Pygmalion

Nearly 70 years later the Gabriel Pascal "Pygmalion" still sets the bar for film adaptation of a stage play. So much so, in fact, that the GBS incorporated many of the film's upgrades into the authoritative published version of the play, despite the play being more than 20 years old when the film was made.

When was the last time you saw a performance leap off the screen like Leslie Howard's as Professor Higgins? Shaw never saw such treatment on screen again, even under Pascal's hand. The film of "Major Barbara" is interesting (and a bit bizarre toward the end) in its own right, with some magnificent bits in the Act II homeless shelter and a heart-wrenching Wendy Hiller, but pales next to the stage version in its intellectual, political and dramatic depth. And all the rest, even the charming "Caesar and Cleopatra" with Raines and Leigh, just don't cut it compared to the plays.

"Pygmalion" is where any screenwriter needs to start in adapting a play for the movies. No one has done it better since.

(BTW, GBS's afterward to "Pygmalion" is intended to be tongue-in-cheek, I think. It's intentionally ridiculous, so that the mob clamoring for a romantic ending would realize just how inappropriate and uninteresting that would have been.)

Shaw's brilliant play is expertly filmed by Howard and Asquith. Howard is perfectly cast as the snobbish Professor Higgins and is matched by Hiller, in her second film, as Eliza Doolittle. The fine supporting cast includes Sunderland, Lawson, and Lohr, who's terrific as Mrs. Higgins. It is difficult to make a bad film of this work, given Shaw's witty dialog, but film performance is different from stage performance, with film calling for more subtlety. The love-hate relationship between the professor and Eliza works wonderfully because Howard and Hiller provide the right combination of humor and humanity. Howard's role here is in sharp contrast to the wimpy Ashley the following year in "Gone with the Wind."

Perfect cinema. That was my reaction when I first saw Pygmalion, the first of 50 viewings and counting, and I still think so. Who could not fall in love with Leslie Howard, one of our greatest actors, so tragically assassinated in the Second World War? Wendy Hiller IS Eliza. The cast is flawless. The script... words fail me, for George Bernard Shaw was a genius, he did not simply adapt his play for the screen, it is so good that it is like it's happening before your eyes. My God, after seeing this is there anyone out there who thinks 'My Fair Lady', the slowest film musical on record, is the best screen version of Shaw? If they do, they are mad.

That film moves me not one jot, everything is so clean, so smug, so unreal. Here we see poverty, but also hope. These are not actors and actresses moving through the sets garbed in Cecil Beaton, but real people, real suffering, but humanity lights every scene like a beacon. The unbearably moving scenes of Eliza capturing society at the ball, the irresistible waltz, watch this with no tears in your eyes, I dare you. Halliwells Film Guide calls this 'one of the most heartening and adult British films of the thirties'. Too right. I cannot fault this film, it is priceless. By the way, I saw 'My Fair Lady' on stage recently, and it's miles better than the film version. Warner Bros really let Shaw down, and it's impossible to put it right. But this...well it is a big compensation. And I don't miss the songs one little bit.

There are so many classic scenes I can't pick any out. Of course viewers will spot that it was 'updated' to 1938, and the original play set in the Edwardians. That doesn't hurt it at all, 'polite' society didn't change much in the intervening years and gives the play an added 'contemporary' edge. Please, please, please see this film. You will be gripped.

Even if I had not yet seen this film I'd have had good reason to assume its merit simply because George Bernard Shaw, as cantankerous and protective of his work as he was, liked it. But I have seen it, many times, and that only validates that conclusion.

Leslie Howard not only starred in it but co-directed as well, and accomplished both magnificently. His rapid-fire intensity, conveying the true overbearing Higgins using Eliza as if she were "a block of wood," to quote, to be sawed, hewn, nailed, drilled and pounded into an object to his liking, is wonderfully complemented by Wendy Hiller's Eliza, bringing us to understand the full range of her growth from the depths of her imprisonment in the class of the street vendor barely escaping mendacity by selling flowers to a real princess, not by royal birth, but by her strength and accomplishment. Higgins may like to claim credit for her transformation; but it's Eliza who really made it happen.

There's a lot said here comparing Pygmalion to My Fair Lady. That's really a classic apples-and-oranges fallacy. Musical theatre is an entirely different art form, with a different goal. It's clear that if this interpretation of Pygmalion had been duplicated with songs and dances tacked on, it would have been horrible; yet My Fair Lady is a triumph of its art. It's often called a musical adaptation. That's mistaken; it's "based on" Pygmalion. The nature of musical theatre requires a different approach. To evaluate either by the standards of the other is a waste of time and thought.

Shaw would undoubtedly have hated MFL; his revulsion for Romanticism and the failure of The Chocolate Soldier, the operetta based on Arms and the Man, would guarantee that. MFL is not a musical Pygmalion, and should never be mistaken for one.

It is a great tribute to the genius of George Bernard Shaw and his best-known play that it could spawn both this artful and powerful movie version and a greatly different and beautiful musical as well.

I think that Leslie Howard is one of the most wonderful, spectacular actors that ever lived. He is positively great in this movie, and he won lots of recognition and awards for this role and ultimately carries the whole movie. He is a wonderful actor that will live in my heart forever!

Laura