MY FAIR LADY (1964) *** Cinematic variation on George Bernard Shaw's better-written (obviously) Pygmalion. It's also fair to say that even Shaw couldn't put Audrey Hepburn onto paper, so it's a matter of taste really, I think. Audrey is absolutely perfect-perfect accent, looks perfect, dances perfect, delivers her lines perfect, lip synchs perfect. Audrey's matched, tangentially, by Rex Harrison, who understands and has mastered everything that us commoners finding amusing and endearing about upper crust gentlemen and, I suspect, everything they find amusing and endearing about themselves. Stuck somewhere in there as an unnecessary lynchpin (accessorized lynchpins? the aristocrats just might do it!) is Gladys Cooper, who somehow just walks into scenes with the stars without getting blown away. The songs aren't really my style for the most part (excepting “The Street Where You Live”), but they're theatrically put together and some of the lyrics are very clever. Not clever like Shaw or Euripides, but worthwhile more like a more conventionally matured Dr. Seuss. Clever rhyming, but hardly impossible to forget. It loses some of Shaw's social punch (obviously on the social side of the society v genetics debate), but gloriously fossilizes his affectionate portrayal of aristocratic intellectualism, and all that it engages and ignores. See this before you let Rex Harrison convince you that he's Dr. Dolittle .
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