OVP: Pygmalion (1938)

Film: Pygmalion (1938)

Stars: Leslie Howard, Wendy Hiller, Wilfrid Lawson, Marie Lohr, Scott Sunderland

Director: Anthony Asquith & Leslie Howard

Oscar History: 4 nominations/1 win (Best Picture, Actor-Leslie Howard, Actress-Wendy Hiller, Adapted Screenplay*)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 4/5 stars

As a child, I oftentimes would watch the film My Fair Lady, which was one of my father's favorite films, and really the only musical I genuinely remember him gravitating toward more than my mom.  I loved it-I thought it was terribly romantic, with a number of catchy tunes, and introduced met to Audrey Hepburn, who is one of my favorite stars of the late Classical Hollywood era.  I have not, however, rewatched it in a number of years, and while I hit a lot of favorites during the pandemic quarantine, this hasn't been one of them.  However, I'm working my way through the 1938 Best Picture lineup, and got something similar with Pygmalion, the nonmusical film version that eventually inspired the Lerner & Loewe classic, a film I had never seen and was startled to understand just how loyal My Fair Lady was to the original.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is focused on Eliza Doolittle (Hiller), a young Cockney flower girl who meets Professor Henry Higgins (Howard), a scholar of language, who has a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering (Sunderland) that he could transform Eliza into a proper lady.  Eliza, hoping to improve herself (potentially to be able to work in a flower shop) eventually relents to being a part of the bet, even if she doesn't seem to care for Professor Higgins.  Though they struggle, with him berating her to better succumb to his training, it eventually works.  Eliza does, in fact, pass for a true lady (one man even assumes she's falsely a Hungarian princess in disguise), and wins the bet for Henry.  At that point, though, she realizes that she wants more from this relationship-she has been changed on the outside, as well as on the inside, and can no longer simply return to being a Cockney flower girl.  Henry Higgins, after much prodding from her, also (begrudgingly) admits that he can't live without her, and that they will continue on their lives together, in some version of happy coexistence.

The film is well-constructed, and very similar if you're only familiar with My Fair Lady, with lines from this picture plucked directly by Lerner & Loewe for their songs like "The Rain in Spain."  It's also, upon revisit, quite problematic, particularly the ending, which strays from playwright George Bernard Shaw's original intent.  In the original, Eliza leaves to marry the hapless Freddy character, even if Henry Higgins is more of an intellectual partner for her, but this film (and My Fair Lady) has her return to Henry Higgins, implying that they will end up together in some fashion.  This is troubling because Henry Higgins doesn't ever really relent, other than admitting that he "needs" Eliza, in treating her with true respect.  Unlike some of the much later versions of this (like, say, Pretty Woman), there isn't an acknowledgment that Henry, not Eliza, truly needs to change.  As a result, I've always been with Shaw here-Eliza deserves better than Henry, and particularly here, it feels like a superb cheat of the writers to give us such a sweet ending.

That's because Pygmalion is given a rare depth through leading lady Wendy Hiller's great work.  I love the Audrey Hepburn version, and she's wonderful, but Hiller is somehow better in this part, mostly because she gives Eliza such terrific desperation.  She is, in fact, a woman who tries to live by a strict moral compass ("I'm a good girl I am"), something that Henry Higgins doesn't acknowledge, and that stays through even as she has to press through a society that doesn't see her as something valuable.  Hiller gives Eliza range by showing that knowledge, particularly for a woman without money in this era, is a dangerous tool because she gets to see how limited her situation is.  Shaw hints at this with his tale, but the truth is that even as Eliza moves up, her freedom is held by either Freddy or Henry or her father-she, as a woman, never gets to control it even if she might have more opportunities after her "transformation."  Other actresses would have dismissed this, but Hiller makes it central to her performance, and it's a well-done triumph.

The rest of the case is quite good, though no one is as superb as Hiller.  Howard, best known to modern audiences as the passive Ashley Wilkes in Gone with the Wind, is good & cruel as Henry, finding the heartless callousness of this character in a better way than the forlorn Rex Harrison would decades later.  The supporting cast has a lot of plumb parts, but the only one that stood out for me was Wilfrid Lawson as Alfred Doolittle, the man who by sheer accident comes across great respect & fortune.  In My Fair Lady, this is a scene-stealing delight from Stanley Halloway, but here Lawson isn't given as much to chew on, and it's hard for me to tell, honestly, whether I'm cheering on him as an actor or if this is simply a really good part that any actor would've been able to love.  I also cannot leave without acknowledging that even with the ending & the politics of the movie that make it hard to watch in some parts in retrospect, this script & story is really well-constructed, and the set design is great (I love a crowded English study in an old movie-mess is so rare on the sets of most films).  All-in-all, a classic retelling of the story, even if it suffers in the end (and wonderful stuff from Wendy Hiller as the lead).