Pygmalion (1938)

User Rating:

8.0/10   

Directors:

Anthony Asquith
Leslie Howard

Writers:

George Bernard Shaw (play)
George Bernard Shaw (scenario and dialogue)

Release Date:

3 March 1939 (USA)

Genre:

Comedy | Drama | Romance

Tagline:

He picked up a girl from the gutter - and changed her into a glamorous society butterfly ! . . . See Wendy Hiller, new star discovery, in this amazing role !

Plot:

Shaw's play in which a Victorian dialect expert bets that he can teach a lower-class girl to speak proper English and thus be taken for a lady.

Plot Keywords:

Professor | Language | Culture Clash | Forbidden Love | Cinderella Story

Awards:

Won Oscar. Another 1 win & 4 nominations

Cast

Leslie Howard	...	Professor Henry Higgins
Wendy Hiller	...	Eliza Doolittle
Wilfrid Lawson	...	Alfred Doolittle
Marie Lohr	...	Mrs. Higgins
Scott Sunderland	...	Colonel George Pickering
Jean Cadell	...	Mrs. Pearce
David Tree	...	Freddy Eynsford-Hill
Everley Gregg	...	Mrs. Eynsford-Hill
Leueen MacGrath	...	Clara Eynsford Hill
Esme Percy	...	Count Aristid Karpathy
Violet Vanbrugh	...	Ambassadress
Iris Hoey	...	Ysabel, Social Reporter
Viola Tree	...	Perfide, Social Reporter
Irene Browne	...	Duchess (as Irene Brown)
Kate Cutler	...	Grand Old Lady

Also Known As:

Bernard Shaw's Pygmalion (UK) (complete title)

Runtime:

96 min | USA:89 min

Country:

UK

Language:

English

Color:

Black and White

Aspect Ratio:

1.37 : 1

Sound Mix:

Mono (Western Electric Wide Range System)

Certification:

Canada:G (Ontario) | South Korea:12 | West Germany:6 | Australia:G | Finland:S | Sweden:15 | USA:Approved (PCA #4845)

Filming Locations:

Pinewood Studios, Iver Heath, Buckinghamshire, England, UK

Company:

Gabriel Pascal Productions

Trivia:

The original Broadway production of "Pgymalion" opened at the Park Theater opening October 12, 1914 and ran for 72 performances. The play premiered in a German translation at the Hofburg Theatre in Vienna on October 16, 1913 and in English at His Majesty's Theatre in London on April 11, 1914 and starred 'Mrs Patrick Campbell'.

Quotes:

Prof. Henry Higgins: Yes, you squashed cabbage leaf, you disgrace to the noble architecture of these columns, you incarnate insult to the English language, I could pass you off as the Queen of Sheba!

Movie Connections:

Referenced in From the Ends of the Earth (1939)

By George, they got it the first time...

George Bernard Shaw was a Fabian Socialist who editorialized and lectured on the need for uprooting obsolete notions of a rigid English class-structure in order for individuals to realize their full potential. He wrote the play "Pygmalion" in 1912 and 1913 as part-social protest, part-satire, part-comic farce. Its central character, Henry Higgins, a London teacher of elocution and expert in regional phonetics, makes a small wager with his friend and colleague, Colonel George Pickering, that he can take a waif from the streets and pass her off as the cream of the social crop. Using a pedagogical technique consisting mostly of almost inhumane badgering and humiliation, he manages to pull off the feat with unexpected success – but at an emotional cost he did not quite foresee.

Besides the inventive montage sequences displaying the frustration and exhilaration of linguist Higgins as he transforms Eliza Doolittle from Cockney flower-girl to the statuesque, gowned beauty who's mistaken for a royal princess at a diplomatic reception, there are other items which failed to materialize in Shaw's original transcript – the use, for example, of the phrases, "The rain in Spain stays mainly in the plains" and "Hurricanes hardly happen in Hartford, Hereford, and Hampshire," both of which became lyrics for Lerner and Lowe's musical version of the play

Additionally, in Shaw's original play, Higgins's irritating Hungarian nemesis is not given a name; here, for the first time, he is dubbed "Kaparthy."

Leslie Howard, who co-directed with Anthony Asquith, plays Higgins as the antithesis to the character for whom Howard became most famous to American audiences – that of the dreamy, romantic Ashley Wilkes in "Gone With the Wind." His Henry Higgins is hard-nosed realism to the core - diabolical, profane, impatient, sometimes maddening. Howard beautifully caricatures the obsessive personality of a scientist who lives for nothing else but his work, and the rest of the world be hanged. And as Eliza, Wendy Hiller was never lovelier. The exoticism of such contemporaries as June Duprez and Merle Oberon may have tickled the fancy of an Alexander Korda, but in Ms. Hiller, rarely has the screen enjoyed the advantage of such beauty and intelligence combined. She even has her coy moments, particularly when Eliza is "tried out" at a tea party given by Higgins's mother. Her carefully high-toned enunciation of "the new slang" is timed to perfection.

This 1938 version of Shaw's classic, unfortunately, leaves one with the feeling that at the end - with Higgins quietly demanding to know from Eliza the whereabouts of his slippers - both student and mentor "live happily ever after." This sappy conclusion must have been a compromise on the part of Pascal, although one finds it mystifying that Shaw would have ever endorsed such a sentimental ending. For, as Shaw had written at the end of his play over two decades earlier, "the rest of the story need not be shewn (Shaw's spelling)...if our imaginations were not so enfeebled by their lazy dependence on the...reach-me-downs of the rag shop in which Romance keeps its stock of happy endings..." The playwright then proceeded into seven pages of prose, describing an epilogue wherein Eliza married Freddy Eynsford-Hill and the generous Colonel Pickering set up the happy couple in a business near Victoria Station. As for the relationship between Higgins and Eliza, according to Shaw, "(to this day) he storms and bullies and derides; but she stands up to him so ruthlessly that the Colonel has to ask her from time to time to be kinder to Higgins." As is the aftermath of most good stories, the worm turned.

With Wilfrid Lawson as Eliza's father, Alfred; Scott Sunderland as Pickering; and David Tree impersonates the shallow but inoffensive Freddy in high style. (He would do the same with the role of Charles Lomax three years later in "Major Barbara.") If the American schleps and male-pushovers that Ralph Bellamy used to play in "The Awful Truth" and "His Girl Friday" ever had a British opposite-number, David Tree was it; he did the upper-class twit better than anyone.