My Fair Lady (1964)

Despite having been made and distributed by Warner Bros., My Fair Lady always feels to me like one of those old MGM musicals. It won a ton of Oscars in 1964, including one for Best Picture. It's a lavish entertainment, with art direction and costume design at their best. The wonderful Lerner and Loewe music is familiar to almost everyone, and many of the performances are first rate. I've seen this film several times and I've always enjoyed it, but it has always struck me as odd that during a decade when big budget musicals were on the decline, the Academy kept giving awards for Best Picture to them. In fact, four musicals won during the 1960s, and another five were nominated.

I won't rehash old Hollywood lore about why Audrey Hepburn was cast over the woman who originated the part on the stage, Julie Andrews. I will only say that as much as I have always loved and admired Hepburn as an actress and for her humanitarian work, the role of Eliza Doolittle is not one that she is suited to play. At the beginning of the film, when she is meant to be a simple Cockney flower girl, you can't help but see the luminosity of Hepburn's presence shining through what is meant to be grime on her face. She can't help it, I suppose; she just wasn't truly meant to play someone as common as Eliza. The great transformation that allegedly occurs after Professor Higgins takes her into his care just doesn't seem all that great, frankly. Whether she's wearing a ragged coat and battered hat or one of those amazing Cecil Beaton gowns, she's still the same to me. The only real difference is the application of some soap and water.

A few years ago, on an episode of Will & Grace, Will made the assertion that My Fair Lady is really about two gay men who like to spend time together and dress Audrey Hepburn up in fabulous gowns. I can certainly understand where he's coming from after this viewing. Rex Harrison's Professor Higgins never seems to show the slightest interest in Eliza until the very end of the film. Instead, he's too busy talk-singing about why women can't be more like men. And his closest relationship is with Wilfrid Hyde-White's Colonel Pickering; they have a sort of mutual admiration society. I suppose I shall be accused of reading too much into this film, but the script itself calls for him to have a dramatic revelation ("I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face") that is surely one of the more roundabout ways of expressing one's love for a woman.

No matter. Whether you want to read this as a gay-coded love story between Higgins and Pickering or a heterosexual love story involving Eliza and the clueless Higgins, you'll probably spend much of your time singing or humming along to the musical score anyway.