Pygmalion

Trivia quiz: who was the first person to win both an Oscar and a Nobel Prize? George Bernard Shaw, who won an Oscar for his screenplay adapting his own play, Pygmalion (Bob Dylan has since joined his company, winning both awards). The film was released in 1938, but has pretty much been eclipsed by the musical adaptation, My Fair Lady. Woody Allen had a joke in his routine that he was working on removing the music and lyrics from My Fair Lady and turning it back into Pygmalion.

The fellow of the title was a mythical sculptor who created a statue of his ideal woman, who was then brought to life. Shaw's idea was to make the sculptor a professor of phonetics, Henry Higgins, who is fascinated by the idea of taking a common flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, whom he refers to frequently as a "guttersnipe," and teaching her how to speak like a fancy Englishwoman. He makes a bet with his friend Colonel Pickering, and Eliza, tempted by the possibility of leading a better life, agrees.

Of course Shaw had a lot up his sleeve. The classes here are often reversed--Higgins is a beast, who doesn't care about Eliza except as an experiment. He eventually realizes he can't live without her, but Shaw, in his preface to the play, reveals that Eliza will end up with Freddy Eynsford-Hill, a bit of a twit, but who really loves her.

This adaptation was directed by Anthony Asquith and Leslie Howard, who also plays Higgins. It changed the play around a bit, but Howard is the perfect Higgins, a snob who has no emotional center at all--he is kept human by Pickering (a terrific Scott Sutherland) and his mother, the equally delightful Marie Lohr.

Wendy Hiller, who had played Eliza on stage, plays her here as well, and she is sensational. Audrey Hepburn has imprinted the role in many of our minds, but Hiller gives her a less glamorous and more gritty edge. As her father, the redoubtable Alfred P. Doolittle, Wilfrid Lawson knocks the ball out of park in both his scenes. He, a rather uncouth dustman, has been rendered respectable by Higgins joking to a colleague that he was the most moral man in London. The result is that Doolittle has been thrust into society, and has to marry his common-law wife. It is if he is being sent to the gallows.

Shaw didn't like the pairing of Hiller and Howard at the end, and he was right--there's no reason for Hiller to have turned down Freddy (played by David Tree). It smacks of Stockholm Syndome. Still, Pygmalion is a delightful film with lots of wit and verve.