've fast-forwarded those moments if it was an online streaming. The ending looks like implying a sequel, not sure if this movie will get one
Wally-E Good things: Beautiful sets, decent songs, ok performances, Higgins is fairly funny, and an easy to follow story.Bad things: WAY too long, useless songs especially from the dad, Audrey Hepburn has one of the worst voices of all time in the fist half of the movie (I know this is on purpose, but my god), and Higgins is a huge ass.My biggest and worst complaint about this fine movie, is that the run time is bloated with useless musical numbers, this is a 1hr 50min movie tops, but because of Bollywood type musical numbers it (like a Bollywood movie) is bloated to 2hrs 50mins. I think it's perfectly fine, but with heavy flaws.
lasttimeisaw Fairly speaking, vintage Hollywood musicals don't age well thanks to their tie-ins with ingrown fluffy affectation and sound-stage-bound artificiality, which doesn't see eye to eye with the surge of an ever-finicky/skeptical modern audience. But mercifully, MY FAIR LADY, George Cukor's Oscar BEST PICTURE title-holder, still can hold court and rivet viewers through its lilting numbers, tableaux vivants par excellence, and a barnstorming cast headlined by Audrey Hepburn and Rex Harrison. Cashing in on the popularity of George Bernard Shaw's stage play PYGMALION and its subsequent musical iteration from Lerner and Loewe, this film adaptation is first and foremost, a well- intention-ed crowd-pleas-er and takes no prisoners in flagging up its swagger and grandeur, both interior and exterior, the story-line pits a cockney flower seller Eliza Doolittle (Hepburn) against Prof. Henry Higgins (Harrison), a misogynistic scholar of phonetics, who boasts that under his tutelage, within a six-month stint, he can transmogrify Eliza into a bona-fide duchess, to be presented in an embassy ball. Making allowance for Henry's make-up, he is way too snobbish to rope "that filthy, silly girl" into the deal, so it must be Eliza, who takes up the gauntlet of her own accord, with an impetus of bettering herself which attunes with the Edwardian time, when suffragettes are spotted parading on the streets of London. Abetted by Colonel Hugh Pickering (Hyde-White), Henry's new acquaintance and a kindred spirit in phonetics (who also implausibly and conveniently, co-habits with the pair in Henry's abode, indeed, their male bonding will grow chummier as a cross-current of the central gender spar, and reach its apogee in A HYMN TO HIM, WHY CAN'T A WOMAN BE MORE LIKE A MAN), a bet is struck and this folie-à-trois segues comically and tunefully through many mishaps and frustrations until Eliza magically expunges her cockney accent in THE RAIN IN SPAIN, under the spell of a patriotic rhetoric from Henry, and then is thrown into elation through Eliza's I COULD HAVE DANCED ALL NIGHT, alas! The biggest hindrance has been officially conquered!(suspended disbelief is critical to countenance this deus ex ma-china, subtlety and logic is given a wide berth here.) A leitmotif is the paralleled contrast between the transformation of Eliza, her appearance/utterance along with her inner state elevated by it and the intransigence of Henry, who habitually treats Eliza as a guinea pig, and takes her efforts for granted, the climax comes not in the palatial ball, but after, when a simmering Eliza lets rip to a bemusing Henry, who still has no clue why she suddenly blows a fuse on their (him and Pickering's) triumphant night, what an exasperating pedantic and egoist bore! Serendipitously, what trenchantly tones down Henry's defective persona is Mr. Harrison's invigorating elocution and a left-field approach of doing his numbers by speaking his lines in a singsong tone, pertinently deadens the schmaltzy impact of the material (I'M AN ORDINARY MAN) and leavens the hoary template, in the end of the day, Henry is the one who has learned a lesson, however unmerited he is, it is a cracking exemplar of a none-too-pleasant character salvaged by a transcendent show-stopper. Needlessly to say, being dubbed in a musical by a splendid belt-er (in this case, the unsung star here is Marni Bixon) takes the shine off an otherwise wholesome and majestic performance from Ms. Hepburn (who replaced Julie Andrews from the original musical play, ironically the latter won an Oscar the same year for MARY POPPINS while the former was given a cold shoulder early in the nomination stage, albeit the movie was being doled out a magnanimous twelve nominations including that vexatious coattail one for the venerable Ms. Gladys Cooper, who is barely present and given nothing remotely concrete to act), not in her prime though (she was 35-year-young to play a 21-year-old damsel), her portrayal of a girl's metamorphosis through her manner, accent and inward orbit is magnificent and isn't being eclipsed by her gorgeous wardrobe and millinery accouterments, her Eliza is a full-bodied character rising above her rite of passage as a winner refusing to take the short end of the stick (although the ending predictably but gingerly winks at a compromised happy-ending). Stanley Holloway steals the limelight with his own voice in two merry pieces (WITH A LITTLE BIT OF LUCK and GET ME To THE CHURCH ON TIME) as Eliza's bullheaded father Alfred, and is granted with a hard-earned Oscar nomination (au contraire of Ms. Cooper); a young, handsome and debonair Jeremy Brett (also dubbed in his singing by Bill Shirley) is a commensurate match for Ms. Hepburn, and a genteel Wilfrid Hyde-White drolly slums it in the singing-and-dancing sequences but captures an air of lassez-faire pulsating mostly on the sideline of this humdinger emblazoned with sparkling gender politics and chipper euphony.
jwiley-86292 On paper, I consider My Fair Lady to be almost without flaw. I've read the play it's based on, and I like this version better. (It's really fanficcy when you think about it. Aren't half of all fanfics meant to pair up characters that didn't end up together in the source material?) I can say with confidence that this is the best adaptation of a musical I've ever seen. Hepburn utterly convinced me she was Eliza. I have no complaints regarding her. Despite the film's length of almost three hours, I find it admirable that they cut nothing from the original libretto. Unfortunately, it is not without flaws. Allow me to list them:-Numerous lip-sync failures. -Obvious sound stages in supposed outdoor locations. -The added scene where the maids forcibly strip and bathe Eliza is highly disturbing.-In Eliza's big telling-Higgins-off song, she. . . waters plants???-Ironically, the actors often talk so quickly it's hard for me to understand them. Especially for the part where Higgins pep-talks Eliza by calling her attractive, the guy playing him should be slow and deliberate so that the scene carries overtones that he is uncomfortable about feeling attraction towards her. Furthermore, in the final scene, Rex Harrison isn't sad enough. All of these are conspicuous problems, but I'd sooner re-watch this than any other movie musical. The story is deeply touching, and the character arcs of the protagonists remind me so much of great writers like Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë. If you're uneasy about possible misogynistic subtext, let me say that Higgins reminds me of multiple romantic leads created by both those women. More to the point, the more imperious he is, the more heartwarming it is when he realizes the error of his ways. That is what makes My Fair Lady so satisfying where Pygmalion wasn't. Still, I'd be open to a remake if only to have a version where no one has 60s hair.
mihajlo_bn_1994 I watched this movie with a lot of reserve, since I am not a fan of musicals and old movies. "My Fair Lady" forced me to expand my views and start watching more movies from this genre. But this will stay one of the best musicals ever! Didn't like the way it ends, although I understand that this is classic ending.Audrey Hepburn is just amazing and loud. Rex Harrison, in this movie, is simple natural misogynist. Alfred P. Doolittle was annoying, especially when he took money from Professor Henry Higgins.Audrey Hepburn is denied Oscar, she wasn't even nominated, although this movie claimed 8 Oscars and was nominated for four more.