Favorite Fridays: My Fair Lady (1964)

It seems fairly rare for a movie based on a hit Broadway show to actually retain cast members from the show. Sometimes this is because it takes too long to get the movie version going. Movie fans famously missed out on Michael Crawford playing the title role in Phantom of the Opera because of how long it took to get that film version going. Other times it's a simple case of the studio deciding to recast with more famous actors such as Kiss Me Kate. But every so often, we movie fans get a taste of the magic that Broadway audiences got. My Fair Lady is one of those times even though it almost wasn't.

Hollywood legend has it that producer Jack Warner wanted Cary Grant and James Cagney to play, respectively, Henry Higgins and Alfred Doolittle in his big screen version of My Fair Lady. Cagney turned it down on the grounds that he was retired. But, as the story goes, Grant told Warner that not only would he not do the movie, he would never do another movie for Warner Brothers if Warner didn't quit fooling around and get Rex Harrison to reprise his stage role. I don't know  if that story is true or not, but if it is, it proves Cary Grant was a pretty classy guy. As for Doolittle, Cagney's turning the film down left the door open for Stanley Holloway to reprise his role.

Of course, not everyone from the Broadway cast made it into the film. Wilfred Hyde White takes over for Robert Coote as Pickering. More controversially, Audrey Hepburn was cast in place of Julie Andrews as Eliza Doolittle. Rex Harrison didn't want her to begin with even if he did later state she was his favorite leading lady. The Motion Picture Academy was apparently so outraged that Hepburn got the part over Andrews that she wasn't even nominated for Best Actress, even though the movie itself got 12 nominations--including for Best Actor (Harrison), Supporting Actor (Holloway) and Supporting Actress (Gladys Cooper as Mrs. Higgins)--and won 8, including Best Picture, Actor, and Director (George Cukor). Instead, Andrews was given Best Actress for Mary Poppins that year basically as a consolation prize for losing out on the role of Doolittle.


Well, I'm going to be the guy who out and out says it: Nuts to that. Audrey Hepburn is superb as Eliza Doolittle. She got robbed and mistreated by the Academy. Yes, her singing is dubbed by Marni Nixon about 90% of the time. So? The list of actresses who got dubbed in a musical movie is long and mighty: Ava Gardner in Show Boat, Rita Hayworth every single time she sang, Deborah Kerr in The King and I, Natalie Wood in West Side Story and Debbie Reynolds in Singing In The Rain to name a few. The fact is, she acts the part. One of Harrison's concerns was if someone who was so classy all the time could play a "guttersnipe" with a cockney accent. The answer, of course, is yes, she could. You can question Jack Warner's decisions on a lot of things, but his casting of Hepburn was dead on. Point in fact, this may well be Hepburn's best movie.

By the way, she does do some singing in the film. She sings the first minute or so of Just You Wait as well as it's reprise. She also sings the sing-speak parts of The Rain In Spain and the beginning of I Could Have Danced All Night. So give her some credit, people. The simple fact is--and this will drive all the Andrews apologists nuts--that Audrey Hepburn did a better job at the part than Andrews would have. Hepburn was primarily a film actress and Andrews, at that time, was primarily a stage actress. Those are two entirely different styles of acting. And no, Andrews as Mary Poppins was not better than Hepburn as Eliza.

Most people know that this is a musical version of George Bernard Shaw's 1914 play Pygmalion. However, the musical takes most of it's cues not strictly from the play but from the 1938 film version with Leslie Howard (who was a rotten Higgins, but that's a topic for another post). The ending that tends to outrage most people was written by Shaw himself for that movie. He hated that ending, but it stuck. The premise of both versions is that arrogant professor of phonetics Henry Higgins takes in flower girl Eliza Doolittle with the bet that he can pass her off as a Duchess at the Embassy Ball six months later. Higgins, who calls himself "a confirmed old bachelor and likely to remain so", doesn't seem to realize that this "heartless guttersnipe" has a few lessons to teach him as well.

This is one of the few movie musicals to transplant every song from the play to the screen. Not even The Sound of Music did that. It is a common practice for the movie versions to drop a song or two and replace it with another often lesser song.  But anyone who fell in love with the Broadway soundtrack will be delighted to know that it's transplanted whole to the movie. Considering that this may well be the best soundtrack for a non-songbook musical, it's well deserved. In fact, the only movie musical I can think of that's not a songbook musical that's it's equal may be Kiss Me Kate, and even that one may fall a little short despite a wonderful Cole Porter score. But every song in My Fair Lady is wonderful. My personal favorite is I Could Have Danced All Night.

Harrison doesn't sing his songs so much as he sing-speaks them. But it works, and why not? It worked for Robert Preston in The Music Man, too. The more important thing here is that this is as close as modern audiences will ever get to seeing Harrison's defining role. He may have done other movies before and after, including The Ghost and Mrs. Muir and Anna and the King of Siam, but he's forever Henry Higgins. After seeing him in the role, I can't imagine anyone else in the part. It is one of those perfect marriages of actor and role, the proverbial lightning in a bottle. He was honored with Best Actor and it was a well deserved honor.

Hepburn may not sing most of the time, but she acts the songs out fantastically. Holloway as her ne'er-do-well father gives a masterly comedic performance and his two songs are easily showstoppers. Come to it, Holloway should have won an Oscar as well. He steals every scene he's in from every other actor. Again, as this is modern audience's chance to see what delighted Broadway audiences for years. Jeremy Brett, who was also dubbed, manages to not make lovestruck Freddy Eynsford-Hill not a creepy stalker, which is definitely one way to look at the character, but a charming, well-meaning goof. Hyde-White was always a great character actor (and always looked to be about 80, even back in 1949's The Third Man) and he's a perfect foil for Harrison as Pickering. And if Hyde-White wasn't dubbed, he's a better singer than you'd think. He plays off Harrison beautifully. His reactions to A Hymn to Him is hysterical. Cooper's Mrs. Higgins and Mona Washburn's delightful Mrs. Pearce also due their bit as foils to Higgins. Let's not forget Theodore Bikel as "that hairy hound from Budapest" Zoltan Kaparthy. He's in the movie only about five minutes, but he's an absolute delight.

Horrifyingly, copyright holder CBS has treated this movie shamefully over the years. They let the negatives deteriorate, leading Film Restorationists Robert A. Harris and James Katz to due a Herculean restoration in 1994, which did actually lead to a re-release (which is where I first saw the movie). The DVDs have apparently been skittish over the years. But most shameful of all is the fact that the Blu Ray of this was massively mishandled. That's a heart breaker. This is my favorite musical and one of the main movies I most wanted on Blu Ray. Being as this is the 50th Anniversary, it is to be hoped that CBS corrects this, but there has been no word on such as of this writing.

Still, it really is a wonderful movie. Among musicals, only Singing in the Rain can be argued as being better. But that may simply be because Singing in the Rain has the great dancing, the only thing missing from this. That said, My Fair Lady has a fabulous cast, gorgeous sets, and hands down the greatest original soundtrack ever.